Collaboration Activities for Impact in Complex Water Projects

The water sector faces complex sustainability challenges – from cascading climate change effects, to enabling digital transitions, or emissions reductions – all which require collaboration across scientific and societal actors. Providing safe and sufficient water is becoming more complicated than before – and water utilities need to adapt their services and collaborate with other societal actors such as water boards, municipalities and farmers to enable collective solutions that work for all. Transdisciplinary collaboration offers an approach where these actors across disciplines and sectors can co-create knowledge to address such complex challenges.

However, do we in the water sector have all the skills, competencies and tools it takes to work in a transdisciplinary way? How can we ensure that the projects we work on are relevant, impactful and address sustainability and societal challenges? How can we effectively work across sectors to safeguard and provide sustainable water services of the future?

These are the questions I answer in my PhD research. With this blog, I aim to demonstrate how we can all build capacities for transdisciplinarity and collaboration in water sector projects. Although my research focuses on research projects, the following activities could be applied to any kind of project with multiple actors coming together across sectors to work on a common goal.

In my research, I identified a list of 12 collaboration activities[1],[2] to be applied across project phases, derived from literature and gaps noticed in practice in water sector research projects.

Water sector project leaders and partners can use these collaboration activities as guidelines from project conception to the final phases. What is important here is to also look at how each of these activities can enhance credibility, saliency, and legitimacy (see graphic below) to enable useful collaboration processes, knowledge outputs and results – ones that are deemed worthwhile by the desired end-users. The list in the figures is a highly summarized version for this brief. However, there is much more than meets they eye in terms of application and detail. For more information, have a look at the recently published paper here.

The collaboration activities listed should be used as a package, and all 12 should be reflected on from the very beginning of the project. Activities #6 and #12 are particularly important when you want to achieve societal and sustainability outcomes and should be planned from the project design phase. Activity #12 requires reflecting on what type of activities could be planned and budgeted into the project to ensure training, hand-over and capacities to absorb and use the knowledge produced in water research projects. Furthermore, selecting the right leader or co-leaders – as in activity #8 – is crucial to the success of the project. Project leaders should have capacities for collaboration and knowledge integration to effectively lead the project and ensure relationships are being built across all project actors. They should also ensure continuous reflection, discussion and transparent communication. This helps to build trust and enhance the collaborative efforts.

Although the collaboration activities are written in a specific order and across certain project phases, they can be applied in a different order as needed, repeated and overlapped – and that is kind of the point. They are guidelines, but they also need to be flexible and adapted over the course of the project in discussion with project actors – this enables the activities and the knowledge co-created to remain relevant.

Reach out to learn more and how the Innovation & Valorisation research team at KWR can help you with how to build transdisciplinary and collaboration capacities and identify and use the right tools to improve your water sector research projects!

[1] This list across the phases is loosely based on the framework of Lang et al. 2012 where they propose activities across project phases.

[2] In my paper, I use the term “boundary work activities” – boundary work consists of activities that support ‘boundary crossing’ at the intersection of different sectors or disciplines – i.e. activities that support communication, collaboration and knowledge integration across actors from different sectors.