 Welcome everybody to today's webinar. It's the quarter to 12 here in the Netherlands, so I would like to start them off. Today our webinar is called Towards Better Cities with Water and Nature and you, my learning moments during 10 years of rubbing shoulders with stakeholders. So my name is Leneke Knoof, I am from the Water Channel and this webinar is part of the webinar series IHE Delft Online Seminars for Alumni and Partners in Cooperation with the Water Channel. So a very special welcome to all IHE alumni and partners and before handing over to the speaker of today I would like to mention a few things as usual. So this is an interactive webinar and you see in the bottom right corner a chat panel. This is the place where you can type in your questions regarding the presentation. You can do that throughout the whole webinar and then after the presentation we will compile them and post them to the speaker one by one. I would also like to ask you if you can share your name, your organization, and your expertise in the chat box just to see who is inside and to have a clue who is who. And a final note on my side the recordings and the presentation will be shared afterwards at thewaterchannel.tv. So our speaker today is Dr. Assela Patirana, Associate Professor of Integrated Urban Water Cycle Management at IHE Delft and Dr. Assela is a civil engineer and hydrologist by background. I am very excited by Tupac because he's going to address something that I recognize and I'm sure many of us recognize and have experienced before. So in this webinar Dr. Assela will explain his practical experience related to stakeholders, no theory or complex diagrams but his own experience from the past 10 years that he learned on the job. Of course this is all centered around water challenges. So what are the crucial learning moments of Dr. Assela that could benefit us and other water experts when moving around in the seemingly complex water arena? So I'm happy to hand over to Dr. Assela right now to answer this question and also to discuss many more other things. Okay thank you Leanneke for that very nice introduction and greetings from Wintery Netherlands. I'm going to spend about let's say 30 minutes of your time trying to share some of my experiences dealing with this very interesting world of you know stakeholders. As Leanneke pointed out I'm not a social scientist. I'm a civil engineer to start with and then if you look at my research interest the areas I have worked on are largely in domains like modeling related to urban water cycle issues, numerical problems. So my comfort area is there. So what I'm trying to do is to open up to a different set of experiences that I have had over the let's say last 10 to 13 years that I worked at IHE in the domain of stakeholders in the water world. So let's start this discussion by asking why. Why stakeholders have become so important today? Then let's very briefly touch upon how and what. So I firmly believe that if you understand why you're for certain issue usually that gives a lot of encouragement for you to address the how and what of that eventually. So starting with why. Now into introduction you heard that my domain of work is urban water cycle. So most of my examples come from that domain. So if you look at what's happening to cities around us whether they are in Asia, Latin America, Africa or any part of the developing world what you will see is a very common phenomena of very rapid growth or explosive growth of these cities. The environment we are living in in the cities are changing extremely fast. To give an example one of my favorite case studies that is the city of Kanthar in Vietnam. If you look at this city that is on the bank of the Mekong river you clearly understand that there are several drivers that are affecting the water security of the city. Upstream flow changes downstream sea level effect and also the local changes that are happening in the city. So this is a very complex situation and as a result you can see lot of flood problems among other things are happening in the city. Now these are results of some of the modeling studies that we have done around in 2012-2013 about these cities. So we try to provide the certain prognosis about the future of the flooding problem of the city. So we come up with certain ideas and how the flood volume, the flood extent or the flood depth in the city will change in the future under different scenarios. Now when you look at this kind of picture it is very easy to get hooked on to the idea that we know what's going to happen in our future. However it's always important to remember that while it's extremely important for us to try to understand what's going to happen in the future at the same time we have to remember that there are certain things that are very difficult for us to pinpoint exactly like issues like climate change, you should like urban growth all these things compound on each other providing a very complex situation when it comes to predicting what happens in the future. Now this is a fun example that I use in certain situations to show how good we are as a species in predicting our future. This is the real data from the time of the oil crisis in the 70s. So people started making predictions using a lot of state of the art those days models about how the oil price will develop into the future. They made certain predictions and this was the reality and they made other set of predictions later this was the reality. So what you will see here is a classic example of the in spite of using a lot of sophisticated and state of the art techniques models and so on we are still unable to grasp in a deterministic way what's going to happen in the future. I'm not saying that this is a useless exercise. It is extremely useful and essential exercise but at the same time we have to remember that what we see in this kind of results is not the one reality but certain possibilities. So when we look at our water problems in cities what we see is there are certain virtual certainties that is our external forcing like climate change and internal drivers like urban road are going to increase. So this is a virtual certainty. We all know it and there's no point of arguing about it because there is a lot of solid scientific evidence that that is going to happen but at the same time we have to remember the exact nature and magnitude of those changes are far from certain. So we are in a very unenviable situation here. We have to deal with a combination of very urgent problem. I call it urban adaptation problem or you can call it climate adaptation problem if you like. It's a very urgent problem. We have to do it today but we have to do it while being highly uncertain about what exactly is going to happen. So this combination is a certain vicious combination that we have to leave it in the reality of the water problems. So how to act? I'm sure you have seen many examples where in the face of these uncertainties we just ignore the future and that is we all agree is not a responsible way to deal with this situation and sometimes what we do is we assume a non-existent predictability that is we look at one scenario about the future and we think that okay let's just take this scenario as the reality and make some concrete plans to address that scenario. So we look at the urgency but we forget the uncertainty and that's also not very responsible. But I suggest that there is an alternative. Let's talk about that. Now my proposition, again remember that I come from the urban water domain. My proposition here is that so-called green solutions that we are talking about a lot these days, nature-based solutions, green blue solutions, sustainable drainage systems, these things are suitable for addressing this wicked and complex situation of adaptation in the context of uncertainty together with urgency. So that is my proposition and let's start looking at it. I'm sure you are familiar with the contours of what green solutions are in cities and in water problems in general. In cities we use for example if you want to manage the flooding issue in the city you can use solutions like rain gardens, vegetated soils, urban wetlands, natural detention areas, these are green solutions. One of the interesting points about green solutions is that even though most of the time we develop these solutions to address a certain problem like flooding for example or natural water treatment, almost always we get variety of benefits from these solutions. So we call these multiple benefits. Now the slides I was going through while explaining this was a case study from Singapore where we use state of the art modeling techniques together with artificial intelligence and things like that to come up with very optimal and suitable designs for this kind of green solution. But what I want to talk about is not about all this modeling and artificial intelligence but I want to start with a metaphor. Now imagine that you are worried about your health in the future. Now this is a good example for an urgent but uncertain problem because we all know that we are going to get old and eventually we are going to get sick. If you are lucky when we get old if you are unlucky earlier. So that is a certainty but at the same time we don't know what exact disease that we are going to succumb to. So if I propose to you that you know you should take action against heart attacks or diabetes you know specifically you will laugh at me because that is not the way you do these things. You look at your health as an overall problem and you rather do exercise maybe manage your diet and buy your general health insurance. So this is exactly the kind of solutions that we are promoting in the green infrastructure as well because in the cities we have a lot of we have a plethora of water problems but it's okay to start pointing out a problem from the viewpoint of flooding because I belong to a group here called flood resilience group. So I talk a lot about flooding or sometimes about drought about motor resources lack of water for citizens. You can start your point of departure can be any of these points but then when we look at the problem a complex problem that is both urgent and uncertain there's no point of getting hooked into one objective only. Look at it as a whole holistic problem and try to come up with solutions that work no matter what. That is why I started with the proposition that maybe green solutions is a good point to address this unenviable situation we are in trying to manage our future in the water world. Now to come back to the issue of green infrastructure in cities you know whether you create a piece of infrastructure for managing floods or managing droughts or managing water quality at the same time you get the plethora of benefits like recreation even things like social cohesion education sometimes if you do it right that control obviously water resources so all these things come together. So what we are looking at is something like exercising against getting sick or buying a general health insurance against getting sick. We are not focusing on you know specific disease in the case of that metaphor or a particular specific problem in case of urban adaptation. So some of the examples here very quickly even urban agriculture is gaining a lot of popularity around the world. Now to go to a case study very quickly this is a case study from Latin America Montevideo Uruguay. So here what we try to do is we try to estimate all these benefits that we gain from solutions green solutions that we primarily implement to manage floods. So if you look at only the floods you can see that there is a threshold below which the investments give a positive return but after that they don't give a positive return because the flood protection alone does not justify investment more than this point. But the moment you consider all the other benefits by the way there are accepted ways of estimating these benefits and give them a financial value today. What you see is you can justify much larger investments because you consider all these benefits starting from social cohesion all the way to urban agriculture starting from urban heat mitigation all the way to flood mitigation. If you look at all these benefits then you can justify much bigger investments but the point I was trying to make in this long-winded justification is that when you look at urban green infrastructure and their multiple values what you have to understand is all those things are interconnected. Single purpose infrastructure is little bit outdated today. So whether you want to address flooding, whether you want to address water resources in cities or pollution whatever you do it's beneficial to look at what kind of other benefits can you make out of that out of that project or the activity for that it's very important to understand that the systems are interconnected. So why stakeholders? The simple answer is that if you look at multiple values of these green solutions that we propose in the modern day what you realize is these multiple values are intimately connected to a variety of stakeholders. You can build a big pipeline underground pipeline and not worry too much about stakeholders because the pipeline will be buried anyway and the connection between that pipeline and the relevant stakeholders will be will not be that strong at least after the construction of that probably. But if you look at for example urban wetland in the middle of an apartment complex imagine you can you can never probably succeed in implementing that kind of system with multiple benefits unless you understand who are the people interested in that solution because these are intimately connected with multiple stakeholders that is why stakeholders are so important in this business of urban adaptation using green infrastructure. Now sometime back we were doing some theoretical work on try to get into grips with this problem of complex problem of urban adaptation and we came up with four requirements that you need to address these issues that depict the combination of high uncertainty and high urgency like climate adaptation in cities. If you look at these four principles you can see that in two of them there's a very big prominence to stakeholders like what we use this term virtual worlds here what we mean is like things like models things like simulation models simulation games they should be understood and accepted by old stakeholders and old stakeholders and working and learning together is very important so this is where these two worlds come together. So now let's move quickly into what and how. So here I'm going to share with you some of my anecdotal experiences you know some of the learning points that I had in the last 10 years or so. We come back to the city of Kanthar you remember that from the beginning of the presentation. Now here in this city flooding happens once in few months sometimes during the flood season it's normal sometimes to have you know small floods 20 times around somewhere in the city. So one of us were highlighting this situation and saying that you know people have developed resilience to live with water so that that was our headline so to say. But later we started doing some investigations about the water quality of these flood voters and what we realize is that in this situation they are while they are living together with floods if you look at the water quality of that flood voters actually it is not a very healthy situation. So what is the relationship of this to the stakeholder story? The relationship is you know the knowledge does not come you know spontaneously first in stakeholder context you have to look around you have to look at multiple disciplines I mean earlier we were looking at the flood from the point of view of flood damage, economic damage, hydraulics and so on. But the moment we look at it from the water quality angle you start seeing a very different world there that is very important. And another example from the European city you know this beautiful park was apparently designed by a famous landscape architect and that the city officers explained to us that people do not like this park they complain that you know floods are making lot of noises why do you have this jungle in the middle of the city and so on. So then after scratching my head little bit I asked the question when did you involve this residents in the decision making process of designing this park due to some practical reasons apparently that did not happen. So it is very clear that you know stakeholder engagement should not come as a aftertort but it is very important that you involve the concerned stakeholders including the communities but not limited from the beginning of a project that is very important. Now another example from another corner of the world from Indonesia city of Sulawesi, city of Kendari in the island of Sulawesi sorry and I was doing some you know stakeholder engagement sessions so we had about this 50 group of people from all different disciplines and all walks of life including citizens but not limited government workers and different types of experts. So we were doing what we call co-designed and co-learning workshops and then I noticed that there was this lady who was not joining the tables around she was just waiting I asked her what is what is going on then she told me something very interesting that later I realized something profound that is she said that the way we work is that the city government comes with plans and then I asked the environmental NGO or environment expert I make the critique environment critique of those plans once I get the plans I do not get involved in the making of the plans so that is the way I work so that is why I am waiting for other people to come with the plan. So this this was a very interesting learning movement for me because you know sometimes you think that stakeholder collaboration the way of co-design sitting down and doing something together comes naturally but generally what I realize is the school learning needs a lot of learning by everyone but most importantly by the facilitators who are creating these co-learning experiences you have to really look at you know what the backgrounds of the people and how familiar they are with this kind of settings and sometimes do some unlearning that is sometimes our edification systems have made us to be very much tunnel vision that is we try to isolate ourselves in our own disciplines whether it is water quality whether it is wastewater whether it is flooding whether it is social science whether it is modeling we are not that comfortable sometimes opening up and trying to learn together with others so that is a one very important point so here I make this statement that you know can be little bit controversial that is I believe that we as experts we have an extra burden to make sure that what we are trying to say is conveyed well to a broad set of stakeholders and they can learn and understand so that they can contribute meaningfully so in other words everyone has a right to an opinion but if you don't facilitate learning in this context everyone's opinion might not be right so it's very important as you know as a domain expert for us to learn the way how we can make sure that stakeholders around us are aware and understand what we are talking about so that communication is extremely important this is another example of co-design workshop with it in Vietnam this is mainly addressing about the water supply problem in Ho Chi Minh city because because of climate change the you know sea level has risen and all of a sudden the salinity in the river system that is the source for the water supply has increased so the everybody was in the panic mode so we were helping the city government to think about solutions for this crisis this particular workshop was attended by a lot of local experts and local community some of the community members from the local environment and also by a number of Dutch experts from Netherlands so I was part of that group and in the beginning of this process we observed that sometimes it's very difficult for us to remove the hat of being a Dutch or being an expert of one country and try to open up and look at problems of completely a very different domain in other context so in the beginning we we saw some statements like let's look at project X in Netherlands and let's try to implement that here similar project here so that the problem will be solved but somehow towards the end of this one week exercise we realize everybody was helped to realize that that's not the way to do we can get inspiration from around the world but when it when it comes to proposing solutions we have to adhere to what I call localism one of the statements made by a director of the water company is very interesting here he told on the last day I told you would try to push that solution because he was observing what's happening but at the end you came up with very nice designs that are appropriate to the Vietnamese context so this is all of it about you know proper stakeholder engagement you need to look get into the the complex realities of a particular problem and stakeholders around you can help a great deal in achieving that insight if you all have it's a hammer everything might look like a nail but there is no single best that is applicable for everywhere in the world so that is where the stakeholders can really help you to contextualize the problem and get insights about how you can come up with the local appropriate solutions for that problem finally let's come back to the to a third time let's come back to that city in Vietnam Cantha city you know once I was talking about the boss of the climate change adaptation unit of the city and he told me a very interesting story he was referring to a certain big project that have just concluded in the city a research project funded by a developed country and what this person told me is that this project's outcome gave us the destination that is the city has this problem so city has to achieve this kind of situation in order to address that problem but we knew that he said that the problem we knew and what we the destination we have to reach we knew but what we needed was the steps to start that journey that's another very important point when you discuss about this whole business of learning together with stakeholders that is you know it's very easy for us to provide the so-called the shining city on a mountain and say that that is where we you know you should go but you know that vision alone will not inspire and provide the pathway to go there but it's equally important that you come up with incremental solutions that start with the reality that we are living in today in that particular context and then how you can come up and start going up so that you can reach a better destination in the future so vision science firing but coming up with the process is the real challenge and this is extremely important when we are dealing with stakeholders because the moment you only discuss about a vision everybody yeah will turn out because you I mean visions are not very practical when it comes to implementing things okay so finally let's summarize what we have been discussing first you know I gave my own interpretation of why stakeholder engagement is so important in the domain of water so obviously I came up with my own justification from the urban water cycle management and my own reason for that was that the problems we are dealing with are wicked complex and uncertain and urgent so in that kind of context we have to come up with flexible multiple valued solutions if we are to success in that kind of solutions we need to engage a broader spectrum of stakeholders so that was the first point I made then how and what needs to be done there first of all we have to be open for learning in order to succeed in stakeholder management and we have to empower that learning culture among our groups of stakeholders and we have to understand our problems are transdisciplinary so the solutions are also transdisciplinary and stakeholders can help us to lead into local insights about problems and incremental solutions lead to learning cycles so always promote incremental development and stakeholder engagement is about equal partnership it's not somebody providing a technical solution and trying to explain it down to the others and as experts in the work domain we have extra responsibilities because we have to make sure that other expertise is delivered in such a way that others can understand what we are talking about so that they can meaningfully contribute to address our own problems because we alone cannot provide all the local specific solutions that we need for each city and finally I mean I told you I'm a modular and I am convinced that one of the most important roles of models sometimes we call them virtual worlds models is not as an end but a means for broad learning so models can sometimes help stakeholders learn that is the reason why the main reason why we should promote models in this context of urban motorcycle adaptation so that's that's all I want to share with you today so let's see whether we have uh any questions comments or things like that thank you thank you very much dr. Asselin yes indeed we have some questions received so I will put them up right now the first one is a bit more generic so I'll put that one first Monica Saruma from Uganda asks is the such approach sustainable drainage system similar to the IWRM approach can you say something about that yes the IWRM can be looked at as a superset of sustainable drainage systems because IWRM is about uh looking at the nature base well looking at the interconnectedness of the motorcycle in the in the catchment level or urban level or at every level but the sustainable drainage systems is specifically in cities we look at these so-called green solutions how they can help uh to solve this interconnected water problem so Monica you're right because there is a very strong connection between the two terms though they are not exactly the same thing okay the next question from Brian Emmys he agrees true stakeholder engagement is key throughout the project however can the associated challenges of speculating and land acquisition be managed in countries where government does not own land so you have some experience in that or some advice well I don't have experience on that because that was not not the problem that I have dealt with in uh my limited experience but it's a very interesting question because the let's let's break your question into two parts because one one part is specific that is about this particular issue of land acquisition so and the other part is the the the generic issue that is generics complexity that is arising from you know stakeholder engagement so when the government does not own the land actually that is all the more reason sometimes you have to go out of the way in order to convince the people because this landowners are also very important part of the stakeholder spectrum there so um you know sometimes proper stakeholder engagement might help to convince landowners that you know this is a worthwhile activity to do and to to relent but at the same time it that kind of process can help other parties to understand okay where are they coming from what are their real problems so then once you understand those real problems because it becomes a rather than a negotiation it becomes a situation where you try to understand each other's positions and try to see how you can make synergy out of that kind of context now I want to expand very quickly to the other part of that question of I mean that is the stakeholder engagement aren't we inviting for trouble by trying to make it too complex sometimes the answer on the surface could be yes because you know the old-fashioned way that we especially engineers we thought that you know we we know the solutions to the problem so if we have given the freedom to to act the world will be a better place but when we encounter more and more complex solutions we slowly are realizing that whether you are an engineer or a social scientist or an environment specialist or whatever you are it's there are only there are only so many problems that you can effectively serve uh sold by only looking at your own domain and by domain I don't even limit this discussion to the circle of experts you have to go beyond sometimes because some of the knowledge learning experiences come from outside so-called traditional expertise so that is where this complexity is well worthwhile complexities you encounter by stakeholder engagement is well worthwhile because then you really understand the problem rather than wishing it away I have a few other questions and I want to put two at the same time so first of all Caroline L asks how do you deal with competing and conflicting stakes from stakeholders I think that's something we all might recognize and also what are then meaningful contributions by stakeholders I think halfway during the presentation you mentioned that but what is that actually yeah you know the again I you have to understand that I am not an expert of mediation or uh or negotiation techniques or anything like that so I'm a poor civil engineer who is wearing a different hat here but from my experience what I can tell you is this now the uh you can look at uh everybody's position from a negotiating point of view but at the same time when you try to uh get people to sit around in a in a table and to do what we call co-design that is you come up you put your knowledge on the table and then try to work together to achieve a common objective and it's very important that you understand and you agree about that common objective as well once you do those things actually what I have observed repeatedly in different contexts sometimes even I can say respective of the the culture specific cultures people open up you need a little bit of time for that sometimes you I mean I told you that this Vietnam experience we took about one week and many other stakeholder experiences were like that like they were sometimes we had workshops that you know lasted for four or five days continuously but in those processes what you notice is that the moment you uh become the moment you you know open up to the and understand each other a little bit and that happens when you start talking about talking around the table sometimes and then it becomes more of okay let's together you know try to solve this problem but then you know this is my position and this is somebody else's position and maybe related to this you say people need to open up and somebody asked in the case of Vietnam so how deep can stakeholder engagement really be in a one-party state like Vietnam so you already mentioned that during the workshop it took a week to open up but how do you think is this a sustainable way of engagement could you say something on that yeah the again I mean from my limited experience about how things worked in the vietnamese society and the vietnamese system of governance is that you know sometimes you from a as an outsider I had this mental caricature about how does this one one-party system work before I went there and before I try to understand that then you think that everything will be very monolithic but what you realize is like any other system of governance it has its own intricacies complexities and within the this monolith of so-called governance structure within that you have your own enclaves you know the half of the problem in in many situations in Vietnam was to get to the different departments in the government to talk to each other so that is not something you expect in a one-party system when you look at it from a simplistic way but once you go in and see that you know similar things to what is happening in democracies happen there as well and when you look at the social context there again I mean again it's far from somebody implementing all the rules so every everything is structured and so on because what you see is that one of the biggest problems in my domain in Vietnam is illegal settlements in cities they are not really really not slums but people try to expand their houses try to live in places where they are not supposed to live but again this is a contradiction from the you know caricature we had about this one-party system where everything is implemented it's far from it actually in that context I see Netherlands has been much more well regulated much more well regulated in terms of where people are supposed to live and not compared to compared to Vietnam so yeah even though there are limits there are certain realities that you have to adhere to depending on the system you're operating in still stakeholder engagement is very much needed but one of the one of the shortcomings that we saw in Vietnam was that the level of engagement of community organizations were less in our own particular work but most of the stakeholders were coming from different government departments and so on but that I see largely as a limitation of what I will reach rather than the absence of that kind of organization yeah that that's again my personal observation that's why I would like to hear from you and another question country specific so Monica asks what should cities in low-development countries which were planned since colonial times without putting future drainage challenges into consideration do yeah that is you know that is the classical challenge we are facing in what I term what I coined as urban adaptation in the cities because on the one hand we have this we have these two situations about future that is on the one hand there is a very huge uncertainty and at the same time we have a big urgency to act another dimension to look at these kind of situations is that what we call I might use a technical term here we call adaptation gaps and adaptation deficits if you look at the city in the global north generally even though I'm generalizing here generally the problems are largely in the domain of adaptation gaps that is how you can adapt to a future threats in the city but when you are dealing with a developing city you have significant adaptation deficits as well that means today the status quo is far from satisfactory population has grown up and our water system is struggling to cope up with this and our drainage system is struggling to cope up with cities polluted so how you can deal with that but at the same time you have to look at how you can deal with a future that is coming because you have to balance the both so it's much more complex in developing cities compared to developed cities if I may say so because of this competing situation that's even more reason to go for this incremental flexible multiple valued solutions because every dollar you spent you have to justify from the point of view of today's benefit from that I jump into another explanation that is if you look at what is a good city to live in people explain that from the terms of sustainability, resilience and sustainability is the long-term viability of the city resilience is that when you face with shocks how you can deal with that viability is that here and now how you can make the city better so what I always propose is try to connect these three together sustainability and resilience should not exist independent of viability because once you make that viability argument then what you are doing is we are providing something for the community and the stakeholders in the city that has immediate benefit so if you look at it as multifaceted multiple value solutions then you can connect that together with this you know long-term endeavors like sustainability and resilience because sustainability and resilience are not things that are very close to our heart in the day-to-day life because we worry about that later sometime but viability is very close so if you can integrate these two and you can integrate that by looking at these multiple value solutions with the proper stakeholder backdrop then yes you can you can achieve you can overcome those challenges. I think with that answer you answered another question of Mr. Prakash so what I'm doing I put up a question that can maybe give us some idea back to the whole concept that you were telling Luisa asks how can you agree on learning in a transdisciplinary and international context and how can you unlearn but it was one of your latest slides where you have put that how can we actually do that if we want to implement that yeah what I mean by unlearned there is that you know somehow we I am a product of a very traditional education system so I come from there so what we learned is that the way we learned is this divide and conquer way of learning so we divide the subject into different sub areas and then we develop our expertise in the sub areas and as we progress in our education we focus on much narrower areas as we go I mean this is very good to develop you know develop domain knowledge but what we sometimes forget in this process is that most of the problems that we are at the end trying to solve in the world are not narrow to that that domain alone so while we are improving our depth in one of the areas at the same time we have to keep on reminding ourselves that it's important to have the breadth so there are two ways of having this breadth one is that you know the obvious way that is you become little bit broader the other is the develop the transferable skills that you need to engage with experts in the other areas to engage with communities so that you can gain insights from multiple group of people so that is what I meant by unlearn unlearn is that don't get into this ivory tower of you know specialization once in a while just look around little bit and and also develop the necessary skills that are needed to deal with people who are using a different language sometimes metaphorically like you know language of water quality versus language of water water supply and flooding or sometimes literally people who speak a different language so you need skills because for example some of these workshops that I talked to you about we have to do it together with translators because we don't speak each other's languages so sometimes you have to very carefully design those things so that that mother tongue experience happens around the tables but at the same time we the people who do not speak that language can also meaningfully contribute so those are the challenges that you have to deal with. Yeah thank you very much for this answer and then seeing the time I would like to ask last question which is maybe also the most challenging but we've seen many of your examples and experience in Vietnam in Asia but now Ulukoy asks what is your advice in terms of water governance in African cities any experience there or things that you would like to share with us? Well I have done some work related to African context for example I have done several capacity building projects in topics like infrastructure asset management water supply systems and so on but based on my experience my current viewpoint is that you know when we look at these problems the context is very important because solutions are very much context specific but at the same time there are very big common nature about these problems as well whether you deal with Africa Latin America or Asia right but sometimes the the point of departure of these problems especially when you look at the water cycle issues point of departure might be different I'll give you an example from a different example that recently we were dealing we were having a collaboration very interesting collaboration between Netherlands and Australia about this domain of multiple value and urban green solutions and so on and something interesting came up that is Netherlands entered this whole foray of green issues from the viewpoint of too much water Australia came up with the same direction from the point of view of too little water but what we all agree at the end is that whether we come from the flooding point of view or from the drought point of view or the water quality point of view finally we have to look at that whole circle yeah then we have we see the commonality everywhere because wherever you are you are dealing with the whole interconnected water cycle so there is a very big commonality but at the same time I have to repeat this that is when you are looking at solutions it's very very important to look at the local context of a problem I think we leave it here I see there are still some questions coming in but we can what we will do we will upload the video and also the presentation and people can always contact us and then we can put you in contact with Dr. Assella so for now I would really like to thank you for the presentation for me personally I really enjoyed the metaphor of comparing it to health think that they gave a lot of insight and I want to thank also people at IHC Wim, Raquel and Maria over there and I can already know that the next alumni webinar and partners will be organized in the first week of May but you will be keep posted on that and for now I would like to say goodbye and the recordings can be found on the water channel later on thank you very much goodbye thank you