David Feldman, director of Water UCI and emeritus professor of urban planning and public policy. Photo by Steve Zylius
Water UCI director’s reflections on UN-sponsored conference
In late May, I traveled to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to participate in the 4th High-Level International Conference on the International Decade for Action "Water for Sustainable Development" — a UN-sponsored gathering that drew some 2,000 delegates from 110 countries. I was there in my capacity as adjunct faculty in Transboundary Water Cooperation and Policy for the United Nations University's Institute for Water, Environment, and Health (UNU-INWEH). What I witnessed and heard over those days left me with a set of impressions I haven't been able to shake.
Let me start with some context. In 2016, the UN General Assembly proclaimed 2018–2028 the International Decade for Action on water — a sustained push to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for everyone by 2030, known in UN circles as Sustainable Development Goal 6. Biennial summits like the one in Dushanbe exist to take stock of where we are, what's working, and what isn't. By that measure, this was a meeting that balanced genuine momentum with hard, uncomfortable truths.
Before the main conference began, I helped lead a pre-conference workshop titled “Promoting Collaboration over Shared Waters,” organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Swiss-funded Blue Peace Central Asia project, and UNU-INWEH. Its focus was the contributions of women water professionals to high-level decision-making — a topic I'll return to. The 25 junior-ranking officials from water and environmental agencies across Central Asia who participated were tasked with generating concrete policy recommendations for implementation by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
My contribution on the first day was a presentation on confidence-building for transboundary water negotiations. The core challenge is familiar to anyone who studies shared water resources: countries are often reluctant to share data on water availability and use; governance institutions for jointly managing water agreements are weak or absent; and accurate information about what's happening in common river basins is hard to come by. Against that backdrop, I walked participants through methods that have actually worked — river basin and groundwater compacts, joint monitoring systems, agreements to share supply innovations — drawing on examples from the Mekong, Indus, Nile, Colorado, Tigris-Euphrates, and elsewhere. I also discussed role-playing exercises to demonstrate how confidence-building techniques can be taught and practiced before they're needed at the negotiating table.
On the third day, I reviewed and offered suggestions for the policy recommendations participants had drafted. In final form, those recommendations were shared with the full conference at its closing session, chaired by the UN's Under Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs. It was a small but meaningful moment — junior officials from across Central Asia putting their ideas directly in front of the people responsible for acting on them.
At the main conference, I served as a panelist on a session about resilient food systems in an era of global water scarcity — a session that drew more than 200 attendees. I was asked to discuss instructive success stories in water-smart food cooperation across national borders. I chose two.
The first was the work of the Arava Institute, which has built collaborative partnerships among scientists and university students from Israel, Jordan, and Palestine to develop small-scale solar-powered water distillation systems and other innovations for growing vegetables in highly arid conditions. The second was a UN and Republic of Korea-funded initiative introducing water-saving irrigation technologies in the Mekong River basin. What struck me about both examples — and what I emphasized to the panel — is that their success was driven largely by academics, entrepreneurs, and civil society groups, with minimal dependence on governments.
That is worth sitting with.
The networking that surrounds events like these is often where the real exchange happens. A reception sponsored by Women in Water Diplomacy — an initiative grounded in the recognition that women bear enormous responsibility for water provision in the developing world yet remain severely underrepresented in decisions about it — gave me the opportunity to meet delegates from across the globe as well as officials from the Swiss Consular Office and OSCE. Through a series of small-group meetings hosted by the UN University director, I had the privilege of speaking with, among others, the Deputy Head of the UN Regional Center for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia, the Director of the World Food Programme in Tajikistan, the Head of Brazil's Environmental Policy Division, the Head of South Africa's water ministry, and Samoa's ambassador to the United Nations.
Those conversations left me with a few lasting impressions.
One is financial. Delegates across the board expressed deep preoccupation with the challenge of securing stable, long-term financing for water initiatives. No matter how sound the science or how strong the political will, programs cannot be sustained without dependable resources — and that remains an unsolved problem at nearly every level.
A second impression is structural. There was widespread frustration with what many perceived as duplication of effort across UN agencies and NGOs, and a sense that too many water-related activities proceed in isolation rather than as part of a coordinated, tightly-focused strategy. The machinery of international water governance, in other words, does not always work together harmoniously.
But perhaps the most enduring lesson I took home is a human one. In countless conversations with officials from vastly different countries and contexts, a consistent theme emerged: that the development of personal relationships is essential for reaching practical agreement. The principles scholars often emphasize — clarity, honesty, transparency — matter enormously, but they are not sufficient on their own. It is one-on-one, face-to-face engagement that builds the trust and mutual respect that, over time, makes cooperation possible. That is not a new insight, but seeing it confirmed again and again by people working on the front lines of water diplomacy is a reminder that no amount of institutional design fully substitutes for human connection.
Large, multi-national conferences like the one in Dushanbe are sometimes dismissed as unwieldy or inefficient. And they can be. But they also serve a function that is difficult to replicate elsewhere: they create space for candid exchanges, divergent assessments of progress, and the public airing of deeply-held policy positions in an environment where those positions can actually reach decision-makers. For scholars like me, they offer something rarer still — a genuine avenue to have our observations heard by the people responsible for acting on them.
That influence may be modest. It may be slow. But in a world facing a water crisis of growing severity, I am convinced it matters.