Across Southeast Asia, climate adaptation is entering a new phase. Most ASEAN countries now have a National Adaptation Plan (NAP). The next step is harder: turning these plans into action on the ground. Through Partners for Water, The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management is supporting this next step through cross-learning by bringing experts, governments and countries together to learn from each other. This is part of a wider approach that reaches beyond the ASEAN region.

ASEAN is one of the global regions most vulnerable to climate change. Rising temperatures, extreme weather, sea-level rise and water scarcity put pressure on food security, infrastructure and livelihoods. Like elsewhere in the world, turning national plans into local action depends on access to finance and close horizontal and vertical coordination between different layers of government.

Cross-learning helps to bridge that gap. Climate resilience and water management are shared priorities in the partnership between ASEAN and the Netherlands. Since 2025, a cross-learning event has taken place each year in the country that chairs ASEAN. Delegates bring challenges and real cases from their own countries and work on them with peers and experts. Promising cases can lead to follow-up support, bringing plans a step closer to implementation.

Organised by the Philippines, chair of ASEAN in 2026 and the Government of the Netherlands, and facilitated by Partners for Water, the latest cross-learning event took place in Malolos City in September 2026. Seven ASEAN countries and the Netherlands came together around one shared question: how do you turn long-term plans into results on the ground?

Dutch knowledge in practice

The sessions in Malolos covered themes that have shaped Dutch water practices over the years, drawing on experiences from both at home and through international cooperation. Dutch experts shared their experiences as input for the cases that delegates brought from their own countries.

Land subsidence was one of these themes. Experts from Wageningen University & Research shared insights into its underlying causes, including groundwater extraction. The issue came up in several cases, from the Pampanga Delta, the Mekong and Red River Delta, the Bangkok Bay to the North coast of Java. The Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP) approach offered a way to look at these cases over time. Which steps are needed now, and which choices can wait without limiting future options?

Nature-based approaches and transformative landscapes are gaining ground in the Netherlands and across the ASEAN region. In the Pampanga River Basin, for example, residents, farmers and a local wetlands NGO are helping to turn a plan for large grey infrastructure into one that combines floodwater storage, protected zones and farmland that accommodate floodwaters when needed.

Financing these approaches remains a challenge. Yet nature-based approaches can generate benefits values in multiple ways. Mangroves protect against erosion and provide breeding grounds for fish, which supports local livelihoods. Other solutions also bring wider benefits, such as ecotourism. Knowing exactly what these benefits are, and who receives them, helps to identify how these solutions can be funded.

What connects these themes is a shared way of working: start from the local context, build plans together with the people who live there, and combining local knowledge with expertise from elsewhere.

What the Netherlands takes home

Cross-learning is not a one-way exchange. ASEAN countries are already dealing with climate extremes such as intense rainfall, drought and saltwater intrusion. That experience offers valuable lessons for the Netherlands, both in general and through specific cases.

The nature-based alternatives developed for the Pampanga River Basin are one example. Storing floodwater in rice fields can serve as an example for Dutch approaches, such as a ‘wisselpolder’ (a sedimentation or land-raising polder) or the rewetting of peatlands. The same goes for measures that dampen waves and trap sediment, such as coastal forests and nature-based wave breakers, as seen on the coast of Pamarawan Island.

“The resilience of local people is especially inspiring to me,” says Liliane Geerling of Partners for Water. “Local adaptation measures can be very creative. Raised tricycles, an important mode of transport in the Philippines, can keep carrying people even when roads are under 80 centimetres of water.”

Beyond Southeast Asia

The same approach reaches beyond Southeast Asia. Alongside ASEAN, Partners for Water supports cross-learning with Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, in collaboration with the NAP Global Network. Peer learning events in Johannesburg and Accra in 2026 focused on the same question as Malolos: moving national adaptation priorities from planning to implementation. Insights from both regions will be shared at international forums, such as the UN climate conferences.

The exchange continues

Insights from Malolos will be presented at COP17 in November 2026 and at the UN Water Conference in December 2026. In 2027, the next ASEAN cross-learning event will take place in Singapore, coinciding with ASEAN’s 60th anniversary.

Throughout the year we will continue the cross-learning activities via webinars and one-on-one support. Meanwhile, the African track will continue with a workshop in Kenya.

How do ASEAN countries transition from planning to implementing national climate adaptation priorities? From 28 to 30 September, seven ASEAN countries and the Netherlands met in the Philippine city of Malolos. The meeting aimed to facilitate cross-learning and increase understanding of how to strengthen the enabling factors for the implementation of the National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) in these countries. 

The event was organised by the Philippines (ASEAN chair in 2026), and the Government of the Netherlands and facilitated by Partners for Water. It brought together policymakers involved in the NAP process from various national ministries and local governments as well as climate adaptation experts to share various frameworks, pathways and practical examples. Most ASEAN countries already have NAPs, but implementing them on the ground is hard. In Malolos, delegates and experts shared what worked, what didn’t work and where they still need support. Delegates came from Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Vietnam. Dutch experts from Rijkswaterstaat and the NL2120 knowledge network also participated.

Over three days, interactive sessions were held on land subsidence, systems understanding and root causes, Dynamic Adaptation Policy Pathways (DAPP), nature-based approaches, and climate adaptation financing. The insights gained from these sessions informed the further development of their regional adaptation cases selected for the event. A visit to Pamarawan island, where a nature-based coastal protection project is being implemented, was also organised.

Adaptation on the ground

One of the Philippine delegates at the cross-learning event, Sir Angel Boy Cruz, former mayor of Hagonoy, highlighted why cross-learning on climate adaptation matters: his community lives with floodwater on a day-to-day basis.

In the weekend before the cross-learning event, a small team of guest experts visited several sites in the wider Pampanga River Basin in Bulacan province to prepare for the cross-learning event and gather insights. Bulacan is highly vulnerable to flooding, storm surges and the impacts of climate change along Manila Bay. As part of the local implementation of national climate strategies, the province has integrated disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation into its Provincial Development and Physical Framework Plan (PDPFP).

Malolos City, for instance, is at the forefront of local climate action, with projects such as the Pamarawan nature-based coastal approach. This is the country’s first large-scale green coastal defence system, which uses natural materials to address tidal flooding and land subsidence.

During the preparatory field trip, Sir Angel showed the team parts of Hagonoy that had remained underwater for more than six weeks, as well as areas where the floodwaters had only recently receded. He demonstrated the effects of prolonged flooding on soil, nature, infrastructure and housing. In his own garden, the trees had stood in brackish water for almost six weeks. Even after the floodwaters had finally receded, the soil remained waterlogged, and the impact on the fruit trees and other vegetation was clearly visible. Some trees and plants had died. At the local village church, where flood marks from the preceding weeks were still clearly visible on the doors and walls, he showed a video of a couple getting married in the same church three weeks earlier. In the video, they walked down the aisle through floodwater that reached above their waists. For Sir Angel, this is the daily reality behind the question that brought the ASEAN delegates to Malolos: how can adaptation plans reach local communities like his?

Rice fields, fishponds, floodwater

Twenty years ago, the land around Sir Angel’s home was filled with rice fields. “Rice tolerates only a few centimetres of water, so farmers pumped their fields dry. By 2006, the rising water made that too expensive, and they stopped. Fish farming came next. With support from aquaculture offices, farmers tried white shrimp, milkfish and tilapia. Each time, floods arrived just before harvest. After four experiments, you no longer have the confidence,” he said. “Most villages now have little economic activity left.” His diagnosis: land subsidence is the root cause. “People think the water is rising, but in fact, the ground is sinking.” He estimates that only two or three out of ten people know this, with higher levels of government often hearing it for the first time. Satellite data from Malolos supporting his argument show that parts of the Philippine Pampanga Delta are sinking at up to 20 centimetres a year. “Small, isolated dikes do not solve the problem,” Sir Angel stated. “It is like a little wall on the river, but when the waters rise, it still spreads everywhere.” The area needs one comprehensive approach that respects nature, with local engineers, provincial authorities, hydrology experts and the local university at the table.

Listening first

The area between Hagonoy and Calumpit is also where Partners for Water is supporting a nature-based climate adaptation approach. Consultants from the Netherlands are working with Philippine partners and the communities on a climate adaptation plan for the area. The first phase consisted of interviews with residents, both online and on site. Based on the outcomes, a second phase will explore adaptation interventions like wetland restoration for water storage, including drinking water storage, combined with livelihood potential. “The plan will be built in co-creation with local stakeholders and the communities,” Sir Angel explained, “and not designed in an office somewhere else and imposed on the area.” Local knowledge matters: those who live with the water know what it means, and you only understand it by experiencing it yourself.

Sir Angel also welcomes Dutch expertise. “What the community knows is no longer enough, people need to be informed about other options.” He adds that the involvement of Dutch experts has helped connect the community with higher levels of government.

A video filmed during the preparatory field trip about the wider Pampanga River Basin that was shown at the opening of the cross-learning event followed the same logic. Nature-based approach expert Jasper Leuven explained that the first idea for this river basin was a large grey infrastructure to discharge water downstream. Local inhabitants as well as farmers saw many negative aspects of this solution and shared their ideas on how to solve it differently. The adapted plan includes this input and is composed of various reservoirs to store floodwater and protected zones to keep homes, schools and hospitals dry, and some farmland which is allowed to flood when needed.Both stories match what Sir Angel asked for earlier: not isolated fixes, but a comprehensive approach built with the people who live there. The Dutch contribution is not a ready-made solution, but a way of working. Listen to the community, combine local knowledge with additional expertise, and design from there.

Learning from each other

For Sir Angel, this is why cross-learning matters. Experts and officials in the Philippines cannot solve this alone. His region needs to learn from countries with the same climate challenges, “so it can look beyond the solutions it already knows.”

The cross-learning goes both ways. At the opening of the cross-learning event, the Dutch ambassador to the Philippines, Mr Roderick Wols, mentioned that ASEAN countries have valuable lessons for the Netherlands too. Few people in the Netherlands know what it is like to live with water in their house for weeks in a row.

What’s next?

In the coming year, nature-based climate adaptation approaches in the coastal area of Pamarawan Island, the Pampanga River Basin and the Hagonoy–Calumpit area will be further implemented, monitored and developed. Partners for Water, together with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the relevant government departments in the Philippines, will explore opportunities to create synergies between these pilot initiatives. The aim is to strengthen the region’s climate resilience and provide an inspiring example of practical, on-the-ground implementation for other ASEAN countries.

In the Humans of Partners for Water series, we showcase the people who are involved in and benefit from our projects. The Humans series sheds light on the stories of people who work with and for whom Partners for Water and focus on how water affects their lives. Discover how Maghfiroh’s research is turning scientific knowledge into real change for the communities of Pekalongan.

Meet Maghfiroh

Maghfiroh is an environmental researcher and lecturer at Universitas Pekalongan. Growing up in the heart of Indonesia’s batik industry, she has dedicated her career to ensuring that research does not stop at theory, but creates direct impact for people and their environment.

From the classroom to the community

For Maghfiroh, water has always been part of daily life. Growing up in Pekalongan, home to   around 2,000 batik industries, she witnessed first-hand both the value of water and the impact that water pollution can have. On the environment.

” That is why water is so precious to me, and why I work on wastewater treatment processes. It is deeply meaningful when the results can be applied directly in the community.”

Dutch-Indonesian water cooperation

Indonesia is one of seven Delta countries in the Partners for Water programme 2022–2027. Supported by Partners for Water, the Universitas Pekalongan (UNIKAL) is a key local partner in the Green Batik Pekalongan pilot.  It brings together Dutch and Indonesian organisations to develop community-led wastewater treatment solutions for the batik sector. The university is set to become the future Green Batik Centre, anchoring knowledge, training and innovation locally for the long term. Read more about the project here.

During heavy rains in Nakuru, Kenya, flooding often makes its way to the city’s industrial area, shutting down factories that have to halt their production and engage in cleaning up the damage. For Susan Njuguna, Regional Coordinator at the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM), it is a scenario she has “witnessed far too many times.”

An industrial backbone under pressure

Nakuru’s economy is driven by a diverse mix of manufacturing, agro-processing, and construction industries, alongside growing tourism and service sectors. The city hosts factories that produce building materials, textiles, plastics, and food products, many of them located in or near the central industrial area that has long struggled with flooding. These businesses form the backbone of local employment and investment, making their participation in resilience planning critical for Nakuru’s sustainable growth.

“We have lost both time and machinery due to floods,” explains Susan. “The workers, businesses, and even the entire community are affected by this.”

Bringing everyone to the table

At the beginning of the year, Susan became a participating member in the Water as Leverage (WaL) workshops. This initiative funded by the Dutch government is managed by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) and implemented in partnership with UN-Habitat, Vitens Evides International through its WaterWorx programme, and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It brings together government officials, community representatives, development and private-sector actors to co-design environmentally-friendly and investment-ready solutions for urban water challenges in Nakuru. The WaL Nakuru project uses the ‘sponge city’ design model to tackle flooding, stormwater runoff and climate change, while promoting nature-based infrastructure and inclusive urban growth.

Susan recalls being struck by the inclusive spirit of the workshops. “The best thing for me was the listening aspect. They were really listening to everyone, the residents and even the business owners,” she explains. “If you want to help Nakuru, you must understand its environment.”

Water as a catalyst for change

The WaL approach positions water as a catalyst for sustainable urban transformation. It combines the expertise of spatial design, engineering, planning and finance to unite local knowledge with global innovation to transform environmental challenges into opportunities for equitable development supported by an international and local multidisciplinary design team. This approach is now being scaled across cities through the Upscaling Water as Leverage programme.

Participants discussed six ‘impact areas’ or hotspots including Kiamunyi, a district which was once farmland but is now a hillside that has been rapidly urbanised in recent years. The area quickly changed from being a source of water retention and carbon sinks to hosting scenes of stormwater rushing down to the central business district, flooding the industrial zones.

Greening the industrial zone

For Susan and her colleagues, the exercise was more than just a means to an end. “We were taught the process of turning a city into an environment that can retain water through vegetation such as trees, grass, and parks instead of water overwhelming the city,” she explains. Moreover, the team witnessing the Nakuru Water and Sanitation Service Company demonstration project made them realise how such seemingly small and simple measures like rooftop gardens or shaded lawns could make industrial spaces cooler and more resilient.

Inspired by the WaL pilot at NAWASCO, the city’s water and sanitation company, KAM members have started greening their own premises, adding rooftop gardens, lawns, and trees, and donating seedlings to surrounding communities. “It’s a collective effort,” says Susan. “We even hire local labour to help plant them. When everyone takes part, the impact lasts.”

From threat to resource

The initiative is also helping Nakuru’s private sector to see opportunities in sustainability. Businesses are exploring ways to store rainwater and treat wastewater which will support new livelihoods around Lake Nakuru, where fishing and tourism are beginning to thrive. “When we take care of the environment, the economy benefits too,” Susan says.

For her, the workshops marked a shift in how Nakuru views water as a transition from a threat to a resource. “This project sells itself,” she explains, smiling. “It’s solving real problems like flooding and water shortages, but it’s also showing us how to turn those challenges into opportunities.”

For decades, desalination has been presented as one of the most promising answers to growing water scarcity. As droughts intensify and freshwater sources come under increasing pressure, more countries are turning to the sea to secure their water supply. Yet every litre of drinking water produced through desalination leaves behind a highly concentrated salt solution known as brine – a by-product that is usually discharged back into the ocean.

What if that waste stream could become a resource instead?

That question lies at the heart of the Partners for Water project Smart Brine, a Dutch-Brazilian collaboration that has spent the past two years exploring how desalination brine can be transformed into valuable products. The project recently reached an important milestone, with project partners meeting in Brazil to review findings and discuss the next steps.

“We expected to identify possibilities for the future,” says Luewton Agostinho, professor at NHL Stenden, “technologies that might become viable in three to five years. What surprised us was discovering that one of the most promising solutions is actually much closer to implementation than we thought.”

Waste as a missed opportunity

Although discharging brine into the sea remains legal in most countries, scientists have raised concerns about the long-term environmental impacts, particularly as the number of desalination plants continues to increase.

The challenge is not simply the salt itself. Brine may also contain treatment chemicals used during the desalination process, while thermal desalination plants can discharge water at elevated temperatures. Together, these factors can affect local marine ecosystems.

Agostinho sees it differently: brine is a missed opportunity. “Many of the compounds present in brine already have economic value,” Agostinho explains. “The question is whether we can recover part of that value in a way that is technically and economically feasible.”

The most promising pathway

At the start of the project, the consortium explored three possible routes: mineral recovery, chemical production and energy generation.

One of the project’s most important achievements was identifying which of these pathways offers the greatest chance of success.

The clear frontrunner turned out to be chemical recovery.

“If you look at seawater composition, there is no big mystery,” Agostinho says. “The main salt is sodium chloride – about 85 percent of everything – followed by smaller amounts of magnesium and calcium.”

For the project, sodium chloride offered the most promising route. “We want to split these two elements electrochemically,” Agostinho explains. “The chloride will be used in the plant itself. It’s a cleaning agent, but it’s also a disinfectant agent. And from the sodium, you can make a strong base, sodium hydroxide, which is also widely used in industry. Magnesium and calcium are also good options, but chlorination is the first priority.”

The technologies required for this process already exist and are commercially available. The challenge therefore lies not in developing entirely new technologies but in combining existing ones into an efficient treatment chain.

“That was our first major breakthrough,” says Agostinho. “We realised that this is not fundamentally a technology challenge. It is much more of a process challenge. The pieces already exist.”

Listening to the market

Promising as it may be, technical feasibility alone is not enough. A solution only becomes viable if someone is willing to pay for the end product.

To assess market potential, the project brought together water companies, industrial users and local stakeholders in a series of workshops and consultations. From dozens of potential users, the consortium identified a smaller group of companies with realistic interest in purchasing recovered products.

“We are engineers and technology specialists,” says Agostinho. “So we worked together with business developers who helped us understand the market side. The key question is always: what is the product worth, and what are end users willing to pay?”

Those discussions reinforced confidence in the chemical recovery route. The market already exists. The customers already exist. What Smart Brine changes is the source of the raw material: instead of buying salt, desalination plants could produce the same chemicals from their own brine.

A desalination plant could potentially generate far larger quantities of raw material than current producers use. While that creates opportunities, it also raises new questions about market demand.

The objective, however, is not to eliminate brine discharge entirely. “Full brine recovery remains extremely challenging,” Agostinho says. “The volumes involved are enormous. We don’t have to solve the entire problem at once. If we can recover a meaningful fraction, that is already progress.”

The economics question

Yet one major hurdle remains: economics.

Because brine discharge is still permitted, desalination companies currently have little regulatory incentive to invest in alternative solutions. So any new system must make financial sense on its own. That means competing with existing industrial processes that rely on extremely cheap raw materials.

“The technologies work,” says Agostinho. “The real question is whether we can make them work at a competitive cost.”

The consortium has developed economic models and preliminary calculations that suggest the concept may be viable. However, the projected costs remain close enough to existing market prices that further validation is required.

To answer those questions definitively, pilot-scale testing will be necessary. “We are confident enough to move forward,” Agostinho says. “But we need real operational data before we can say with certainty that the business case works.”

Looking ahead

Although the current project phase is nearing completion, the meetings in Brazil left little doubt: the partners want to continue. The consortium is already exploring new funding opportunities to support pilot-scale implementation and further development.

For Agostinho, the project is also deeply personal. The desalination plant involved is located in the region where he grew up, and his connection with the local water company dates back almost thirty years, to an internship during his civil engineering studies.

“I have been working with these people in one way or another for almost thirty years,” he says. “Maybe one day I will drive past the plant with my grandchildren,” he reflects. “And I will be able to say: I helped create that.”

Water as the foundation of sustainable food systems

At the Netherlands Booth, Dutch Water Envoy Meike van Ginneken held up a punnet of blueberries. Roughly 100 litres of invisible water are embedded in them, from cultivation in Peru to a Dutch breakfast table. It set the tone for the Water for Tomorrow session. This new Dutch initiative addresses the water footprint of the fruit and vegetables the Netherlands imports.

Rather than pushing individual farms or companies to become more water-efficient, the programme aims to work at a landscape level. It seeks to bring producers, traders, local authorities and communities together to manage a shared water resource within its sustainable limits, protecting not just food production but also the livelihoods and economic resilience that depend on it.

This government-to-government programme is currently under development and is a joint initiative of the Dutch ministries of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature; Infrastructure and Water Management; and Foreign Affairs. The first phase may run to 2035, with a longer-term horizon extending to 2040. That long timeline draws on decades of delta cooperation, where change has always taken longer than a typical funding cycle. The programme aims to focus on six to eight regions from which the Netherlands imports significant volumes, and therefore contributes to the water footprint it hopes to reduce.

During the session in Stockholm, participants role-played different stakeholders in fictional sourcing regions, wrestling with trade-offs between growers, buyers, communities, smallholders, nature, investors and governments, before a panel discussed how to turn those tensions into action. ‘It’s really about long-term relationship building – how can we jointly solve this and embark on a journey together,’ said panellist Klaudia Schachtschneider from CEO Water Mandate. Maarten Gischler, Water Advisor at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sees the fruit and vegetable sector as a testing ground for other sectors too. Because it often experiences water stress first, he describes it as “a canary in a coal mine”.

Watch Hajar Yagkoubi’s video report on Water for Tomorrow, recorded during World Water Week 2026, or read more about the initiative in the Water for Tomorrow long read.

On 27 August, an Egyptian water delegation travelled throughout the Netherlands as part of the 50th anniversary of Dutch-Egyptian water cooperation. During the visit, the long-standing relationship was evident with lively, familiar and open discussions. The setting could hardly be more fitting. At Van Oord in Rotterdam, the Nieuwe Maas flows past the windows as the focus turns to coastal protection. At Evides, drinking water takes centre stage and near the North Sea, seawater itself becomes the subject.

Similarities

There are clear reasons why Egypt and the Netherlands have kept finding each other. “It is a very good cooperation,” stresses Dr. Walid Hakiki of Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation. “We have low-lying delta areas, saltwater intrusion – there are a lot of similarities.” Yet similar challenges do not necessarily call for identical approaches. That becomes clear in the delegates questions about costs, scale and what would actually work in Egypt.

At Van Oord, the Dutch marine contractor involved in projects including Dubai’s Palm islands and the reinforcement of the iconic Dutch Afsluitdijk, the conversation moves from sand nourishment to mangroves and the potential of combining conventional coastal defences with Nature-based Solutions. For Eng. Mohammed Ghattas of the Shore Protection Authority, this is particularly relevant. Egypt has traditionally relied heavily on grey structures. “In the past, when we started protecting our coast, we went for hard measures, not soft measures,” he says. “Turning our mind set to soft measures needs a lot of work.”

The Dutch Sand Engine generates critical questions. Why has it not been replicated more often? What would it cost in Egypt? And would it work on a different coastline? Van Oord, visibly pleased by the delegation’s concrete interest, responds that there is no ready-made formula: waves, currents, morphology and the availability and type of sand all matter.

Knowledge partner

At Evides and VEI, attention shifts to organisation. The visitors want to understand how Dutch water utilities cooperate and divide responsibilities. For Mahmoud Mehany of the Holding Company for Water and Wastewater, the institutional dimension is crucial. “What we need more of is discussions around institutional arrangements: how will the governance work? Who will do what? That is really important.” The point is not to copy the Dutch model, but to see what can be adapted to Egypt.

During a lunch of fresh fish in Scheveningen’s picturesque harbour, Jasmin Nasser of Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation sees opportunities precisely because much remains to be investigated together. “The solution is site-specific, so more research and testing should be done in other areas to determine exactly what guidelines we should follow,” she says. Egypt could therefore become not just a recipient of Dutch expertise, but a testing ground and knowledge partner.

The right decision

For Prof. Sherif Mohamady of the National Water Research Center one idea stands out in particular: the digital twin, a virtual representation of a water system that supports monitoring and decision-making. “I would love to see that happening in Egypt,” he says. As climate change makes water management more unpredictable and extreme events more frequent, such tools can help “take the right decision at the right time”.

The final visit of the day, to Elemental Water Makers, brings the conversation to desalination. The company develops small-scale desalination systems designed to use less energy and operate without added chemicals. The delegation wants to know where such technology would add value in Egypt. At what scale does it work? What does it cost and what happens to the brine? One passible application is small, remote coastal communities – provided the technology proves practical and cost-effective.

The exchange goes both ways. As drought becomes a growing concern in the Netherlands, Dr Hakiki sees something Egypt can offer. “Drought is something Egypt has been dealing with for quite some time,” he says after a short and quite noisy demonstration of how Elemental Water Makers’ technology turns seawater into drinking water. “That is experience Egypt can bring to the table as well.”

What becomes very clear over the course of the day is that there is enough awareness to recognise common challenges and enough trust to keep questioning each other’s approaches. The following morning, the conversations continued at the high-level meeting, with ideas to test, approaches to adapt and questions the two countries can answer together.

Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum, an interdisciplinary scholar and associate professor at IHE Delft, discusses how Dutch academic institutions privilege certain ways of knowing water, and how her team is trying to decolonise current knowledge systems.

“I took over a programme that was considered successful in many ways, yet it was inherently failing in its core objective of redressing colonial injustices,” Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum. said with palpable discomfort, as she spoke about the Water and Development Partnership Programme. This programmatic collaboration between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, a Dutch organisation, seeks to address rampant water challenges worldwide. It does this by investing in education and research to “establish networks and strengthen the capacities of the water and development sector in low- and middle-income countries”.

As an associate professor of Water Governance and Justice at IHE Delft, Jeltsje picked up the baton from her predecessors to lead the programme’s third phase. However, the programme’s transition to a more critical approach prompted Jeltsje to reflect on the colonial legacies that continue to shape international development programmes and the production of water knowledge. Soon, she found herself questioning how to decolonise what she describes as an inherently colonial programme.

In this case, “It is Dutch funding (from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs), which goes to a Dutch organisation (IHE Delft), and is coordinated by a Dutch academic, me, or my former Dutch colleagues,” she introspected as an entry point to her journey to decolonise water education.

The invisible coloniality in knowledge production

Jeltsje highlighted the slew of pernicious challenges confronting the team nearly every day, starting with IHE Delft’s history. The water institute was established in 1957 at Bangladesh’s request due to its frequent encounters with floods. “Bangladesh came to us, the Dutch, for its water expertise and experience in Europe, based on the widely held perception that the Global North brings knowledge to the Global South. It created different hierarchies within the water and development sector,” Jeltsje said. For decades, delegations from the Global South have visited the Netherlands to learn from its water management expertise. These visits often occur as part of a broader Dutch strategy that frames its own knowledge and solutions as indispensable to global water development.

She pointed to another challenge in the water sector that bears strong colonial imprints: the educational curriculum on water and related disciplines. “Irrigation engineering, for instance, was always about controlling water and people living in certain areas to maximise agricultural output. The underlying logic extends market-driven economic performance, which was part of colonial expansion strategies,” she noted. Similarly, other water-related education programmes were set up with input from Western universities. Gradually, Western logics continued to shape the curriculum, carrying colonial legacies in how we envision water and see people’s interaction with it.

The Dutch programme also bears similar traces. It was launched in 2008 as a characteristic Eurocentric, top-down vision. IHE Delft concluded agreements with university authorities in other countries on how to develop water-related educational topics. Lecturers and other water sector professionals, mostly trained in European ways of knowing and managing water, were expected to implement them. While the programme provides crucial support for projects that aim to be innovative and draw on multiple disciplines, this funding-backed arrangement comes with strings attached, which, in turn, influence the research and education content.

By ‘strings attached’, Jeltsje meant specific conditions set by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Some of the programme’s focus countries are in the Sahel region, the Horn of Africa, and West Asia. However, these regions are not selected based on longstanding political collaborations or where development cooperation is needed most, “but largely based on the assumed risks of migration to Europe, as people from these regions may cross into Europe to seek asylum or settle as undocumented migrants,” she said.

The framing is worth interrogating, as the underlying assumption is colonial in character. It centres Europe’s concerns rather than ground realities, which are also evident in the programme’s rigid reporting systems. The project in Palestine, for instance, demands that project partners report progress to the Dutch coordinators twice a year, and submit receipts and reports on time. “Because I need to report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I must ask for progress reports and updates from our partner organisations, even when bombs are flying over their heads. It is part of my job to put that responsibility on the partners who have been forced into a war,” Jeltsje challenged.

Decentring European influence and decolonising knowledge production also demands attention to funding, according to Jeltsje. That was the starting point for the team’s failing forward strategies.

We can turn to a trove of research to contest the water sector’s colonial roots. “But unless voices beyond the usual ones can influence where the funding goes, little will change, as more funding will go to mainstream studies on water than other ways of knowing,” she reasoned. This necessitates diverse responsibilities in knowledge production, including being mindful and continuously challenging asymmetries, prejudices, and underlying biases.

Decolonising knowledge production

As the third person and the first woman to coordinate the Dutch programme, Jeltsje, along with the funding committee, decides where the fund goes, who gets it, and who becomes part of the programme. She mandated major funding for Global South partners, with budgets set for women and marginalised persons. She envisioned a diversity-anchored transdisciplinary programme, in which IHE Delft would work not just with universities, but also with actors who experience a particular problem. For instance, agriculture and water management projects had to include farmers’ collectives or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that work with farmers.

The team sent open calls for proposals that contributed to decolonising and pluralising knowledge on water. Scholars and organisations could submit proposals on water-related issues, including water supply, sanitation, river basin management, or agriculture. They had to be interdisciplinary, focusing on technical, environmental and social aspects of the issues. The team also offered training to candidates who found it challenging to articulate their ideas. However, despite the good intentions of inclusive collaboration and non-mainstream science, Jeltsje acknowledged that the training remained trapped in standard Western proposal-writing frameworks.

Besides navigating the paternalistic structures, Jeltsje recounted navigating the gender dynamics – a familiar, rampant reality across sectors around the world. “When women are put in charge of projects, male colleagues could undermine them. It creates another layer of challenge.” This catalysed Jeltsje to bring more women into the programme.

Not there yet

On the one hand, people across the globe share bold, socio-culturally rooted ideas, including ways to resolve water issues. On the other hand, creating the conditions needed to shift towards a decentralised approach to managing projects remains a challenge. It cannot happen without broader structural transformation, and if the economic system and powerful elites maintain the status quo, it won’t. “We are still not moving towards more sustainable and socially just ways of managing water. Yes, we are failing forward by working in inter- and transdisciplinary ways of understanding water, but we are not there yet,” said Jeltsje.

The first critical step towards decolonising Eurocentric, neocolonial programmes is acknowledging the underlying colonial structures. This entails intense, open-minded reflection on the dynamics shaping programmes like the Water and Development Partnership Programme and understanding where the failings originate. As a corollary, in development programmes, we could decentralise funding mechanisms (think no-regret or trust-based funding with minimal requirements or no tedious bureaucratic reporting) and knowledge production rather than gatekeeping these collaborative, inclusive processes. As Jeltsje said, “We need to continue to struggle and push in the right direction.”

It took Bangladeshi NGO Uttaran numerous interactions and engagements with communities in vulnerable settings to realise its approach to working with them was flawed. Over the past few years, it has changed course, reimagining what community-led projects should embody in practice.

As a rights-based organisation, Uttaran began working with civil society leaders and community members in Southwest coastal Bangladesh since the early 1990s on numerous intersectional advocacy projects, including fighting for land rights and addressing waterlogging. Over the past few years, the grassroots non-governmental organisation (NGO) has reorganised its approach to facilitating community-led projects in water governance and climate adaptation: instead of NGO handholding, communities in vulnerable settings will plan, design, budget, and implement projects themselves through direct funding.

This renewed approach to working with communities stemmed from a realisation that cannot be traced back to a single project or programme. It was a collage of initiatives, encounters, dialogues, and interactions with communities over an extended timeframe that taught them the need for collaborative governance. An important principle of Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) approaches, collaborative governance is characterised by calls for negotiated roles and dialogue among multiple actors, ultimately shifting decision-making power to local communities – over what gets built, how, and by whose standards. Incidentally, LLA projects have sometimes genuinely worked towards an equitable shift in planning and decision-making to local stakeholders. However, critiques have argued that such projects often resuscitate the top-down dynamics that LLAs were designed to counter, including the reduced power of local actors in fund allocation; the risk of ‘local elite’ capture; the unaddressed structural inequalities; the dehumanising and depoliticising resilience-focused solutions; and agenda-setting by international actors or funders, among others.

And so the need for collaborative governance is also rooted in the colonial past, said Zahid Amin Shashoto, Uttaran’s Head of Climate Change and Water Governance programme. “For years, people in post-colonial societies forgot how to govern by themselves. With every self-governed, true LLA climate adaptation action, they are reclaiming that knowledge organically, and we need to give them that time and space.”

Arriving at that realisation, however, cost time, money, resources, and negotiations of ideas and expertise.

Re-learning to work with communities

Much of this learning traces back to the collective efforts of Uttaran, communities, and other entities to reintroduce a centuries-old nature-based sediment and tidal water management practice into the formal water governance system. The impoldering introduced by the Dutch in the 1960s not only devolved into a series of environmental fallouts (silted riverbeds, waterlogging, and saltwater intrusion into groundwater), but also social fallout, primarily displacing the traditional community-driven sediment and river management practice, which was later termed Tidal River Management (TRM). While community participation is essential to effective TRM implementation, implementing authorities often disregarded people’s role in local consultation.

TRM was not the only experience that forced Uttaran to rethink how it engaged with communities and the state. For instance, Uttaran began working on land rights in the mid-1990s, although a major success came around 2004, when the Bangladesh government allocated land to the landless communities they advocated for. It was only then that they realised their approach was ineffective. Until 2004, the NGO adopted a confrontational approach, prioritising protest and marches over dialogue and viewing the government understandably as an adversary. It almost always culminated in violence and threats, without commensurate results. “It pushed Uttaran to shift strategy to a ‘negotiated approach’, moving from confrontation to coordination with administrators, and focusing on dialogue and holding officials accountable while understanding why processes were slow. It produced better and more concrete outcomes, including land distribution to landless farmers,” said Zahid, adding it underscored the value of negotiating between different stakeholders to surmount an impasse.

Zahid recounted another anecdote that inspired Uttaran’s shift in approach towards communities. Unlike Dhaka, where the government subsidised water testing, distribution and pipeline maintenance, Southwest Bangladesh lacked testing, infrastructure, and subsidies. Seeing this as unjust, Uttaran spent $60,000 (own funds, Corporate Social Responsibility funds, and grants) to build an overhead tank and a groundwater pipeline system, skipping a feasibility study for lack of funds. By year two, the project proved unsustainable: households were too scattered for cost-effective testing and distribution, and without Dhaka-level subsidies, Uttaran could not sustain it. Zahid reflected that they had replicated a “foreign” urban model in a rural context, guided by emotion and values rather than vernacular knowledge. The failure was not about choosing the wrong infrastructure, but about choosing on communities’ behalf. Uttaran’s real fix, then, was to work closely with communities to rethink, redesign, and develop locally appropriate models rather than adopting a foreign model.

In 2022, Uttaran collaborated with the Dutch government’s Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) for the Reversing the Flow (RtF) programme, which provides longer-term funding directly to communities in vulnerable settings. Much like Uttaran, whose approach evolved through a series of projects that revealed shortcomings in its earlier methods, RVO’s collaboration has also been shaped by lessons learned from its multiple interventions in Bangladesh.

Besides the RVO specifications that the projects focus on water and climate adaptation, LLA and resilience practices, communities could choose their leaders, identify their own priorities, and decide how to manage funds to implement projects that address their immediate socio-economic and environmental challenges at a landscape level (a landscape comprised one village or a cluster of villages beside a canal or a floodplain). Uttaran transferred the entire amount to each landscape’s bank accounts.

When communities relearn to govern

Like any international development projects, community-led projects, too, run into challenges and failures. However, instead of hand-holding community members to make the putatively ‘right’ decision, Uttaran’s objective was to step back and let the community encounter failure and apply their learnings to the next course of action. The goal was to remind communities in vulnerable settings of their agency and right to self-govern their socio-economic realities. “We only ensure all projects abide by four principles: pro-gender, pro-people with intersectional vulnerabilities, pro-environment, and pro-poor. People found these a reasonable ask and adopted them into their projects,” said Zahid.

Zahid illustrated his point with an example: In Southwest Bangladesh, communities agreed to build dykes to protect their homes and land from tidal surges. The core group of the village, which leads all projects, set a timeline, earmarked $8,000, and began the work during the monsoon. But a heavy shower caused part of the dyke to collapse, sparking conflict within the community. “We anticipated this, but we did not intervene. It was their engagement, and a failure that they had to recognise and resolve,” said Zahid. The main committee decided that they would not handle the technical work but would only facilitate decisions. If it is a dyke, only people with experience living near or working on dykes will be part of the implementation team. “The initial approach had overlooked the valuable insights of those with lived experience. They realised the importance of harnessing the knowledge and experience that already existed within the community. In a sense, they were relearning and restructuring their governance,” Zahid reflected.

However, communities governing themselves do not always guarantee ‘fair’ governance on the ground, said Zahid. It threatens the equal distribution of decision-making power among the community members, especially in heterogeneous communities – a mix of elite, poor, landless, and caste groups – where decisions tend to favour the elite. “For instance, a seemingly community-led decision to spend around $14,000 on a road turned out to be influenced by two powerful shrimp farmers, not the villagers’ actual needs. It showed how participatory decisions can mask elite capture, and how easily that goes unnoticed without someone on the ground willing to dig into who really benefits,” he said, explaining the pitfalls of community-led initiatives in highly unequal societies.

However, Zahid cautioned against writing off these challenges as failures, and justifying not allocating funds and shifting decision-making power to community-driven projects. “If NGOs found no success, it is often recorded as ‘a good learning opportunity’. Contrarily, community failures are often written off as ‘a failed approach’, risking an abrupt severance of funding,” he noted. Instead, he encouraged international development agencies and practitioners working on such projects to observe and learn how communities make decisions, implement plans, fail, learn, unlearn, and redo when given the freedom, space, and resources – “particularly because once donors, INGOs and grassroots NGOs leave eventually, it will be the communities who have to work alongside their government, and lead and sustain the adaptation efforts,” he reminded.

Addressing such ground-level challenges, he learnt, also demanded trust, time, and patience as investment. When residents are given ownership of funds, planning, budgeting and implementation, it may seem like a waste of resources – only when viewed from a short-term perspective. “When considered over a longer timeframe, we can observe how communities have broken away from NGO-designed development projects. They build their own assets, trade, understand their own capabilities, and reactivate their power and agency within societies. This will take five to seven years, and that is when you expect resilience, not within a year,” said Zahid.

Uttaran’s Failing Forward story is a reminder of what community-driven or people-led projects should look like in practice; not steered by NGOs or funders towards their own interests and understandings. Programmes built on collaborative governance – providing longer-term funds with a hands-off approach and interdependent partnership – are needed experiments in a sector that stubbornly continues the systematic top-down imposition of Western standards and, in the process, invisibilises other practices and reinforces societal hierarchies. If institutional frameworks such as the Logical Framework or numerical targets are the only focus, the top-down machinery will stymie the exercise of locally led adaptation plans, and continue to fail. As Zahid said, “Giving people back the governance systems is what failing forward perhaps looks like.”