NARBO secretariat (the Japan Water Agency) attended the 14th Water Governance Initiative (WGI) Meeting held by OECD on 2nd and 3rd November, 2020.
The objectives of the 14th WGI Meeting
- Peer review of the ongoing policy dialogues in Africa and Asia
- Discussions on WGI contribution to the 9th World Water Forum
- Advancement of WGI working groups on Capacity Development and Indicators
NARBO (JWA) gave a presentation in “Water Governance in Asia” session to comment for the draft report of OECD/ADB survey on water governance in Asia.
Comments from NARBO (JWA)
- The report describes the characteristics of Asia, and contains useful tips for policy making.
- However, the report should touch upon more on floods. “Applying the OECD Principles on Water Governance to Floods” (2019), which clearly mentions the relevance between WGI principles and the flood, and “Yangon Declaration", adopted at 3rd APWS, should be referred to more for this report. By doing so, the people in Asia will become familiar with it.
- Typhoon No.16 (Hagibis) in 2019 caused the paradigm shift in Japan, leading to more importance of the assessment of each river basin due to different environmental characteristics. This would be a case study for better water governance.
Besides, during the meeting, there was a questioner asking whether each country treated the water issue as a part of COVID-19 problems or not, and 67％ of participants answered “Yes”.
