ISEAL Alliance

Interview by Michelle Doust, ISEAL's Communications Coordinator.

The Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS), an ISEAL Associate Member, is in the early stages of developing a water stewardship programme to recognise and reward sustainable water use and management. The programme will be based on an international water stewardship standard (IWSS), currently under development. As part of this standard development process, AWS recently undertook a pilot project around Lake Naivasha in Kenya, testing regional standards from Europe and Australia to look at how a water stewardship standard could work in a developing country. The learning from the project, which will feed into the development of the IWSS, is shared in a new report called Exploring the Value of Water Stewardship Standards in Africa which was launched on 24 August at the Stockholm World Water Week.

Here, we speak to Adrian Sym, AWS’s new Executive Director, to find out what attracted him to the world of water stewardship and to discuss what’s next for AWS.

Congratulations on your new appointment as Executive Director for AWS. What attracted you to the role and what will be your main priorities going forward?

Thanks. The main thing that attracted me to AWS is that better water stewardship is so obviously a good and needed thing. I am a big fan of using collective action to deal with big issues. I wasn’t aware, and indeed I am still not fully aware, of the range of tools and services that exist to improve the management of fresh water, but the idea of a collective approach to deal with shared risks for a public good has a lot of appeal.

The main priorities for AWS are to simultaneously build a standard and verification program; the additional tools and services that will help us to achieve the broad-ranging impact we aim for; and the organisational capacities necessary to successfully manage these programmes.

You recently attended the Stockholm World Water Week - what were the main themes of this year’s event and what were you able to take away from it?

The aim of World Water Week is to bring together experts and decision-makers from around the globe to find solutions to pressing water issues and the theme of this year’s event was “Responding to global changes: water in an urbanising world.” As such, the focus was very much on the urban aspects of water management. However, our session was one of, I believe, many that didn’t focus exclusively on the urban perspective.

In terms of what we gained from the event, we took away a lot of encouragement that AWS is on the right track when it comes to developing our water stewardship programme in general and the international water stewardship standard in particular.

For me personally, and being new to the world of water stewardship, I learned a huge amount which is really helping to shape my thinking on AWS’s future. Hearing about the experiences of others in the sector, such as how companies are measuring their water use was particularly interesting. For instance, a large beer company reported that “99%” of their water use was in their supply chains rather than in direct production. The importance of managing water use along the supply chain was echoed by many and is something that will be fed into the development of our programme.

AWS held a session on water disclosure at the event – how did that go and who attended?

The session was delivered jointly with the CEO Water Mandate and the audience was very diverse. The majority of attendees were from the private sector with many CEO Water Mandate endorsing companies present. But there were also representatives from the public sector, NGOs and international organisations.

One of the things I was very keen to stress at our session is the need for all of our programmes to be grounded on the principle of continuous improvement. This also came out strongly from those presenting on the Mandate’s guidelines on corporate water disclosure. Incorporating this principle also helps us to achieve more convergence between the many, potentially complementary but also potentially duplicating, tools under development. We are at a stage when there is a lot going on and it is quite a confusing landscape, but over time things will get shaken down to a more manageable level and it will be clearer which tools are effective for which circumstances. It’s important for all of us in the sector to be willing to work together to accelerate this process of refinement or innovation. At AWS we feel we can play an important role in this process as a stewardship approach touches on many aspects, from awareness-raising and measuring or accounting, right through to appropriate responses and verification of claims.

Were there any key messages that came out of the session?

For me, the most important outcome was the message that I can take to our International Standards Development Committee (ISDC), the group of international stakeholders tasked with overseeing the development of the international standard, that will inform the next phases of development. Some of the key points that this message will contain are:

• The importance of meaningful local engagement. We often deal with large national or international agencies but the impacts of water use are felt very much at a local level. We need to ensure that our programmes bring tangible benefits for local communities and do not only serve, and are not perceived only to be serving, the needs of large corporations. 
• Convergence and alignment of the various tools and services under development. It is important that we develop strong and effective partnerships at multiple levels. As well as working with existing water programmes I am also keen that AWS plays a role within the ISEAL community to promote convergence of approaches to water use and management across ISEAL’s members.
• Transparency and Credibility. Transparency in decision-making helps to build credibility and work like ours can only succeed if it is seen to be credible.

Your new report on the pilot work you undertook around Lake Naivasha in Kenya was launched at World Water Week - how was it received and are there any other pilot projects planned?

Launching the report at World Water Week was an obvious choice and it was very well received in Stockholm. We are lucky to have the experiences of pilot testing in both Australia and Europe to learn from. The project in Kenya was the first level of testing AWS has done and we learned a lot from it. The next step will be to test our own draft international standard which we aim to do so in all of the eight “ISDC regions”. This is an exciting period and we look forward to building and strengthening relationships in all regions. To give you a flavour of the strength of interest, we will hold five sub-regional workshops in Latin America and the Caribbean this year as well as a “Regional Forum” to map out the progress so far and identify the next steps in these regions. North America now has an established regional initiative with a very impressive coordinating committee and strong support base and, following on from the Naivasha project, there is a lot of interest to test the draft international standard in Africa. Workshops have also been held in South Asia and China, and I will be visiting China and the Middle East soon to scope out how to proceed in those regions. Ultimately, our success will depend on successful collaboration at a regional level.

About Adrian

Born and raised in Scotland, Adrian has spent most of his working life internationally and has spent the last ten years in the development sector where he has primarily focussed on relationship management and organisational development. Before moving to the development sector, Adrian ran a successful business in Germany making and selling custom made golf equipment.

Adrian joined AWS on 1 July 2011 from Fairtrade International where he led Fairtrade’s partnerships programme, building and consolidating relationships with the key actors in international development including development finance institutions, UN agencies, funding organizations, NGOs and technical service providers. Prior to working in Fairtrade, Adrian worked for seven years in disability-focused organisations in Bangladesh and Nepal.

Adrian is based in Bonn, Germany, where he lives with his wife Natasha and daughter Delta.