Governing Water Wisely: Twin2Go seminar at the World Water Week

Friday, 05 August 2011

On 25 August the third in a series of Twin2Go policy workshops will take place at the Stockholm World Water Week. Twin2Go is working with the  Global Water System Project (GWSP), the Global Water Partnership (GWP), and UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme (IHP) to organise this event. Complementing the knowledge and experience of these initiatives, the seminar will share and discuss insights gained from Twin2Go with policy and decisions makers as well as practitioners and researchers.

Failures of governance systems are one of the most important reasons for poor performance of water management under changing conditions – such as climatic change and rapid urbanisation. Where uncertainty cannot be reduced, or where policy decisions cannot be postponed until better knowledge is available, adaptive approaches to water resources management are required that are able to respond flexibly and accommodate conflicting interests. The 25 August seminar “Governing Water Wisely: Adaptive Approaches to Water Resources Management” will thus discuss ways in which water governance systems could be designed in order to cope with complexity and uncertainty; what characteristics make approaches transferable across different basins and governance levels; and how a transition towards adaptive water governance could be included in existing policy processes.

Prof Claudia Pahl-Wostl from the University of Osnabrueck in Germany will start the workshop with a discussion on context sensitive analyses of adaptive governance in river basins. Speakers from UNESCO-IHP, GWP, the UNECE Water Convention Secretariat, the Okavango River Basin Commission, the Indian Water, Climate and Hazard Programme, and many more will then continue the conversation on policies and programmes for adaptive water governance and on facilitating transferability of best practices.

For further details on the workshop date and location please see the Policy Workshop section of this website.