Top content

Research project Twin2Go

Twin2Go (Coordinating twinning partnerships towards more adaptive governance in river basins) is a research project supported as a coordination action by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (Contract No. 226571). Duration: June 2009 - September 2011.

The challenge

The Integration and new approaches to manage risks in the light of increasing uncertainties require transformation processes in institutional resource regimes and management style. Different approaches have been developed and proposed to deal with this complexity and with the ambition of ensuring a sustainable use of the resource. The failure of governance systems has been identified as being one of the most important reasons for the increased vulnerability of populations to water related disasters. Successful governance in river basin management depends on adaptive institutions that are able to cope with complexity and uncertainty and to face new challenges such as climate change.

Project objectives

Over the past years, the EU has funded several projects that undertook research on specific integrated water resources management (IWRM) issues in case studies carried out on twinned river basins from Europe and from developing countries. The aim of Twin2Go now is to review, assess, synthesize and consolidate the outcomes of these projects in order to make them transferable and applicable to other basins, and to disseminate the project results effectively to relevant authorities, stakeholders and end-users. In order to achieve this aim, Twin2Go will elaborate a methodology that allows comparative analysis and synthesis of the outcomes of the diverse projects. The consolidated outcomes will feed into best practice guidelines for the adoption and implementation of sustainable water resources management plans. All synthesis activities will involve stakeholders from the projects and basins including all relevant levels of target groups and high level decision makers in water policy. Twin2Go will focus its activities on the thematic priority ‘adaptive water governance in the context of climate change’ and cluster past and ongoing twinning projects along their target regions (Latin America, Africa, NIS, South and South East Asia).

Methodology

In order to facilitate a comparison of past and ongoing work not only in the selected projects and river basins, but also on the framework conditions (social, economic) within which these projects are performed, a methodology for comparative analysis will have to be elaborated. This methodology is intended to support the comparison between the ongoing projects and/or river basins and synthesise their lessons, which will allow opening new perspectives for water managers and stakeholders in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Such analyses support what can be called a "diagnostic" approach which develops tools to analyse problems embedded in context and supports the development of context specific solution instead of advocating simplistic panaceas. In the conceptual context, the methodological framework of Twin2Go will fall back on approaches of adaptive management, institutional development, social learning and adaptive governance.

You can find further information on the project homepage.