Transparency, accountability and the new water challenges

1. Transparency, accountability and the new water challenges Julia Bucknall The World Bank

2. As water challenges get more complex, accountability becomes increasingly important

3. As water challenges get more complex, accountability becomes increasingly important

4. As water challenges grow, so does need for governance Concerns about Scarcity, Quality Customer demand Accountability Institutions Engineering

5. Pre-Arab Spring MENA suggests that accountability is associated with better water management

6. Water particularly vulnerable to opacity • Highly politically sensitive service, human right • Often shared across international borders • Water services involve multiple levels of government, roles and responsibilities may overlap or have gaps • Complicated hydrology: • underground flows, underground storage, storage in ice, snow and glaciers, uncertainty of climate change • non-consumptive use, consumptive use • quantity, quality, timing, geographic distribution • Complicated funding when public utilities all under the same budget, when definitions vary

7. As water challenges get more complex, accountability becomes increasingly important

8. Information can help at all stages of water management Source: Perry, C

9. But information will not be sufficient • Many water decisions are zero sum games • Water • Right to pollute • Public finance • Many require large numbers of people to change their behaviour • Many have long-term diffuse benefits and short term concentrated costs

10. As water challenges get more complex, accountability becomes increasingly important

11. New technologies can help improve accountability across all of water

12. New technologies can help improve accountability across all of water Red fields generate four time more wine per liter of water than fields in blue Use technology to target extension work, enforcement of groundwater limits

14. New technologies can help improve accountability across all of water

15. Can encourage data production, dissemination and use through old methods as well • Farmers monitor their own water resources in fields, with low-tech, low-cost techniques • Women took the lead. The community now sells data to government hydrological services • >1 mnfarmers changed agricultural practices to produce more sustainable crop production World Bank(2010)

16. Hackathons are one way the WB has encouraged generation, publication and use of water information

17. Hackathons pay off most if you invest in curating the problem statements • We invested in exploiting our relative comparative advantages • Hackers know how to make code • Hackers work hard and fast when motivated by an idea • The World Bank can help clients state their problems in a way that hackers can work with • The clients make themselves and their data available during the hackathon • Prizes in form of recognition and facilitation of follow-up from the prototypes developed over the hackathon • Many of the benefits came from meeting of two different communities • Several non-winning apps are now being used routinely • Teams working on one app are now developing solutions for water teams in other countries

18. Transparency can help governance of an increasingly complex water problem Concerns about Scarcity, Quality Customer demand Accountability Institutions Engineering