Method
InnWater aims at promoting social innovation to renew multi-level and cross sector water governance, associated with economic and financial mechanisms to support EU Green Deal transition while ensuring water systems sustainability.
The methodology is based on four pillars.
Pillar 1: Improved water governance assessment framework
The first pillar of InnWater seeks to develop practical instruments to address the various governance challenges.
More specifically, the WP2 will provide water managers and practitioners with and improved governance GAP assessment tool and ready to use innovative governance practices (through an online Decision Support System) for better water, climate and biodiversity conservation, according to the existing main policy framework such as WFD, Green Deal and SDG 6. The WP2 framework, tools and best practice collection will also contribute to prioritize critical determinants for the economic modelling of pricing policies and investments (within WP4) and evaluate the paths of implementation of said practices in the pilot sites with a WEFE nexus approach.
Pillar 2: Quintuple Helix and Social engagement
The aims of this pillar 2 are to ensure all the stakeholders including citizens are embarked, and to consider the energy, food, ecosystem and health sectors next to the water’s one to develop InnWater governance solutions.
The concept of River Basin Water Forums (RBWFs), built on the concept of Quintuple Helix and where all socio-political sectors are involved in the issue of the relevant water challenges, will be further improved and enhanced by InnWater to address the issue of river basin water management.
Volunteers recruited from the beginning will work towards co-thinking on local water issues, co-creating awareness campaigns, and also being the spokepersons for their community’s views.
Pilar 3: Improved economic and financial tools design for basin authorities and utilities
The aims of this pillar are to link water resources management with economic activities, to ensure the transparency/equity of tariff systems (through modelling, dashboards and simulations), and to link with the Green Deal and environmental observations.
Several actions will be implemented.
To understand the interactions between different sectors with water resources and natural ecosystems, InnWater will adapt a sectoral Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model and the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-W) at river basin level.
A specific focus to the domestic sector will also be provided with the development of a micro-simulation (MS) model of drinking water demand. The micro-simulation model allows to measure the socio-economic performance of the various pricing policies that are implemented on a dedicated area, including the basin level
The combination of both the CGE model and the micro-simulation model will allow a real integrated planning of sectoral water uses, leading to link water management to the economic and social development of the sectors and more generally to support decision making regarding water resources, energy production (particularly renewable), by producing relevant information for both decision makers and citizens.
Pilar 4: Social innovation supporting InnWater cross-sector and multi-level governancne platform for improving water governance and policy recommendations
The aims of this pillar are to provide an integrated platform for stakeholders and citizen to learn about water governance, explore governance mechanism options and support evidence-based decision, to allow a transparent sharing of monitoring data, and to develop Online Decision Support System with catalogue of good practices a policy recommendation experienced in the 5 Pilot sites.
The transversal pillar work as a common pool of resources and support for the 3 other pillars. It is embedded in the cross-sector water and social innovation approaches.
Social innovation means tackling societal, water-related challenges by combining the technological & non-technological dimensions (governance, capacity building and economic) of innovation. It consists of new combinations (or hybrids of existing and new) products, processes and services. These four dimensions of the social innovation process cut across organizational, sectoral and disciplinary boundaries and imply new patterns of stakeholder involvement and learning fully aligned with the innovative and cross sector governance challenges.
This pillar gathers the collaboration between WP2 and WP3 in the design of the water governance platform under the co-creation environment. Under this design, visualization methods and procedures will be identified and selected in terms of policy-based procedures to aid decision-making at different scales.