Introduction
Purpose and scope of this report
The year 2023 marks the first major United Nations (UN) conference dedicated to water since 1977. The UN 2023 Water Conference focuses on progress towards water- and sanitation-related goals, coinciding with the mid-term comprehensive review of the International Decade for Action, ‘Water for Sustainable Development 2018–2028’. At current rates, progress towards all the targets of the sixth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 6) is off-track and in some areas the rate of implementation needs to quadruple, or more (see Prologue Part 2). The SDG 6 Global Acceleration Framework (GAF) was designed to accelerate this progress, and partnerships and cooperation are central to it (Box 1.1 in the PDF). Such partnerships and cooperation transcend boundaries and sectors, making SDG 6 everyone’s business.
As the UN system’s principal authoritative report on water, the United Nations World Water Development Report 2023 directly informs the UN conference discussions, describing how building partnerships and enhancing cooperation across all dimensions of sustainable development are essential to accelerating progress towards SDG 6 and realizing the human rights to water and sanitation.
The Prologue to this report briefly describes the status and trends concerning global freshwater resources (availability, demand, quality, etc.) and summarizes the current level of progress on each of the SDG 6 targets. Chapters 2–7 showcase experiences and perspectives on partnerships and cooperation from different water-dependent sectors: Agriculture, Environment, Human Settlements, Industry and Energy, Human Health, and Climate Change. Regional knowledge and practices are highlighted in Chapter 8. Chapters 9–13 review partnerships and cooperation with regards to each of the five ‘accelerators’ under the SDG 6 GAF: Education and Capacity Development, Data and Information, Innovation, Funding, and Governance. Guiding principles for successful partnerships and cooperation, along with a review of the roles, responsibilities and contributions of partners at various levels, are presented in Chapter 14.
Partnerships and cooperation, at all levels, overwhelmingly deliver positive outcomes. Cooperation improves water governance and decision-making, stimulates innovative solutions, and leverages efficiencies. By promoting inclusive engagement, participation and dialogue, and giving voices to those that are otherwise not heard (e.g. marginalized communities), partnerships can help ensure that no one is left behind and that the human rights to water and sanitation are realized.
However, in rare cases, partnerships and cooperation can institutionalize exclusion, distort resource allocations and encourage fragmentation. Corruption is widespread in the water sector (WIN, 2016; Vos, 2011) and can be based on or influenced by partnerships and cooperation. These negative aspects, even where unintentional, highlight the need to be vigilant that partnerships and cooperation are aligned with societal benefits.
Water resources management has a long history of experience with partnerships, both good and bad. Partnerships and cooperation take place in almost any water-related endeavour. The currently inadequate rate of progress towards the SDG 6 targets (see Prologue Part 2) highlights the need to explore opportunities for new models of partnerships and cooperation, especially because of the intersectoral nature of water, crossing all the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainable development. This report reviews this experience, highlighting how enhancing positive and meaningful cooperation amongst the water, sanitation and broader ‘development’ communities is required to accelerate progress.
Basic concepts
What is a partnership or cooperation?
There is a multitude of definitions and understanding of what constitutes a partnership or cooperation. For the purpose of this report, partnerships are considered to be “voluntary and collaborative relationships between various parties, both public and non-public, in which all participants agree to work together to achieve a common purpose or undertake a specific task and, as mutually agreed, to share risks and responsibilities, resources and benefits” (UNGA, 2015). Partnerships between different stakeholders at all levels (international, national and local) are emphasized in most contemporary water-related policy approaches, recognizing that solutions to water problems cannot be achieved by one organization or even one segment of society (WWAP, 2003).
Partnerships are often based on some type of formal or informal agreement. Cooperation is generally understood to be a less formal practice of “working together to the same end” (Dictionary, 2021). ‘Water cooperation’ entails various players and sectors working together towards a common goal to peacefully manage and use freshwater resources at the local, national, regional and international levels (UN Water for Life Decade, 2013). Each of these cooperative arrangements may include more formal partnerships, and each partnership involves cooperation. Consequently, many sections of this report use the two terms flexibly and often interchangeably.
To distinguish them from a loose association among players (e.g. meetings), genuinely successful examples of partnerships and cooperation are those that result in a demonstrable mutual benefit for the parties involved and/or result in a tangible change in their behaviour.
Types of partnerships and cooperation
Partnerships exist at all geographic scales: global, international, basin, regional, national and local. Some are more wide-ranging in terms of the aspects of water that they cover, some are more specific; some focus solely on water, and others link to other subject matters. Examples include multi-stakeholder partnerships, corporate partnerships, academic/research partnerships, public–private partnerships (PPPs), basin organizations that involve multiple countries as partners, water user associations (WUAs), and water operator partnerships, among many others. Examples of cooperation include networks, platforms, transboundary water cooperation, and multi-/cross-/inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary cooperation, technical cooperation, South–South/North–South/triangular cooperation, and development cooperation, among several others. Integrated water resources management (IWRM) can involve both partnerships and cooperation, but not always depending on its level of participation.
Partnerships and cooperation can develop naturally among parties, or need enabling and promoting, but few are without difficulties. Each party comes with its own knowledge, perceptions, interests, positions and objectives, such that disagreements on priorities and strategies are commonplace.
Categorizing partnerships
Spatial scales are a precarious way of categorizing partnership and cooperation over water, as these can occur at different geographic scales and most usually operate across multiple scales. Similarly, categorization by discipline or subsector is problematic because stakeholders themselves often operate across different scales and, most importantly, may or may not necessarily share the same primary water-related objectives.
The novel approach to categorization adopted for the purposes of this report focuses directly on the overall objectives of the partners in relation to the type of water-related outcomes that they are meant to collectively achieve. These are divided into three categories:
a) Intra-sectoral partnerships and cooperation between or among stakeholders with a common and specific type of water-related use or objective. The partners may include different types of stakeholders (e.g. governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private sector, financiers, academia, local communities, etc.), but all would share the same general water management objective. Examples include organizations managing a common irrigation system, or coalitions that supply drinking water and sanitation infrastructure to a certain area.
b) Cross-sectoral (or inter-sectoral) partnerships and cooperation, involving actors with different water-related foci and multiple (different or even competing) water-related objectives. While these can potentially involve several of the actors mentioned above, the difference is that these actors would have different perspectives and, therefore, often different perceptions, intentions and goals requiring conciliation and/or benefit-sharing. Examples include cooperation between municipalities and farmers over the allocation of water supplies, or payment for environmental services schemes.
c) Extra-sectoral partnerships and cooperation, involving actors from ‘outside the water domain’, where the primary foci and objectives of some partners are not primarily water-related, but where water plays a determining role. Such non-water objectives may involve land use, gender equity, urban/rural planning, education, job creation, art and culture, trade, and economic development (among others). Partnerships and cooperation addressing climate change adaptation and mitigation through water-related interventions is one specific example.