NEWAVE – Next water governance

Background

NEWAVE is rooted in the conviction that the rising threats of future water crises and hydro-social challenges, present an urgent need to enhance the global capacity to reflect critically on the current water governance trajectory. In that light NEWAVE takes three interrelated steps as it aims to:

1. Bring together an excellent trans-national and transdisciplinary network of water governance organisations;
2. Develop and implement a cutting-edge actionable research agenda on the key water governance priorities and insights for future directions;
3. Train a new generation of water governance early stage researchers (ESRs) and ensure that they have the trans- and interdisciplinary skills to make significant contributions to both the academic and extra-academic water governance world.

Description

Vibrant emerging research agendas on adaptive water governance, political ecology of water and water justice, community, and polycentric water governance have converged to provide alternative perspectives and solutions to address the complexity of human-water problems. NEWAVE approaches the challenge of water governance from three interrelated angles, problématiques, paradigms and patterns (the three “Ps” heuristic framework).

Each of these three ‘P’ angles provides its own distinct window on the water governance debate, thereby offering excellent opportunities for cumulative knowledge development and training.

• The first P — problématiques — allows the NEWAVE team to critically probe the nature of contemporary water problems, to diagnose them and to develop an understanding of the socio-hydrological conditions in which paradigms are diffused and governance approaches are tried out;
• The second P — paradigms — allows to engage with the ideational underpinnings of water governance, making it possible to understand why proponents of certain approaches have come to accept and embrace them, why they propagate them, and how the global circulation of ideas about governance works;
• The third P — patterns — allows to explicitly uncover the socio-environmental impacts of various patterns and modes of governance, and in turn assess their performance.

Publications

• Valin, N. & Huitema, D. (2023). Experts as policy entrepreneurs: How knowledge can lead to radical environmental change. Environmental Science & Policy, 142, pp. 21.28.