Memo to UN 2023 water conference planners

Guest blog - Henry Northover

UN-Water meeting - https://www.unwater.org/un-meetings-on-water-agreement/

Preparations for another UN Conference on Water are underway!

Excited? 

Senior planning officials are enthusiastic.  They are expecting one of the most consequential water summits for decades. The talk is of “concrete actions… business unusual… extraordinary measures”.  But there’s reason to be cautious about the prospects of another high-level event generating the huge changes needed. 

The 2023 UN Water Conference is the latest in a series of high-level events. The AU has declarations on achieving universal access to WASH. There are declarations made by  the South Asian heads of governments’ SAARC summit. Then there’s the G7, the UN and even the High Level Panel on Water. 

And remember that the March 2023 UN Conference is the mid-term review of the International “Decade of Action on Water”  

The third “international decade” of its kind. 

But there is very little sign that these efforts have accelerated progress. Most countries remain off-track on targets for universal WASH. Most have made little progress on water security. And for those countries that have achieved transformational change, there’s no evidence that international commitments have been the trigger. 

As one African official graphically put it to me:

“Leaders will sign up to any summit declaration and then vomit it up on the airport tarmac when they return”. 

If past summits have failed, what UN undertakings would speed up progress on the Sustainable Development Goals on water? 

We researched countries and cities that achieved rapid improvements in water, sanitation and hygiene.  The key point to emerge was the decisive role of effective leadership in bringing about transformational change.  We isolated four action areas that made that leadership effective. 

1)      The most obvious feature of effective leadership was the head of government’s personal alignment with the core mission.  They made values-driven arguments that improving WASH was central to national pride.  In India, Prime Minister Modi personally chose the symbol of the Swacch Bharat Mission to end open defecation. He selected Mahatma Gandhi’s glasses, symbolically defining the ‘mission’ as fulfilling an historic legacy. Successful leaders recognised that they need both public and household investments to realise both private and common goods. They set out a social contract, balancing the promise of delivering access to services for all with the obligation to use and pay for facilities.

As Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew put it:

 “[personal hygienic] standards will keep morale high, sickness rates low and so create the social conditions for higher economic growth”.

2)      It is essential to build the capabilities of the water sector to deliver sustainable services for all. This system-strengthening approach is too often undermined by the aid system – donors prefer capital intensive, projectized approaches. These fragment systems and leave out operations and maintenance budgets and capacities.  The results for sustainability have been dire. Effective leaders focused on building delivery systems with a whole-of-government approach. They established bureaucratic structures with incentives designed to encourage coordinated and goal-oriented activities. Bureaucratic form follows implementation function - government departments work together to plan and deliver. There are measures of success and coordination mechanisms established at all levels of implementation.  In Malaysia, local officials were instructed by government to have weekly ‘morning prayers’. They would review sanitation coverage maps to track progress and resolve interdepartmental differences. 

3)      Successful countries dispersed leadership functions to wider groups of officials. This avoided the rigidities and incentives to misreport associated with the more authoritarian ‘big man’  leadership. Faced with challenges, local implementers had enough autonomy to reallocate money and personnel.

4)      And finally – most striking of all – they changed their bureaucratic culture. Bureaucrats were encouraged to diagnose design mistakes and implementation problems. They were empowered to generate ‘course correcting’ actions.  This wasn’t a routinised data tracking exercise, passively ‘ticking boxes’. This was a systematic drilling down on key barriers and responding with local, relevant, responses.  The deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia urged local officials to be ‘breakers of bottlenecks’. And if systemic bottlenecks undermined local adaptations, feedback loops made senior leaders aware. They were expected to help devise further system-strengthening reforms. 

So, to have a UN resolution that genuinely triggers the actions we’ve seen in countries that have made rapid gains, some of those leadership action areas could be spelled out. 

The important point for the communiqué is to focus on actions and steer clear of vague “commitments to”. Include the ‘how’, not just the ‘what’.  Here’s what that would look like:

Noting, that previous UN commitments and international declarations on water security have not been matched with the required actions on the part of member states;

Accepting that water security is a necessary condition for attracting inward investment, boosting pro-poor growth and accelerating development as well as for strengthening public health, convivial cities and securing a climate-resilient future;

Acknowledging that accelerated progress and the chances of achieving the UN’s Sustainable Goal 6 will require member states to pursue robust water system and sector-wide actions across government and at its highest levels; 

Recognizing that the countries that have made the greatest progress in achieving acceptable levels of water security, heads of state and government have played an activist role in championing the sector and progress-chasing results;

Accepting that making rapid progress involves leaders at all levels of implementation having sufficient resources and authority to listen and respond to the concerns of local communities and stakeholders;

Member states and heads of government will:

Urgently set national reform agendas that build the systems capable of delivering accountable, responsive and sustainable water security and services for all.

Structure the bureaucratic functions – including departments of health, education, rural ministries, municipalities, water management – around delivering key tasks and securing the necessary governance reforms including in planning, regulation, finance, coordination, monitoring, capacity development and environmental resource management.

Devolve the necessary resources and planning authority to local level implementers to find contextually relevant solutions and to include the participation of local level communities in the design, implementation and monitoring of services.    

Build progress-chasing mechanisms and a bureaucratic culture that systematically diagnose bottlenecks and develop course-correcting reforms. 

Champion the imperative of drinking water, sanitation and water resource management as central to national development goals and a climate resilient future.

All the above may be too much for a single UN Conference and communiqué to accommodate.  The language might be counter to the search for consensus and language acceptable to all member states. 

A communiqué that doesn’t dwell on exhortations, resolve and grand outcome commitments that fail to be realised. Instead, a communique focused on the precise actions and activities that leaders can deliver to achieve success.

This is after all supposed to be the UN’s mid-term review of the international decade of action on water. That needs to be the operative word.  More of the same will mean that we will have again wasted an opportunity for a new agenda on water.  Billions of the most vulnerable can’t afford that. 

- Henry Northover is an independent consultant with over 27 years’ experience in international development. He specialises in water security, sector governance and strategy. Previously he worked with the INGO WaterAid as its Global Policy Director. His previous positions have also included work with Caritas on economic advocacy programmes and sovereign debt and before then as advisor to the UK Labour Party’s International Development and Foreign Affairs teams