Ms. Aziza Akhmouch is Head of the OECD Water Governance Programme

What is your role in the Zaragoza Conference?
As a “tool coordinator” for the topic of governance, institutions, and legal frameworks, my role at the Zaragoza conference will be to chair the concluding session on governance. Together with the stakeholder sessions’ rapporteurs and the audience, we will look back at the key messages from the different parallel sessions to discuss how business, academia, civil society and governments can contribute to the effective implementation of the water-related Sustainable Development Goal. We will strive to diagnose the most critical governance challenges and identify the needed tools to set-up enabling multi-stakeholder governance frameworks for achieving the water SDG.

What are your expectations about the conference?
We are at a critical juncture. As the MDGs approach their expiry date, the Sustainable Development Goals to be adopted in 2015 will create a unique momentum for countries to advance on a variety of issues critical for political, socio-economic and environmental development.

I see the conference as a great opportunity for various stakeholders to mobilise collective efforts, create shared global understanding and commit to action to improve water management. The water-related goal aims to shift the paradigm focused on solving individual situations and begin connecting the dots between actors, policy fields and scales to address water challenges in a systemic way.

The Zaragoza conference will thus provide for an excellent platform to share experience and discuss ways forward across a wide range of public, private and non-profit actors.

What would you like to highlight in relation to the most important implementation challenges of the water and sanitation targets of the water related SGDs?
Implementing the water-related SDG will require countries to translate global goals into local actions. To do so, countries will have to bridge governance gaps in a sector that has many externalities on other domains critical to poverty alleviation (energy, agriculture, urbanisation etc.); and it is at the crossroad of public health, revenue distribution and territorial development. They relate to institutional fragmentation; the lack of coordination, co-operation and information sharing among national, regional, and local public actors; limited monitoring and reporting; unclear regulatory frameworks (e.g. for water quality, water quantity); unstable revenues and markets that struggle to deliver the necessary investments to meet the sector’s needs (e.g. infrastructure), corruption, poor capacity and opaque decision-making frameworks. Diagnosing these governance challenges in each water-related area and the extent to which they affect the capacity of countries to achieve the water goal will be a critical step in the SDG implementation process.

What would you like to highlight in relation to the most important tools for implementing the water and sanitation targets of the water related SGDs?
Overcoming governance gaps to the SDG implementation will require taking actions on several fronts to move away from silo vision to create a new scenario for development and sustainability that is flexible, adaptive and resilient to changing circumstances and future challenges.

In an effort to compile the wide variety of guidelines, instruments, and publication that support better governance in the water sector, the OECD Water Governance Initiative prepared an Inventory of more than 100 governance tools on water governance. The key is now to scale up their implementation with concrete guidance, and tailor them to specific contexts.

The OECD is also developing Principles on Water Governance which will serve as international standards to strengthen institutions’ resilience in order to reap the economic, social and environmental benefits of good governance in water.