Water4Change

 
The Water4Change research programme addresses the complex challenges to urban water systems faced by fast-growing cities in India.
 
India is a country which is rapidly growing into urban agglomerations showing infrastructure deficits and adaptation gaps in relation to current and future climatic, societal and economic change. Water4Change embraces water as a basic necessity for life that is both an agent and catalyst of positive transformative changes that are needed to pro-actively deal with and respond to these challenges.
 
To facilitate long-term sustainability and resilience of urban water systems, the programme will co-create and mainstream an integrative, fit-for-purpose and adaptive water sensitive design framework in close collaboration with stakeholders in three Indian cities. The framework will be developed by synergistically connecting four realms – governance, built and natural environment, technology and infrastructure design and societal behaviours – for the delivery of transformative change.
 
DRIFT leads Work Package 4 that will develop and apply a conceptual and methodological framework for co-evaluating and co-developing capacities for water sensitive governance in cities. Shifting to and maintaining water sensitive urban systems places multiple new demands on governance. It requires to proactively adapt to and cope with multiple uncertainties and shocks in the short- and long-term, to take interrelations and dynamics across the full water cycle as well as other socio-economic and ecological conditions into account, and to ensure inclusive and innovative decision-making. Next to developing a novel framework to assess water sensitive governance capacities, we apply an adapted Transition Management approach to co-create pathways for strengthening such capacities together with local stakeholders in the Indian case study cities.
 
Duration of the project
Water4Change runs from 2019-2024.
 
Funding
The project is co-funded by the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Indian Government Department of Science and Technology (DST) under the Cooperation India – the Netherlands programme.
 
Partners
Netherlands: Delft University of Technology, University of Twente, Stichting Deltares, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, IRC Wash
 
India: Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IITR), CEPT University, Centre for Water Resources Development and Management (CWRDM), Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology (MANIT), Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITG)
 
DRIFT Team
Katharina Hölscher, Neha Mungekar