Europe is faced with growing water challenges: consumption and competition over limited resources keep growing while some lack access to water for basic needs, the state of the freshwater ecosystems continues to decline despite decades of efforts to curb pollution, and climate change exacerbates water scarcity and extreme weather events and affects ecosystem health. At the root of the water challenges are challenges of governance, i.e. failures in the design of institutional frameworks, in their implementation and in the involvement of different sectors and actors of the society in ensuring sustainable and equitable water use.
To address the governance challenges, GOVAQUA project identifies, assesses, develops and validates innovative governance instruments, approaches and arrangements that support and accelerate a transition towards sustainable and equitable water use. Such a transition is urgently required to reconcile water uses and environmental needs and to reach the critical aims of the EU WFD, the Green Deal and the UN SDGs, and to implement the EU Water Resilience Strategy.
By adopting an inter- and transdisciplinary methodology that combines case studies with Living Labs, the project systematically analyses and compares existing water governance systems across Europe, focusing on water use and its impacts in agriculture, industries, energy production, water utilities and the role of citizens. GOVAQUA conceptualises for the first time sustainability transition in water governance, and creates associated criteria and indicators for its assessment. To respond to the systemic development needs for the transition, the project covers promising niche governance innovations in 1) legislation and regulation, 2) multi-stakeholder participation and collaboration, 3) economics and finance, and 4) digital solutions for information sharing. Good practices related to them are systematically reviewed, analysed and compared, and further co-developed, assessed and validated with key stakeholders in real-world action situations of six Living Labs in river basins, sub-basins or catchments in France, Finland, Spain, the UK and Romania, and transnationally between Finland and Sweden.
GOVAQUA delivers new knowledge, participatory tools and good practice guidelines laying out pathways towards sustainable and equitable water future, applicable across diverse contexts at river basin, national and EU levels. The project results will be disseminated in a strategic and targeted manner to EU and national policy makers and officials, European river basin management community, water and water using sectors, NGOs and water governance expert organisations, and communicated to empower citizens in the consortium partner countries and beyond. GOVAQUA engages in clustering activities with InnWater project applying social innovation and RETOUCH NEXUS project adopting a cross-sectoral nexus-approach, the three projects complementing each other and working together for strengthened impact.
