by Lyla Mehta and Alan Nicol

The UN 2023 Water Conference took place in New York on 22-24 March, 46 years after the last UN water conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina. The 1977 conference led directly to the UN water decade of the 1980s with an avowed aim of achieving 'water for all'. Perhaps overly ambitious, given the ensuing global crises, decades later some two billion people still live without safe drinking water and 3.6 billion lack safely managed sanitation. Added to which only 56% of domestic wastewater is safely treated.

Much has changed in the intervening years. Sanitation was barely on the agenda in the 1970s and most of the focus was on rural water supply, not urban water or wastewater challenges. The urgency of climate change and water's central role in extreme weather events such as droughts and floods are only now gaining major attention.

The New Delhi statement of 1990 scaled down the ambition to 'Some for All Rather than More for Some', but even that was rapidly overtaken by the Dublin Principles, positing water as an 'economic good', and the push for water supply pricing, marketisation and privatisation. By 2010 water (and sanitation) had finally achieved status as basic human rights though these rights remain paper only for millions of rural and urban poor. And there are precious few means of holding powerful global, state and private actors to account for daily exclusions from water and sanitation on the basis of gender, caste, class, race and ethnicity.

Given this nearly half a century of systemic failure to collectively address global development goals, huge expectations were placed on this 'historic' UN conference. Attended by some 7,000 delegates from governments, NGOs, academia, multilateral agencies and the private sector from all over the world, plenaries, side events and major statements in the General Assembly covered a range of topics linking water and sanitation to health, food, nutrition, energy and climate change.

Yet, the key feature of the conference remained simply a call for voluntary commitments to a new Water Action Agenda. And the meeting generated more than 700 pledges in a true show of clear, but fragmented, commitment. What remains unclear now is essentially how and who will lead on this massive collective action problem. In three short days (after nearly 50 years of waiting) and driven only by two countries (the Netherlands and Tajikistan), New York lacked political clout. And, in stark contrast to annual meetings convened by key UN agencies such as the COP and the World Committee for Food Security, there was no direct call for a new architecture of engagement by all key water sector agencies, supported by the UN, which still lacks a strong water champion.

But the conference did succeed in creating a moment of energy and a spark of unity across the world of water (even for a week) including highlighting water's centrality in ensuring nutrition, food and livelihood security as well as ecosystem integrity and climate resilience. The challenge of having waited 46 years is that the conference still did not establish a new process given the urgency warranted by water as the 'teeth of the climate shark'. Concluding with a declaration of water as a global common good, a recommendation to create a new UN envoy for water (whose mandate was not made clear), and to hold more regular UN meetings and constitute a new scientific panel on water, much remains to be done and pales into comparison with the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate or a legally binding international convention on biodiversity.

An open letter signed by more than 100 representatives from global civil society, water users and researchers urged the Secretary General to push for greater accountability, rigour, ambition and binding agreements to address both climate-induced disruption to water systems and realise human rights to water and sanitation for all.

While there were many sessions on sanitation, including needed linkages between sanitation, wastewater and climate change, the emphasis remained on water, even in official statements. The huge emphasis on the need for the private sector to solve the issue of water security and the notable inclusion of big corporations and the World Economic Forum in most of the official panels was also misplaced in our opinion, given the strong need for public financing especially to reach the poorest, and the huge past lapses on the part of some private actors in violating poor people's basic rights to water. While there were calls for gender justice, inclusion of youth and indigenous peoples, many official sessions, including the opening, were dominated by the usual suspects, including white men.

But it was great to finally attend a global water conference at the UN rather than water weeks and fora elsewhere that require payment and are invariably more pedestrian. The best discussions took place in side events co-organised by governments, NGOs, donors and researcher with forward-looking agendas: how to realise SDG 6 for Palestine in the context of Israeli occupation; joining up action on water, nutrition and food and exploring a human right to water for food security and nutrition; how to construct a feminist water agenda that tackles the politics of water and intersectional justice; building in indigenous knowledge and peoples; and the importance of youth engagement, including from Sudan, with calls to hold up truth to power and really tackle structural barriers to change.

A global water report – Turning the Tide - from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water received a lot of attention with an explicit call for global collective action and treating water as a global common good. However, we need to question how far economics can drive effective collective action given embedded social challenges and complicated incentives across multiple sectors. Ultimately, political leadership has to make choices and be partisan to advance the interests of the marginalised. Also, further apocalyptic framings around water shortages, climate disruption and the global water cycle may divert attention from the thornier issues that Water Alternatives readers will be familiar with, namely power, politics, lack of accountability, transparency, public finance, fragmented governance systems and policies that fail to address the needs and concerns of the most marginalised and poorest people. Also, while it sounds sexy to view water as a global common good, isn't water management largely a local or regional issue?


Ultimately, the conference brought visibility to the urgent need to safeguard water systems so crucial for biodiversity and climate adaptation and long-wave water and sanitation injustices. But until we end the daily cycle of slow and structural violence against the poorest people on the planet as they struggle with little or no safe water and sanitation, and precarious water supplies for food security amidst climate disruption, we may have achieved little more than those other participants nearly half a century ago.


Lyla Mehta is Professor at the Institute of Development Studies and Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

Alan Nicol is Strategic Program Director, Water, Growth and Inclusion International water Management Institute.