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.

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.”

A year ago, the Agricultural Transition to Productive Biodiversity project, implemented by MetaMeta and GOPA, set out to explore how nature-based solutions and local participation could restore biodiversity while maintaining agricultural livelihoods.

Three MetaMeta colleagues – Arpan Mondal, Pratik Ranjan and Shubham Jain – working in Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and West Bengal described how the project is now moving beyond the pilot stage. “We are approaching the final phase,” said Mondal. “Field-level interventions are ongoing, but the focus has shifted to scaling: how can these approaches be integrated into larger programmes and institutional frameworks?”

Building evidence

The team is now actively working to move beyond the pilot phase by engaging government departments, academic institutions and civil society organisations while simultaneously building a broader evidence base through interviews, videos, field data and documentation.

Three interventions in practice

Since the beginning, the project has centred around the same three interventions: ecological rodent management, the revival of field hedges, and water-efficient rice cultivation through alternate wetting and drying (AWD). But by now, these interventions feel less like components in a project plan and more like aspects that have begun to alter everyday realities.

Rodent management: from inevitability to control

One of the clearest examples comes from ecologically-based rodent management (EBRM).

“Last year,” said Pratik Ranjan, “when we asked farmers how to reduce losses caused by rodents, the common response was that such losses were unavoidable.”

That has changed. Farmers are now more aware of the scale of the problem and of the fact that losses can actually be managed.

According to the team, rodent-related losses in the project areas were previously around 15 to 20 percent. By April 2026, losses reduced substantially, in some cases to below 5 percent where the interventions are actively being implemented. Just as important as the numbers, however, is the change in behaviour.

Farmers are increasingly taking initiatives themselves. In several villages, community members began placing additional bird perches independently after seeing the results of the intervention.

“We trained them last year,” said Pratik Ranjan. “But now when we go to the fields, we see that they know how to do it, and are implementing it on their own.”

Hedges that generate income

The same applies to the project’s work on the revival of field hedges. These hedges are planted along field boundaries using species that can serve multiple purposes, combining ecological and economic benefits. The intervention looks simple, but it required careful negotiation. Farmers first had to be convinced that the boundaries of their fields – which had previously generated little or no value – could become productive. Then came the practical question: which species should be planted?

That question turned out to be crucial. The team needed plants that would survive local agro-climatic conditions and also produce visible benefits for farmers within a reasonable time. In some places, heavy rainfall damaged young plants. In winter, cold weather posed new risks. Adjustments had to be made continuously in response to local conditions and farmer feedback. But despite these setbacks, the hedges are beginning to demonstrate income potential for farmers alongside improvements in soil health, biodiversity, and ecological pest regulation. According to the team, some farmers have earned roughly 10,000 rupees from produce grown on field boundaries, while also benefiting from improved soil quality and biodiversity.

Water management and its limits

The third intervention, AWD, was also the one that most clearly revealed the importance of contextual suitability. AWD is a method of rice cultivation in which fields are not continuously flooded. Instead, irrigation alternates with dry periods, reducing water use and often improving soil and pest conditions. In principle, it is a promising climate-resilient practice. In practice, however, it depends on local topography and water control.

That became clear when the team tried to implement it in Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh. In those areas, sloping terrain and unpredictable rainfall meant that water drained away too quickly. Farmers could not control field conditions well enough for the method to work.

“We tried a lot with the community,” explained Arpan Kumar. “We invested time, but it proved difficult to operationalise under those field conditions.”

According to the team, one of the most important lessons from the project is that such interventions depend on clearly identifiable conditions. In the case of AWD, reliable irrigation access, flatter terrain and suitable cropping systems proved essential.

Adapting to local realities

That experience became an important lesson in adaptive implementation. Rather than treating the intervention as universally applicable, the project increasingly focused on understanding which ecological and agricultural conditions were needed in order for specific practices to realistically succeed.

In West Bengal, AWD is now being piloted more successfully.

Women as changemakers

The changes the team described are not limited to techniques. They also concern social dynamics, especially around women’s roles in farming. In many of the communities involved, women already do much of the agricultural work, but they are not always recognised as decision-makers. That is beginning to shift.

Women have played a central role in adopting the interventions, often through self-help groups that already function as important local networks. The project has used these groups not simply as channels for outreach, but as spaces where women can speak more freely, discuss farming decisions and take on practical responsibilities. In some cases, women farmers decided themselves to adopt hedges, EBRM or AWD and then convinced their family members to go along with it. The team was careful not to present the project as a gender-based intervention. However, because many of the participating farmers were women, the interventions indirectly strengthened women’s visibility, technical confidence and decision-making role within local agricultural systems.

“How can we recognise women as farmers in this society?” asked Arpan Mondal. In many regions, women carry out much of the hands-on agricultural labour – from planting and weeding to harvesting and processing – while formal decision-making and land ownership often remain concentrated with men.

Scaling beyond pilots

Another recurring theme was the question of scale. According to the team, this is because the problems addressed by the project – inefficient water use, biodiversity decline and rodent-related crop losses – are not limited to a single region, but occur across large parts of India and beyond.

The team appears cautiously optimistic, but remains realistic about the complexity of institutional adoption. Government uptake requires evidence, policy alignment and coordination across multiple levels. For that reason, the project is pursuing several routes simultaneously, including partnerships with universities, local authorities and civil society organisations.

Bringing knowledge into institutions

Academic institutions have emerged as a particularly interesting route. The team has begun speaking to agricultural universities and other social institutions about including topics such as EBRM and field hedges in courses. That matters because some of the issues the project addresses – especially rodent damage – are still not discussed enough in formal agricultural education.

“People are not talking about these things,” said Shubham Jain. “So how can we add them to courses?”

Transferability and broader relevance

This effort to embed the work in training and policy reflects a broader confidence that the interventions are transferable. EBRM, for instance, is relevant far beyond the current project areas, since rodent losses are a national issue. The team also pointed out that elements of the project resonate with initiatives in other countries. Hedges are already part of discussions elsewhere, sometimes with different goals such as carbon sequestration or biodiversity. EBRM-related work has appeared in countries such as Vietnam, Lebanon and Ethiopia. AWD, too, may be applicable in other contexts where rice production and water scarcity intersect.

Lessons beyond India

In India, the interventions are tied closely to livelihoods and smallholder survival. In Europe, similar practices might be adopted more explicitly in the context of climate goals, green transitions or food security. The local purpose may change, but the ecological principles remain similar. According to the team, the interventions rely on identifiable conditions – such as water availability, land structure or existing farming systems – that can help determine where particular approaches are most likely to succeed.

Personal takeaways

One of the moments that really stayed with the team came when farmers began continuing interventions independently. In one case, women farmers in Jharkhand organised rodent management activities themselves after noticing rodents returning to the fields – without waiting for instructions from the project team.

“It was very rewarding to see,” Meghna Mukherjee, Programme Manager at MetaMeta Research, reflected. “At that point it stopped feeling like something external being introduced to communities. People had started taking ownership themselves.”

Other lessons emerged more gradually. In communities where household incomes can remain very modest, even relatively small gains from hedges or reduced crop losses proved meaningful for families. And for the team working on AWD, the experience in Madhya Pradesh clarified that success depended less on the idea itself than on whether local conditions – such as irrigation access and cropping patterns – actually allowed the intervention to work.

Looking ahead

Taken together, their reflections suggest a project that has become more grounded as it has progressed. What began as a biodiversity initiative now appears equally concerned with trust, adaptation and recognition.

The project may be nearing its formal conclusion. But if the field teams are right, its most important phase may just be beginning: the gradual transition from isolated field interventions towards a broader systemic change in how agriculture, biodiversity and rural livelihoods are understood and managed. At the same time, the project is generating practical knowledge about the conditions under which biodiversity-based interventions can be replicated elsewhere.

In the Humans of Partners for Water series, we showcase the people who are involved in our projects. The series sheds light on the stories of people who work with and for Partners for Water and how water affects their lives. Discover how Falahy Mohamad’s passion for sustainable batik is motivating him to protect Indonesia’s waterways for future generations.

Meet Falahy Mohamad

Falahy Mohamad is a sustainable batik artist from Indonesia. Through his craft, he is reimagining how one of Indonesia’s most beloved cultural traditions can be practised with care for the environment and for future generations.

Every drop counts

Batik production depends heavily on water and in some cities, the consequences of untreated wastewater are visible in rivers that run black for months at a time. For Falahy, this reality is personal. Witnessing the steady decline of groundwater levels and seeing floodwaters creep into urban streets has heightened his sense of responsibility, both as a craftsman and as a citizen.

“The water we use every day feels very different when you see the significant decline in groundwater and witness tidal flooding in corners of the city. It raises concerns about what the next five or ten years will look like. That drives me to be much wiser in how I use water and more responsible – so that we do not pass this crisis on to the next generation.”

Dutch-Indonesian water cooperation

Indonesia is one of seven delta countries in the Partners for Water programme 2022–2027. With support from Partners for Water, Dutch and Indonesian partners are testing community-led wastewater treatment solutions for the batik sector through the Green Batik Pekalongan pilot – turning rivers from black to clear and helping an age-old craft find a sustainable future. Read more about the project here.

In this Failing Forward? episode, Cristal Ange, General Director of Fundación Herencia Ambiental Caribe (Caribbean Environmental Heritage Foundation), reflects on how her understanding of community participation evolved from routine meetings to something far more personal for those participating. Drawing on a jaguar conservation project in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, she challenges how scientists, development practitioners and funders define participation, and how ‘what looks like success’ may, on closer inspection, be something else entirely.

In 2008, the National Parks System of Colombia approached Fundación Herencia Ambiental Caribe (Caribbean Environmental Heritage Foundation) to help them assess the jaguar population and plan conservation efforts in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a coastal mountain range in northern Colombia. Jaguars are a good indicator of a healthy ecosystem, as the wild cats favour dense forest, river, and wetland habitats, keeping a check on prey species and maintaining the ecosystem balance. When local communities are involved in jaguar conservation, it essentially helps protect the forests and waterways they rely on. Accordingly, the project engaged local communities and the indigenous group, the Arhuaco, to understand the jaguars’ path in the coastal mountains.

“It was an open and participatory project, where the Arhuaco people would gather scientific evidence about jaguar movement and their path. We travelled to different villages, organised meetings with the indigenous residents, and showed portraits of jaguars to enquire how they referred to jaguars and the sites where they were spotted,” recounted biopsychologist Cristal Ange, the General Director of the foundation, which focuses on sustainable water management and biodiversity protection by partnering with indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant communities in Colombia.

Beyond gleaning information, the team trained the indigenous people to use camera traps and the methodologies to learn about jaguars and their trails. They also organised capacity workshops to help the indigenous people understand what they were doing, and how that information would be used.

After a year, the team closed the first phase of the project. “We found the jaguar sites, as well as collected pictures and magical stories to share with the world. We also understood how to cooperate with local communities. It was a success,” Cristal remarked.

“Or, was it really successful?”, she quickly paused to consider.

Cristal attributed her reservations about calling the project a success to the consultative and technocratic approach to community participation the team had adopted throughout. “We were too focused on what the science told us, and not enough on ancestral knowledge and ways of understanding the territory held by the communities,” she acknowledged.

Displacing knowledge pluralism

In the post-war era, community participation was adopted as an essential ‘tool’ for development projects in the Global South; as an antidote to the repeated failure to meet the project objectives and outcome; and to counter the traditional top-down strategies that failed to include the people’s voices.

Community participation became a precondition to funding. Projects designed participation approaches around scientific and technical knowledge frameworks, donor mandates, and a pre-determined set of criteria, while (paradoxically) expecting new knowledge to emerge from this renewed focus. And while the project runs, residents support it, attend meetings, and some may temporarily find a job. They are trained and armed with Western and Eurocentric rules and guidelines to approach the very territories they inhabit and interact with every day. The project led by Ange’s foundation to scientifically establish the jaguar path is one such case.

Sample this: An indigenous community member, familiar with jaguar territory and movement in Sierra Nevada, had predicted the animal’s presence before placing the camera traps provided by the team. He knew, without checking, that his camera had captured jaguars. The request for photographic evidence to trace the jaguar’s path sparked his curiosity, as it pointed toward forms of data and ecological information that extended beyond the traditional understanding of jaguar movements.

“Yet, our attention remained centred on the project’s technical requirements and the funders’ interest in ecological data about the species, rather than on the broader ancestral knowledge that had informed his observations,” she recounted

This serves as a powerful empirical illustration of unintentionally reducing the participant to a data collector instead of a knowledge holder. “Traditional Western means of participation incorporate people into how we, as scientists, think jaguars should be conserved. But what do we know about what is the right way for them?” Cristal reflected.

In its noblest vision, community participation is designed to promote dialogue, interaction, learning, and co-production of knowledge between development agents and the community members. In practice, though, community members are often consulted after the project is designed; they are excluded in the implementation, monitoring and evaluation stages; or are approached to resolve a particular information problem to achieve the predetermined project goal.

As a result, community participation has often unfolded within institutional and scientific frameworks, which open important spaces for collaboration between researchers and local knowledge holders, but at the same time, continue to be shaped largely by Western approaches to how knowledge should be validated, interpreted and incorporated into development projects. It systematically devalues and displaces indigenous people from their own everyday reality or their ways of knowing. Such approaches have reinforced themselves as a tool to legitimise Western, neocolonial projects rather than a veritable power-sharing and knowledge co-production procedure.

Paying attention to this contradiction entails self-reflection: did ‘new knowledge’ eventually emerge? Was ‘power’ distributed unidirectionally? Did it eventually devolve into the very ‘subject-object relation’ that community participation set out to eliminate?

Understanding the ‘other’ knowledge

Cristal and her team shifted their base closer to Santa Marta to spend a considerable time going into the jaguar territories with the tribal elders — not to organise workshops, but to sit down with the people, observe their daily activities, and understand their reality, rituals and knowledge, with humility. Now into the second phase of the jaguar conservation project, the team focuses on what matters most to the indigenous people: conserving the jaguar’s spiritual energy, which they believe is a living force, embodied in natural elements, such as a rock or sacred sites. “There is no scientific explanation, but it is the elders’ way of knowing,” Cristal challenged.

Their guiding principle: “If we want to conserve jaguars, how can people support science, and also how can we, as scientists, development practitioners and funders, support and learn about the local ways of conserving the animals.”

A rock identified during the project, for instance, illustrated this difference in perspectives. From an ecological standpoint, the site did not play a measurable role in jaguar conservation. Yet for the indigenous communities, conserving the rock was essential. It was understood as a sacred jaguar site where the animal’s spiritual energy resides and the broader balance of the territory is maintained. The project thus began to recognise that conservation is not only about protecting habitats and species populations, but also about sustaining the cultural and spiritual relationships that shape how communities coexist with the jaguar. “Our goal was not merely to acknowledge indigenous practices, but to validate their knowledge and embed it at the heart of the project,” she emphasised.

Success for whom?

Understanding failures entails a growing self-awareness of how practitioners and scientists can mistake failures for success. In the traditional methods of implementing development projects, participation includes organising workshops, capacity strengthening sessions, and handing down scientific ways of knowing and working with the local community. The latter’s ‘contract’ as participants often ends at this stage, with no active role in the evaluation and monitoring phases of the project cycle. When zooming in on this aspect, the project is a success – but for whom?

To the donors, scientists, and the NGO, the project was a success. When considering the project more holistically — including whether participation translated into changes that mattered in the daily realities of the community — the project may also reveal important limitations in what it was ultimately able to achieve for the people involved.

For such a feedback system to be practical and functional, one needs to go back to the drawing board to assess whether the project makes sense to the local community or the participants. As Cristal, too, reflects, if a project cannot explain how it ties into the people’s local persuasions, it will not work in the long run.  It may continue to operate and generate scientific data considered relevant for institutional and conservation decision-making, but if that knowledge does not also resonate with the priorities, relationships, and ways of deciding within the local communities themselves, its impact may remain limited once the funding cycle ends.

Another sticking point of projects that work in indigenous territories and with their people is funding. Supporting both ways of knowing demands a budget for what funders think should be done, but also for local ways of doing things. However, funding with the correct attitude towards local knowledge and beliefs, too, is critical. “A rock, for instance, may not have added to the ecological value of the jaguar corridor, but it added to the personal value of the project,” she challenged the rampant compartmentalisation among development agencies of what counts and does not count as knowledge.

For Cristal, the project’s most important lesson was not that science had failed, but that scientific frameworks alone were insufficient to understand the full complexity of coexistence in the territory. Being honest about those limitations opened the possibility of recognising other forms of knowledge that had long sustained relationships between people, jaguars, and the forest. In many ways, these approaches were already working on the ground — not necessarily through scientific indicators, but through rituals, practices, and sacred sites that had enabled coexistence across generations. The question is no longer whether these other ways of knowing exist or matter, but whether conservation institutions and funders are willing to invest in them on their own terms.

As the conversation drew to a close, she considered how people’s participation in knowledge co-production ought to be: “Development projects are not only important for the Western academic sector or NGOs. It belongs equally to the people. They may not engage with the project through the same technical or scientific frameworks in which the plan is designed, but they understand its importance and how it complements their own ways of understanding and relating to the territory.”