Water

ADB Water Week Session Themes Features Program Participants Contact

Results of ADB Water Week 2004
Water for the Poor: Setting the Rules and Finding the Money
ADB Headquarters, Manila, Philippines
26-30 January 2004

Change Agenda

ADB's Charles Andrews said that if the water sector in Asia-Pacific DMCs were a football team, it would have been relegated to D Division. The supporters and financiers would demand change: new leadership, new players, and a different style of play. So why is it that after a generation and a half of bad investments, futile technical support, and endless talk there remains perilously little prospect of real change across the water sector? Why are leaders so resistant to change? At one extreme, it even looks like the football team is betting against itself-that it somehow finds an advantage in losing.

The ADB Water Week examined the essential changes necessary to improve water governance and reverse the effects of perverse incentives responsible for sector underperformance. These are:

Changing selection criteria

working with the right information, organizations and leaders

Changing incentives and advocacy

empowering civil society as catalyst for water sector reform

Changing regulation

from independent to credible regulator

Changing the rules to reward efficiency

linking formal and informal providers

Changing the focus of lending

catalyzing water investments to the rural poor

Changing the nature of water project

investing more in non-structural interventions

Changing water financing partners

from national to sub-sovereign

Achieving the goal of improving the water security of the poor will need changes to the ways in which water resources are managed and water services are delivered. Change is necessary to lift productivity and reduce inequality. Institutional performance is always the key. Good development assistance results in positive change: it improves institutional performance and if necessary, supplements available financial resources. The same is true for water sector institutions and financing.

"Change" is really about decisions. Decisions about whom to support or not support, decisions about resource allocations, decisions about rules, and so on. Change is NOT about activities. Activities like research and development, analysis, awareness building, training, and organizational development serve good decision making, but the crux of the change agenda should be the good decisions themselves.

Essential water institutions include:

• national and provincial governments (water law and water policy, fiscal support and discipline)
• river basin organizations (cross boundary planning and coordination, research, regulation and enforcement, technical back-up)
• local governments (control of water service authorities, local policy and regulations, fiscal support)
• publicly owned water service authorities and independent water enterprises
• private water and service companies
• small scale private water providers, and others

Other institutions such as civil society and farmer/consumer groups can influence the performance of those institutions that have public responsibilities.