Collective action

In key catchments and landscapes we work together with our partners to create collective action that fits and works.

Collective action is the fundamental mechanism for society to create water and climate resilience in catchments and manage water risks. We work with environmental NGOs, agricultural value chains, local actors like producers or administrations, global sustainable trade initiatives and standard organisations. Using our proven collective action work flow, we enable our partners to engage meaningfully in collective action.

In 2015 we started our work on collective action with WWF and EDEKA by establishing the Water Stewardship Platform the Frio and Sevilla catchments in Northern Colombia. The platform is a concrete living example of how banana, oil palm and coffee producers, local indigenous people and governmental institutions work together towards catchment resilience.

Our collective action work has continued over the past decade. Since 2016, we've been leading the Water Stewardship component of WWF and EDEKA's ZITRUS project, developing its Collective Action Programme. With the aim of scaling up the project's impact to generate positive effects at the basin level, we promote restoration activities, knowledge sharing, innovation or communication, involving different stakeholders. 

More recently, we have been in charge of the local coordination of the WRAP and IDH-SIFAV collective action programmes for water stewardship in Spain and Peru. 

Since 2022, we have been involved in the global multi-stakeholder movement around the joint paper "Unpacking Collective Action in water stewardship". We have contributed to the development of the paper and the methodology to identify the 100 priority basins with the highest level of opportunity for collective action from an economic and shared water risk perspective.

We use the logic developed in this paper in our daily work. It seeks a common language and basic principles for collective action work on water.