BRIDGE
Launched in 2011, and currently in its fifth phase, the Building River Dialogue and Governance (BRIDGE) initiative initiative aims to build water governance capacities through learning, demonstration, leadership, and consensus-building, in transboundary river basins.
Financed by the Water Diplomacy Programme of the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), IUCN, with partners, have over the past decade implemented transboundary river governance and dialogue through BRIDGE in over twenty river and lake basins worldwide.
This phase of BRIDGE (2022 – 2026) will consolidate knowledge and expertise from previous phases to mobilise key ongoing negotiation processes where IUCN acts as a dialogue broker to foster multi-scale transboundary agreements and strengthen institutions.
Outcomes
In over a decade of implementation, BRIDGE has gone from being active in nine transboundary basins to facilitating activities in over twenty river and lake basins worldwide. Building on the successes, challenges faced and lessons learned from the previous phases of the initiative, BRIDGE is working at multiple levels, from local, basin, national, regional and global level to support all water users, through effective institutions, to enable sustainable management of water resources and contribute to long-term, security and blue peace.
The successes of the past decade would not have been possible without the networks and collaborations established at all levels, from River and Lake Basin Organisations, Water User Associations, local authorities and municipalities, national authorities, regional economic commissions and international actors.
Sharing the benefits from river basin management
Through the BRIDGE programme, IUCN has been working towards promoting benefit sharing in river basins for over ten years.
The concept of benefit sharing represents an alternative approach to the conventional way of negotiation. Operationalising benefit sharing goes beyond negotiating water volumes allocated to different needs. It opens up dialogue to appreciate the range of benefits available in a river basin and how these can be distributed and shared amongst stakeholders.
To help make the concept of benefit sharing for river basin management more practical, IUCN developed a practitioner’s guide with six steps which function as a roadmap and can be applied in basins at different stages of development. This guide is meant to build capacity of stakeholders on benefit sharing in river basin management.
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