A learning process
In the final year of CADWAGO the project has lined up a number of events to engage stakeholders in a co-learning mode with insights that are coming out of the project.
In April this year CADWAGO worked together with the Baltic University Program Secretariat, Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development (CSD) to organise and facilitate a meeting in Stockholm. The aim of the meeting was to share the results of a study CSD had been conducting in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) that examined how different riparian countries conceptualize sustainable development (SD). The participants of the meeting were the national SD coordinators from BSR countries. Some findings from the CADWAGO project were presented prior to running an exercise with the participants around the storyline of ‘Robbing Peter to Pay Paul’. With the rich set of divergent national conceptualisations of SD as a backdrop, the participants were encouraged to reflect upon the systemic and adaptive fitness of nationally implemented SD governance actions by working through the RP3 mnemonic. The participants in the different groups chose to deliberate over governance actions intended to address the global challenges of renewable energy and food security, cognizant of uncertainties attributed to climate change.
Another interim activity that is building on insights from CADWAGO took place in Uppsala in May. A competition was put out to find innovatice solutions to Uppsala’s storm water problem which causes flooding at the moment. As it says on their website: “The ‘ReSolve Process’ is a circular project process for a multi-stakeholder project tackling sustainability challenges. The ‘ReSolve Process’ will help practitioners to think and analyse challenges systematically as well as create and implement innovative and resilient solutions in a collaborative manner.” CADWAGO has worked together with the ReSolve team to design a speed dating workshop in which the teams meet with different stakeholders and are presented with some of the CADWAGO insights. The workshop was organized around issue framing to show the various competing teams the various perspectives people hold on the storm water problem, and how this impacts the process towards possible solutions. More information about the workshop and the competition is available here: http://www.resolveprocess.se/events/speed-dating-workshop-resolve-innovation-competition/ The team that wins the competition will participate in the final Governance learning event in Sardinia in October.
In June, CADWAGO will co-organize another learning event in Sweden, this time in Kristianstad. Together with SEI Stockholm we will organize a workshop as start of the new MIRACLE project, focussing on flooding and its impact on the wider international water system. Results and insights from the CADWAGO project are shared with the team of the MIRACLE project. In this way the MIRACLE project builds upon the results of the CADWAGO project and the insights will help the MIRACLE project to have a smooth start.
In September we look forward to the event in London at the Royal Society organised by the Open University group of CADWAGO. The event aims to showcase the England case study and key transformations in water governance in other projects in the UK and the EU with the idea to develop an action plan ‘An agenda for transforming governance’. The event will bring together around 80 people. More information about registration will be posted on the website nearer the time.
October will see the final event of CADWAGO. In Sardinia we aim to showcase in a co-learning mode the portfolio of conceptual, methodological and operational insights from CADWAGO to those involved in water governance in Europe.