Rationale

The water sector involves a range of public and private stakeholders. In addition to the policy makers, citizens, private actors, end users, investment banks, and infrastructure and service providers have a stake in the outcome.

Achieving sustainable water management and universal coverage requires sound consultation, participation and co-ordination mechanisms to engage stakeholders at different levels of the decision-making process in a coherent, holistic and integrated way. This has become all the more important in the face of increasing urbanization, demographic and geographic challenges, which threaten sustainable water management and require innovative policies that “do better with less”.

Well-managed water systems are a fundamental policy goal for all countries and can be an important driver for economic development and welfare. The water crisis has somewhat spurred the emergence of new topics, new communication tools, and widespread experimentation in stakeholders’ engagement not only for commercial enterprises but also for public bodies. Yet significant “gaps” persist. Making reform happen in the water sector requires overcoming critical bottlenecks on the ground, via an open and inclusive approach.

Description

Stakeholders are persons or groups who are directly or indirectly affected by water policy, as well as those who may have interests in it and/or the ability to influence its outcome, either positively or negatively. They may include locally affected communities or individuals and their formal and informal representatives, national or local government authorities, politicians, religious leaders, regulators, agencies, civil society organizations and groups with special interests, the academic community, or other businesses.

At its modern inception, stakeholder engagement was most frequently associated with high-environmental impact operations linked to infrastructure aspects (such as resource extraction or primary manufacturing companies), or high-technology companies (such as pharmaceuticals, liked sciences and biotechnology companies) that were developing new and controversial products. More recently, the increasing complexity of global issues such as poverty and environmental destruction has resulted in an uptake in stakeholder engagement increasingly by mainstream organisations.

Like any other business function, stakeholder engagement needs to be managed in the water sector. Organisations that take a systematic (rather than ad-hoc) approach that is grounded in business operations, are likely to get better results in terms of the time and resources they invest, and are able to track and manage stakeholder issues and risks more effectively.

Both governments and utilities can undertake concrete actions to foster integrated water management while encouraging a quality stakeholder engagement and adopting pragmatic tools and approaches, including the “professionalization” of methodological frameworks and early warning mechanisms to better diagnose ex ante the risks and design customized responses.

On the government side, to clarify the “black box” that governs water, ways of designing and implementing water policy must be addressed, including setting priorities and formulating strategies to overcome the critical multi-level governance challenges. This implies managing the explicit or implicit sharing of policy-making authority, responsibility, development and implementation at different administrative and territorial levels, meaning: i) across different ministries and/or public agencies at central government level (upper horizontally); ii) between different layers of government at local, regional, provincial/state, national and supranational levels (vertically); and iii) across different actors at the sub-national level (lower horizontally).
On the utilities’ side, stakeholders’ engagement is viewed as particularly fundamental when the core business of the organisation is to provide clean, safe water and sewage services at a fair price. Listening to stakeholders’ concerns and receiving their feedback can be a valuable source of information that can improve project design and outcomes and help authorities and operators to identify and control external risks. For example, panels have increasingly become a solution for corporation engagement with stakeholders in order to move from a defensive position to a comprehensive strategy covering both opportunities and risks. On the other hand, for stakeholders, a consultation process is an opportunity to get information, as well as to educate operator staff about the local context in which a project will take place, to raise issues and concerns, ask questions, and potentially help shape the project by making suggestions for the operator to consider and respond to.

The target solution group tasks will consist in identifying the main obstacles to stakeholders’ engagement (capacity gap, funding mismatch, poor evaluation, asymmetry of information etc.) as well as the existing methodological frameworks, tools and early warning mechanisms to diagnose them pragmatically. It will then provide a platform of good practices for enhancing consultation, co-ordination and participation at all levels in the water sector, whether in developed or developing countries.