NEWAVE – Next Water Governance

The EU project NEWAVE is based on the idea that the global debate on water governance needs a reset. What is needed is to change and reformulate the principles of water governance, to take more account of the social and hydrological sciences and to involve non-academic actors with different perspectives in science-policy cooperation.

NEWAVE addresses these challenges in the form of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network for PhD students, in which a new generation of future water governance leaders is educated in research and training and equipped with necessary transdisciplinary skills.

The central conceptual framework of NEWAVE are the “three P’s”, which reflect the insight that future water governance leaders should have a deep and transdisciplinary understanding of 1) Problématiques – the nature of today’s water problems; 2) Paradigms – the ideational underpinnings of current approaches to water governance; and 3) Patterns – the ways in which newly proposed approaches interact with existing institutions.

NEWAVE offers research on all these aspects from a global perspective, an ambitious training programme to provide the necessary skills to analyse these issues in a reflexive way and formulate recommendations, and close collaboration with several of the key actors in the water governance debate.

The international and interdisciplinary NEWAVE Network will not only be active in Europe, but will additionally look at the water governance debate in a carefully selected number of emerging and developing countries.

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