‘Mega-networking’ at the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City: Looking for Opportunities at a Megaconference

This Guest View is a group effort involving Robert G. Varady, Margaret Wilder, Susanna Eden, Anne Browning-Aiken, Kathy Jacobs and Juan Valdes. All contributors are from the University of Arizona except Jacobs who is executive director of the Arizona Water Institute.

With some 12,500 participants, including us, the Fourth World Water Forum, or WWF4, which convened in Mexico City this past March, was the largest international water conference of its kind.
The gathering provided, as have previous forums, a focal point, a convenient meeting place, for water professionals who otherwise would need to arrange to meet elsewhere, in small groups and at large cost, to discuss specific interests.

The sessions at the WWF4 represented multiple and critical perspectives on timely issues such as integrated water management, global climate change, water pricing, local participation, and water privatization, and at least some of those inside the hall had been participants in protests or alternative forums on the outside in previous days.

Some scholars, stakeholders, and policymakers have disparaged the water forums as expensive, diversionary, and ultimately unproductive. According to this critique, the forums are circuses with too many sessions, too many presentations, and a cacophony of viewpoints. They also tend to exclude underfunded NGO representatives, provide an unseemly venue for hawking water technologies, and end with meaningless, often prepackaged declarations. Some argue that these conferences are too unfocused and therefore contribute little of added value. “More action, less talk” is their conclusion.

We agree that the inner workings of WWF4 were in many ways unwieldy and less than satisfactory. The absence of a detailed agenda frustrated attempts to know who was speaking on what topic at a particular time. The sessions themselves were encumbered with too many talks in too little time, and many sessions ended without time for questions and discussion, much less resolution. In session after session, few people got down to discussing details, developing recommendations, or formulating action items. In addition, “local actions” — the theme of this Forum — such as a case study of Mexico’s Lake Chapala-Río Lerma, were commonly presented as success stories rather than as opportunities for acknowledging and learning from failures.

It’s fair to say that few attendees would argue that the forum yielded decisive breakthroughs or set the world on a new course toward universally accessible potable water and sanitation. The myriad presentations broke little new ground and the discourse and policy pronouncements were familiar. And the numerous alternative water forums and thousands of protesters in the streets leave little doubt that many felt that the forum did not adequately address their concerns. There are lessons here on inclusiveness of alternative viewpoints for the planners of the 2009 forum in Turkey.

But while the critical assessments are not without merit, dismissal of such events solely on the basis of their formal aims and structure misses a significant point. As we observed, much more effectively than disciplinary meetings or topical workshops, these “megaconferences” as they have been called, encourage a kind of “mega-networking” among participants from diverse sectors of the “Water World.”

While, the World Water Forums do bring together the old standby heavy-hitter agencies and organizations that may come armed with particular agendas, they also offer a venue to bring in new voices and introduce challenges to prevailing perspectives. Many seemingly chance encounters allowed for valuable “face time” between people who rarely are on the same continent, let alone in the same room. In addition, the powerful magnetic effect of the event allowed groups of participants to advance their organizational objectives by convening useful side meetings. One example was a dinner meeting between three of us and five Mexican colleagues to solidify a planned collaboration on a binational climate diagnostic product for the border region.

A prominent paradigm at the meeting was one which protesters outside the Banamex Center and formal participants within, would probably agree is essential: a focus on the necessity for effective and meaningful local participation in resolving water issues. Sessions and panels organized to look at paradigms for integrated basin management and local participation in water policy decisions provided useful models that may prove to have ripple effects in time.

If there was a new development, it was in the forum’s explicit disavowal of private-sector control of water services as a panacea or even a preferred solution for the world’s water ills. This recognition can be seen as a clear reaction to protests at the 2003 Kyoto forum and to accusations that the forum’s principal organizer, the World Water Council, is an instrument of the globalization movement. And for perhaps the first time, key concepts such as Integrated Water Resources Management, sustainability, and stakeholder participation became palpably mainstream and uncontroversial, thus contributing to what even sharp critics admit as useful movement toward global consensus on water-related policies.

We suspect that like most of the 12,500 attendees, we came away challenged, highly invigorated, and weighted down by the loads of new materials we brought back. Above all, the event allowed each of us to make useful contacts and plan for new collaborations, and to continue to ruminate about the endlessly diverse problems of water management.

The 4th World Water Forum was held in Mexico City, March 16-22; its theme was “Local actions for a global challenge.”

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