Dr. Andrew Segrave, Dr. Stijn Brouwer & ir. Jos Frijns, KWR Watercycle Research Institute, the Netherlands

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1 Dr. Andrew Segrave, Dr. Stijn Brouwer & ir. Jos Frijns, KWR Watercycle Research Institute, the Netherlands Anticipatory Water Governance is a new concept that could be useful to water organisations in their efforts to develop resilient water services. To demonstrate the efficacy of this concept, we begin with a short review of the historical command and control approach to water governance and compare it to new ideals. Next we briefly introduce the theories surrounding anticipatory governance Anticipatory Water Governance is crucial for theand then show how these concepts were applied in sustainability and resilience of complex practice to design a process model. Finally, we organisations. At present the authors are explain that this process model has proven to be a applying this concept to a water organisation in valuable tool for structuring discussions, assessing a city in the Netherlands. Source: the baseline conditions, and identifying areas for unsplash.com/ Stijn te Strake improvement regarding the capacity of water organisations to anticipate and adapt. Historical Approach: Command and Control Since the late 1970s there has been growing awareness and understanding of problems associated with various socio-political aspects of water management. Up until that point, the dominant water management approach was the command and control approach, which is centred around technological solutions and regulations. The command and control approach has been found to fail on several fronts. 1,2 It is (i) fragmented across geographic, sectoral, administrative, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries; (ii) exclusive, with a technocratic, top-down management style side-lining some stakeholders, (iii) inflexible due to massive infrastructural investments being made using predictive planning; and (iv) reactive as a result of overcompensation for inflexibility. 3 Global Water Forum 1

2 The Need for New Approaches In the face of complex problems, such as climate change and rapid urban development, new water management approaches are needed in order to overcome the shortcomings of the command and control approach. A theoretical ideal has been developed for each of these shortcomings: 4, Integrated (in response to fragmentation) Participatory (in response to exclusivity) Adaptive (in response to inflexibility) Anticipatory (in response to reactive behaviour) The first three theoretical ideals (integrated; participatory; adaptive) have been discussed and developed thoroughly in the literature over the past few decades. Anticipatory Water Governance is an under-developed theory that is discussed further on in this paper. A common thread across all four ideals is the importance of socio-political and governance considerations. For a summary see Table 1. 7 Introduction to theory of Anticipatory Water Governance The most recent and least welldefined theoretical idea concerns anticipatory water management activities, also known as Anticipatory Water Governance. A definition of anticipatory governance that is broad and applicable to water governance has been proposed by Fuerth (2009) 8 : Table 1: Characteristics of ideal-typical twenty-first century water management (adapted from Brugge et. al. 2005) Global Water Forum 2

3 Anticipatory Governance is a system of institutions, rules, and norms that provide a way to use foresight for the purpose of reducing risk and to increase capacity to respond to events at early rather than later stages of their development. There has been a recent, in-depth review of definitions and approaches to anticipation. 8 Recent research has helped to improve our understanding of the barriers and aids for knowledge exchange between governance actors and anticipatory thinkers. 9 These insights support the theoretical foundations that have been laid for integrating organised foresight into governance systems. 10 Anticipation is considered a critical component for building resilience, 10 and anticipatory governance is useful for developing strategies that take uncertain futures into consideration without generating inflexibility. The concept of Anticipatory Water Governance could guide water organizations in their efforts to develop strategies for resilient water services. There is, however, a need to operationalize the concept for practical application, including balanced consideration of both adaptation and anticipation. Paradoxically, there is sometimes an inverse relationship between the capacity to anticipate and the capacity to adapt. Water governance that relies heavily on anticipation tends to be associated with predictive long-term planning and infrastructural investments, which in turn limit the capacity to adapt. On the other hand, water governance that relies heavily on Global Water Forum 3

4 adaptive capacity tends to be characterized by reactive behaviour in practice; lacking vision with limited capacity to anticipate. The two extremes found in practice result from overemphasis of either one capacity or the other (adaptation or anticipation). But both capacities can work together (adaptation and anticipation). An adaptation can be made before, during, and/or after by anticipating and/or responding to a stimulus. Application of Anticipatory Water Governance By designing a process model that shows the various interrelated activities that constitute Anticipatory Water Governance, we aim to operationalize the concept for practical application, including balanced consideration of the four theoretical ideals (integrated; participatory; adaptive; anticipatory). The process model is useful for structuring discussions, assessing baseline conditions, and identifying areas for improvement. It is a holistic approach to improving resilience. To operationalise Anticipatory Water Governance we developed a model that builds on the concept of a knowledge-action system. 11 This choice of method rests on the growing body of research supporting the need to include various types of knowledge in decision-making processes and to consciously design the ways in which this knowledge is generated and used. 12 We distinguish three aspects of the knowledge-action system that are relevant to Anticipatory Water Governance (Table 2). Global Water Forum 4

5 These three aspects describe the steps in the process model visualized in Figure 1. The processes of futures research (exploring) and learning meet at the governance step of strategy and policy formulation. 5 The relative degrees to which futures knowledge and lessons learned are (selectively) used in governing depends on the governance context. The interpretation and form of each of the generic steps (boxes) in this figure are thus case Table 2: Aspects of knowledge-action systems specific. relevant to anticipatory water governance Figure 1 is a process model for water governance institutions to design and analyse their structures, rules, and norms. The basic process is that of governing (the blue steps in Figure 1). Policies and interventions rest on assumptions that emerge from a particular governance context (existing of actors on various levels with certain responsibilities, resources, and perceptions). The focus is on strategy and policy formulation, where current organisational goals come together with lessons learnt from past interventions (the green lines in Figure 1) and signals about future circumstances (the orange steps in Figure 1). The signals that result from exploring potential futures include both external intelligence and strategies emerging internally within the organisation. The lessons learnt can result in incremental changes to interventions (how things are done) and/or more fundamental changes concerning the basic Global Water Forum 5

6 assumptions and goals of the organisation (such as the identity and mission). The practice of strategy and policy formulation, while being essential to Anticipatory Water Governance, is known for being complex and difficult to achieve. Our process model shows which components are necessary to doing this step well. We are currently applying and further validating this process model of Anticipatory Water Governance at a water organisation in the Netherlands. This water organisation is one of the most complex and innovative with respect to administrative and legal structure and its range of responsibilities. The organisation is highly divisionalised, with some sections more influenced by financial controllers guided by private-sector principles and others led by more hierarchical public bureaucracy. It is overseen and steered by both elected and appointed directors and administrators. It is responsible for water supply, wastewater treatment, sewerage, flood control, and water resource management in highly urbanised and rural areas and is financed via various tariffs, taxes and levies. The governance context of this organisation is highly complex and dynamic, which makes Anticipatory Water Governance particularly Figure 1: A process model for water governance institutions to design and analyse their structures, rules, and norms. Global Water Forum 6

7 crucial to its sustainability and resilience. So far, our experiences have shown that the process model works very well as a framework to analyse and design the water organisation s system of institutions, rules, and norms. It also works well for structuring the discussions with relevant employees. Further, it provides a framework for assessing the baseline conditions and identifying areas for improvement regarding the anticipatory capacity of the organization. For example, we discovered that the management could quickly and easily boost their anticipatory capacity by paying more attention to strategies emerging within the operational divisions. We found that the strategic advisors were best placed to fulfill this role, since they could match the internal strategies with signals from external intelligence. In addition, we found that the employees who were currently involved in short term, operational (financial) monitoring and evaluation could make the governance system more anticipatory by collecting and providing more strategic information for deeper learning and more evidence-based strategy and policy formulation. Conclusions Anticipatory Water Governance is a useful concept that merits more consideration within the water sector. We have operationalised the concept in a process model that helps managers and strategists to focus their attention on one of the three aspects to identify areas for improvement (exploring; governing; learning) while maintaining an overview of the links with other parts of the process. This is because the process model is built around a complete knowledge-action system, so that it does not isolate anticipatory capacity from the other theoretical ideas (integrated; participatory; adaptive). In this way, the model reduces the risk that practitioners will come up with fragmented responses and solutions. The process model is empirically grounded with years of work supporting and advising the strategic divisions of water organizations and we are currently developing it further, including more applications in practice. Within the Resilience Management & Governance division of KWR we are also looking to identify more measurable dimensions of Anticipatory Water Governance. References: Global Water Forum 7

8 Mintzberg, H The rise and fall of strategic planning: Reconceiving roles for planning, plans, planners. New York: Free Press. Pahl-Wostl, C Towards sustainability in the water sector-the importance of human actors and processes of social learning. Aquatic sciences, 644, Brown, R.R., & Farrelly, M.A Delivering sustainable urban water management: A review of the hurdles we face. Water Science and Technology 59 (5), Frijns, J., Büscher, C., Segrave, A., & van der Zouwen, M Dealing with future challenges: a social learning alliance in the Dutch water sector. Water Policy 15(2), Segrave, A Time to change: The foreseeable future for water planning. PhD Thesis, TU Delft. Molle, F Nirvana concepts, storylines and policy models: Insights from the water sector. Water Alternatives, 11, 131. Van der Brugge, R., Rotmans, J., & Loorbach, D The transition in Dutch water management. Regional Environmental Change, 54, Fuerth, L. S Foresight and anticipatory governance. Foresight, 114, Van der Steen, M.A., & van Twist, M. J. W Foresight and long-term policy-making: An analysis of anticipatory boundary work in policy organizations in The Netherlands. Futures, 54, Boyd, E., Nykvist, B., Borgström, S., & Stacewicz, I. A Anticipatory governance for social-ecological resilience. Ambio, 441, Munoz-Erickson, T.A Co-production of knowledge-action systems in urban sustainable governance: the KASA approach. Environmental Science & Policy, 37, Van Buuren, A Knowledge for governance, governance of knowledge: Inclusive knowledge management in collaborative governance processes. International Public Management Journal, 12 (2), Dr. Andrew Segrave spearheads scientific futures studies at KWR Watercycle Research Institute. He is fascinated by people s views towards the future and how this influences their Global Water Forum 8

9 decisions and actions. Andrew also has much experience at applying methods for horizon scanning, strategy development, and planning in practice. Dr. Stijn Brouwer is a senior researcher at KWR Watercycle Research Institute where he does social research in water governance issues. His research interests and expertise are mainly in citizen participation, stakeholder collaboration processes, and strategic innovation processes and the role of policy entrepreneurs. Jos Frijns (MSc Environmental Engineering) is manager of the Resilience Management & Governance team at KWR Watercycle Research Institute. Central in his work is facilitating the knowledge development for complex challenges that require collaboration between disciplines and organisations. The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here. Global Water Forum 9