The Networks we need vs. the Institutions We Have: Why Collaboration in Water So Often Feels Like Competition

The Paradox of Collaboration in the Water Sector

When we in the water sector talk about “collective action,” our intent is almost always positive. The challenges we face are too large, too complex, and too systemic for any single actor — be it a company, government, NGO, or financier — to solve alone. We understand this reality well. We often repeat it. So, we say: let’s work together.

But here’s the paradox: in practice, collaboration often feels more like competition. Gatherings branded as “collective” or opportunities for “building momentum” for the community frequently become exercises in visibility. These events showcase commitment more than they advance it. Partnerships that are supposed to be “shared platforms” often morph into arenas for brand defense. The very institutions best positioned to enable networks — especially NGOs and partnerships — are frequently structured in ways that make genuine collective action difficult, if not impossible.

This isn’t due to a lack of desire to collaborate. Instead, it stems from the systems we operate within — the cultures, incentives, and business models — which are often wired to pull us in the opposite direction.

The Promise of the Web of Relationships

If we view the water sector as a web of relationships — comprising the networks of people, institutions, and flows of trust that connect them — the path to collective action becomes clearer. Healthy systems thrive when information, trust, and influence move freely across boundaries. They gain strength when brokers connect siloed clusters, when connectors amplify overlooked voices, and when translators help ideas flow across cultures and disciplines.

In these healthy webs of relationships, the most important actors aren’t always those with the biggest platforms. They are often the brokers and boundary-spanners who link otherwise disconnected groups. Real impact arises not from a single voice but from the alignment of many.

That’s the web we need if we are serious about water resilience: open, porous, aligned, and with credit shared instead of hoarded.

Institutional Incentives: Why NGOs Struggle to Play That Role

Now, let’s examine the institutions that dominate the water space — particularly global NGOs, INGOs, and the formal partnerships they anchor. Most operate on business models designed around visibility, ownership, and differentiation. Their survival hinges on these factors:

• Membership dues reward exclusivity. Success is measured by who “joins our initiative” versus someone else’s.
• Donor and foundation funding rewards attribution. Results must be branded and reported in ways that highlight the lead organization.
• Reputation and credibility are tied to being the “go-to” convenor or recognized authority in a space.

These incentives are rational but push against what webs of relationships require. Instead of fostering openness, they breed guardedness. Instead of promoting shared stewardship, they reward control. Instead of encouraging distributed credit, they demand visibility for the logo at the center.

The paradox is painful: the very institutions best placed to act as neutral brokers are structurally prevented from doing so. The organizations most capable of weaving the web of relationships are often wired to defend their own turf instead.

The Collective Action Contradiction

This creates what I’ve come to call the “collective action contradiction.” On the surface, the sector appears collaborative. Convenings multiply. Partnerships form. Press releases announce shared commitments. But beneath the surface, institutional incentives turn collaboration into a contest.

• Convenings become controlled performances, carefully stage-managed to maintain narrative control.
• Joint platforms fracture into parallel tracks, each claiming unique positioning.
• Competition for corporate sponsorships leads to fatigue, dilution, or shallow commitments.

One colleague recently termed this “uncollaborative collaboration.” I believe they’re right. The logos multiply, but the alignment does not. Independent reviews have echoed this sentiment, warning that competition within the stewardship space itself can dilute credibility and confuse the very companies collective action aims to engage.

The sharper truth is that what wins in this system isn’t what water needs, but whatever boosts an organization’s credibility, visibility, or funding — or, at times, the interests of a few tightly aligned players. The institution that markets itself best wins. The approach that water actually needs gets sidelined.

Why This Matters

This may seem like inside baseball, but the stakes are real. Fragmentation wastes scarce resources. Duplication dilutes credibility. Both corporate partners and NGOs — already stretched thin by proliferating reporting frameworks and overlapping initiatives — find themselves pulled in too many directions.

There are exceptions. The WASH sector, for instance, has made more progress than most in aligning institutions around shared outcomes. Global partnerships like Sanitation and Water for All and Agenda for Change provide practical examples of how coordination can work when incentives are clear and shared metrics are in place. However, even here, fragmentation persists at national and subnational levels. WASH efforts too often sit apart from broader water resilience agendas, treated as discrete projects rather than integral parts of basin management, stewardship, or climate adaptation. Even well-resourced WASH programs rarely influence corporate water stewardship, catchment governance, or climate strategies — missing the kind of system-level integration true water resilience demands.

Most critically, the work on the ground — the work that truly matters — rarely receives the sustained focus and resources it needs.

We observe this dynamic in practice. The OECD has repeatedly found that water outcomes suffer when governance is fragmented across scales and institutions, with coordination failures undermining implementation. An independent mapping by the British Standards Institution warned of competition within the water stewardship space itself, cautioning that new initiatives risk complicating an already crowded landscape. On the corporate side, reporting demands have exploded: in 2024 alone, CDP noted a record 75,000 companies asked to disclose, with water-specific requests more than doubling year-on-year. Basin-level case studies — from Jakarta’s Ciliwung River to Canada’s Wolastoq — illustrate how weak coordination and fragmented networks stall flood management and climate planning.

The result is a system where momentum often gets measured in glossy impact reports — the number of people “reached,” partnerships launched, or basins “touched” — rather than in the durability of outcomes. From the outside, the water community appears busy. From the inside, we know that fragmentation slows real progress — whether that’s rivers restored, water systems maintained, or communities kept healthy.

Reconciling the Network We Need with the Institutions We Have

Adding a Comparative Lens: What Collective Action Really Means

In other sectors, collective action isn’t defined as a bundle of parallel projects. It’s understood as aligning multiple actors around a shared outcome and shifting the surrounding system to make that outcome achievable. The Tamarack Institute’s work on poverty reduction exemplifies this. Their “collective impact” approach doesn’t just measure whether poverty rates fall. It asks: what upstream, downstream, and sideways conditions need to change for poverty reduction to be durable? This includes access to mental health and addiction services, child wellness, job training and placement, schools, and community supports.

We’ve seen similar approaches elsewhere. In Nashville, the Alignment Nashville initiative tackled student outcomes not by adding more after-school programs, but by aligning schools, health providers, city agencies, and nonprofits around a shared set of goals and measures. The shift wasn’t about one more “good project.” It was about redesigning the system so individual efforts added up.

Public health offers a similar lesson. In Australia, a childhood obesity initiative called GenR8 Change deliberately designed interventions across schools, food environments, and local government policy — treating obesity not as one project, but as a web of interconnected conditions. The results came not from one silver bullet, but from coordinated shifts across the system.

Water, by contrast, often takes too narrow a view of what collective action truly requires. We focus on singular but challenging goals — improving water use efficiency, protecting water quality, managing drought, reducing flood risk. Sometimes we widen the lens just one degree — upstream or downstream — to a related condition, and we invest in that “pearl” of a project as if it were a silver bullet solution.

However, even if we strung together a thousand pearls — across goals and geographies — without a systemic frame, we wouldn’t necessarily shift the river basin or watershed in any lasting way. That isn’t collective action — it’s replication.

True system change means that the conditions for progress — governance, finance, culture, and coordination — evolve alongside the projects themselves. Replication only multiplies activity, not alignment.

From Pearls to Systems: Shifting the Incentives for Network-Enabled Collective Action

So, what can we do about it?

Convenings that actually enable collective action: How we run convenings — from international conferences to local workshops — matters more than we often realize. Too many end up as panels, keynotes, and scripted roundtables that showcase institutions instead of building alignment. If we want convenings to enable collective action, we need to intentionally redesign them with three shifts:

• Clarity on who’s in the room: Identify the community members and relationships that truly need to be present, not just the usual suspects, and actively facilitate or support their participation.
• Clarity on outcomes: Be honest and thoughtful upfront about what kind of momentum is realistic, and set the room up for that, not wishful thinking.
• Facilitation for alignment: Use participatory methods — from World Café and Open Space Technology to Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search, Liberating Structures, and un-conference formats — that surface creativity, diversity, and insight from those best positioned to create or implement solutions. These approaches — used everywhere from UN dialogues to local watershed councils — have helped move groups from performance to co-creation. Research shows they don’t just feel better; they strengthen trust and the relationships that collective action depends on.

The result is fewer stage-managed performances and more spaces that genuinely build trust and a shared agenda people can work from.

We’ve witnessed this in practice. In Sweden, a series of workshops on the island of Öland demonstrated how running the dialogue differently actually shifted perspectives and helped people build strategies together. The Gates Foundation even has a playbook for this — treating convenings as a systems intervention, not just another stage show. Techniques like Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search, and the World Café have all been used globally to draw out insights that panels often overlook. Research indicates that it’s not merely a “feel-good” factor — it actually strengthens trust and the relationships collective action relies on.

Funding models: We should explore mechanisms that reward shared outcomes rather than siloed branding. Imagine if donors prioritized alignment and pooled impact instead of proprietary results. We’ve seen this work in practice — the Global Environment Facility’s International Waters program requires cross-organization collaboration under shared basin goals, and pooled funds managed by the ClimateWorks Foundation have helped align NGOs around common climate agendas.

Governance structures: We need to build partnership models that privilege openness and inclusivity rather than exclusivity. The Danube River Commission serves as a strong example — by embedding inclusive governance and joint monitoring, it moved countries from fragmentation to alignment over decades. In contrast, the Mekong River Commission’s limitations (with China outside as a non-member) illustrate how weak inclusivity undermines basin-wide cooperation.

Measuring what aligns, not what impresses: We should stop asking “who leads?” and start asking “what moves together?” Success shouldn’t be measured by workshops held, dollars raised, or logos displayed — it should reflect the degree of coherence, trust, and alignment that make outcomes possible and lasting. In climate, the Paris Agreement’s Global Stocktake was designed to assess collective progress rather than crown individual leaders. In public health, GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance) built shared metrics for immunization coverage, mobilizing billions of dollars and coordinating hundreds of partners toward a common outcome.

Making the web of relationships visible: Finally, we need tools that illuminate the web itself. At Connecting for Change, we’ve repeatedly found that once we can map brokers, blind spots, and bridges, the conversation shifts. The same holds true in development aid: USAID’s Local Systems Framework applied network mapping in places like Uganda, revealing how visualizing relationships exposed coordination gaps and reshaped donor strategies. In corporate sustainability, supply-chain network mapping — such as in palm oil traceability — has enabled alignment by making hidden brokers and blind spots visible. Visibility isn’t just analytical — it’s catalytic.

Closing: Changing the Rules of the Game

None of this shifts overnight — and there is no single “we.” Change in systems as complex as ours begins with the institutions that hold the most connective tissue — the NGOs, partnerships, and conveners positioned to bridge divides but often constrained by their own incentives. Real progress will require bold leadership, uncomfortable conversations, and a willingness to trade control for coherence.

But it also starts smaller than that.

Each of us, in our own roles, can help create the atmosphere where that change becomes possible:

• Reward alignment, not just attribution.
• Design meetings for listening, not just visibility.
• Share data, context, and credit freely.
• Treat relationships as infrastructure, not optics.

Systems shift when the people inside them do.

If we start there, our institutions — and others — will ultimately follow. That’s how collaboration stops feeling like competition and starts becoming what it was meant to be: a collective act of repair.

Endnotes

1. Werker, E., & Ahmed, F. (2008). What Do Non-Governmental Organizations Do? Journal of Economic Perspectives.
2. Alliance for Water Stewardship (2023). Membership Review Report.
3. British Standards Institution (2024). Water Stewardship Landscape Study.
4. OECD (2016). Water Governance in Cities.
5. CDP (2024). Global Disclosure Results.
6. Lassa et al. (2021). Study on governance of Ciliwung Basin flood management.
7. Research on Wolastoq / Saint John River governance networks (2024).
8. Global Environment Facility (GEF). International Waters Program – evaluation reports.
9. ClimateWorks Foundation. Pooled Philanthropy Models for Climate Action.

10. ICPDR (International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River). Governance reports and basin monitoring outcomes.

11. Mekong River Commission. Governance overview; critiques of non-member participation (esp. China).

12. UNFCCC (2015). Paris Agreement – Global Stocktake framework.

13. GAVI Alliance. Impact Reports on shared immunization coverage metrics.

14. USAID (2014). Local Systems: A Framework for Supporting Sustained Development; applied cases in Uganda.

15. WWF & partners. Palm Oil Supply Chain Mapping Reports – examples of corporate network mapping for alignment.

16. Tamarack Institute (2011–2020). Collective Impact for Poverty Reduction — frameworks and case studies on systemic shifts beyond single interventions.

17. Enqvist, J. et al. (2024). Designing for collective action: a knowledge co-production process to address water governance challenges on the island of Öland, Sweden. Sustainability Science.

18. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Convening for System-Level Impact: Designing the Convening Module. (2018).

19. Brown, J. & Isaacs, D. (2005). The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter. Also see FSG (2011), World Café Method Guide.

20. Bushe, G.R. (2013). Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

21. Weisbord, M. & Janoff, S. (2010). Future Search: Getting the Whole System in the Room for Vision, Commitment, and Action. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

22. Lipmanowicz, H. & McCandless, K. (2013). The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash a Culture of Innovation. Liberating Structures Press.

23. Ortiz-Riomalo, J.F., et al. (2023). Participatory interventions for collective action and sustainable resource management. Sustainability Science; and Ferguson, C. et al. (2023). The effect on social capital of participatory design for urban informal settlements. World Development.

24. Alignment Nashville (2013). A Case Study in Collective Impact. Available via StriveTogether and Alignment Nashville reports.

25. de Silva-Sanigorski, A.M. et al. (2010). “Reducing obesity in early childhood: results from Romp & Chomp, an Australian community-wide intervention.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 91(4), 831–840. (GenR8 Change builds on these community-wide, multi-sectoral models.)

26. Yasmin, T. et al. (2023). A system approach to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH): A systematic review of sectoral silos and systems linkages. International Journal of Water Resources Development.

27. de Wit, S. (2024). Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH): The evolution of a sector. Waterlines.

28. Kohlitz, J. et al. (2025). Making Waves: A research agenda for supporting a WASH sustainability transformations approach. Science of the Total Environment.

29. Howard, G. et al. (2021). How Tough is WASH: A framework for assessing the resilience of WASH services. Nature Sustainability.

30. “Failures of water supply and sanitation systems.” (2023). Wikipedia / World Bank open data synthesis — summary of WASH infrastructure non-functionality rates and institutional causes.