Learning from city experiences

As part of a research initiative promoting more sustainable urban water management, the SWITCH project has invested in developing learning alliances in its pilot cities. These alliances have brought together researchers, implementers, policy makers and other key stakeholders with a focus on promoting collaboration towards change, and especially on putting research into use.

The learning alliances are all about creating new or better innovation systems and building bridges between actors that often work ineffectively in their own ‘corners’ of the sector. The underlying premise in SWITCH was that a fundamental change in the way these actors work and collaborate would be necessary in order to start the kind of system change that is required for integrated urban water management.

Over the past years, guidelines were developed for facilitating the learning alliances. In addition, the practical experiences and results in cities are being documented. In 2010, the final year of the project city teams and international partners are documenting the SWITCH processes in 10 cities and will identify and synthesize the lessons learned.

To access the papers, briefing notes and reports, visit: SWITCH website