 Hello and welcome participants from all around the world to the session as part of the IHE capacity development symposium and we are now flying, we wish, to India and to be with Dr. Veena Srinivasan who is the director of the Center for Social and Environmental Innovation or ATRI and in Bengaluru, India and she is going to share with us lessons about capacity development in the water sector specifically to one of the big river basins of India. 70% I think of the river waters in India are shared between states and that's an area where it's work in progress how to do that better and her case will be about that. Now sharing water and the capacity development issues that Dr. Veena will be sharing with us I'm sure will resonate with you in some way for the issues and challenges that you are facing in your country so it could also be about the shared river or it could be about other divides that we observe and that we would like to bridge during this symposium and learn how to do that better. So before we are going to listen to Dr. Veena's keynote presentation I'm going to ask Anna, our tech host and my colleague to come in and share with us some tips or how you can take the most out of this session and meanwhile just before I do that I'd like to welcome Kas Kotan and Syed Mohamed Nazimuddin from Bangladesh from the Asian University of Women and Indra Rini Tenrisal from Jakarta that must be I guess Ibu Indra Indra Rini and then Kalitasan Kali Asam from Malaysia so we have from Malaysia Jayesh Desai from Mumbai looking forward to the session, warm welcome Jayesh to be with us and also Teya I can't see where Teya is joining from please type in the chat where you are joining from and what is your workplace so we get a bit of idea from each other where we come from and how we fit in this session and what we would like to get out so Teya's from Rotterdam and there's Esher Kali from I used to know that abbreviation DWOTR in India okay also in India warm welcome this case will be about India that we present and then we will also look at the global implications and lessons we can learn from that so Anna could you come on and share some tips how we can make the most of the session Thank you Vaut and good morning I think that the easiest and fastest way to do that and to give the instructions is by sharing my screen as you can see on the right hand side is and where are some messages coming in you will see all the messages and the chat option you can type and interact with each other just below where it says write your message here and also this gives you the opportunity to ask direct questions to the speakers in order to ask direct questions to to the speakers about there and Dr. Vina is by the code that is cited just on the top of the chat and you can view it by scrolling up and down with the sidebar during this session we will also have some interactive polls happening as they go along so I will just ask you to to answer them as as they come up just above the chat on the right hand side of your screen thank you I'm going to give the floor back to you Vauter thank you so much Anna it's a pleasure to work with you and your colleagues at IHE and as we make this session happen together and I see now that WOTR is the watershed organization trust in India welcome and Jayesh is working with ACWAM an NGO working on the agenda of groundwater very important and in fact also we will be visiting that issue we also have Haider Aziz from Iraq with us warm welcome and then I see two friends all the way from South America from Ecuador and Colombia so a warm welcome to Sandra and German and now maybe that brings us to a good time to get introduced first by watching the video the pre-recorded video of Dr. Vina's keynote and after that we'll enter into the live discussion including the polls that Anna mentioned and by the way I didn't properly introduce myself I guess but you can check my profile I'm Vauter, Linkland Arians, I'm joining you from Manila in the Philippines and so we are also global this evening and we love to connect from all places in this now for the first time virtual IHE capacity development symposium so my pleasure to be with you and I look forward to learning together with you and now especially from Dr. Vina so can we Anna can we start the presentation please? My talk today is about bridging the gap between science policy and practice and I'm going to do this by illustrating the case study of the Kavadi Delta in Peninsular India the primary argument I make today are that the links between science policy and practice are broken mainstream science is disconnected and fragmented policy making is dogmatic not adaptive and practitioners often lack technical capacity and there's little cross-learning the Kavadi Delta lies at the end of an 80,000 square kilometer Kavadi basin the primary it is the site of a contentious interstate dispute between upstream Karnataka and downstream Tamil Nadu the delta itself has been managed by humans for over 2000 years where the Kalanai Dam was built the dam allowed a rich civilization in the Kavadi Delta to develop and flourish subsequent rulers continued to develop water resources by building small earthen dams to store water and irrigate a paddy crop the conflict however began during the colonial period when the upstream princely state of Mysore present day Karnataka sought to build the Krishna Rajasagar Dam on the Kavadi the downstream area which was then controlled by the British the British Metra's presidency sought to prevent this construction in order to protect the interests of the delta irrigators the dispute intensified post-independence with both states continuing projects of dam building it finally resulted in the formation of an interstate tribunal in 1990 and the tribunals deliberated for 17 years and issued their ruling in 2007 applying the principle of equitable apportionment the long and short of that was that Karnataka was slightly allowed to increase their water use over their 1972 use and Tamil Nadu share was slightly decreased over their historical use now the entire context of the Kavadi Delta and the changes that continue to occur even today is therefore rooted in this long history and larger context and cannot be understood outside of it so therefore to illustrate the links between science policy and practice I'd like to use specific examples from data from recent research on the Kavadi Delta the first argument that science tells us is that flows into the delta have declined the data show that the water has been released later and later each year and the June 28th date for release of water into the delta canals in order to get a viable monsoon crop from June to September has not been met in recent years second at the same time the storage capacity of the metro dam which releases water into the delta canals has also reduced this has been illustrated both by solicitation studies by the Central Water Commission as well as studies that we ourselves have done using satellite imagery however when we look at the storage volume relationship that is used to understand how much water there is in the in the reservoir the storage volume relationship has not changed over time and has not been updated over time so I'd argue that from the science perspective that it has been a culture of using data blindly in models without bothering to check their validity in other words a lot of the bio physical research is civil engineering and not necessarily inquiry-based science the third argument is that cropping patterns have shifted in the delta from single pad from double paddy to either single paddy or mixed crops due to declining flows this analysis that we did using google earth engine shows that a lot of the cropping patterns have changed to mixed cropping in the delta however when we examined the socioeconomic changes we found that in fact a very different story emerged based on focus group discussions interviews with farmers as well as analysis of secondary literature we found that there was very a very different story emerged firstly farmers argue that they were not interested they were moving away from paddy because there had been no improvement in the support price for paddy despite increasing input costs secondly once farmers had drilled wells to build or to depend on groundwater uh they had more control over the timing and quantity of water for irrigation and this allowed them to explore the possibility of higher value cash crops and finally there's been a labor shortage in agriculture now very different stories about why there was a labor shortage in agriculture emerged on one hand farm laborers argued that there'd been a mechanization of agriculture on the other hand farmers argued that the national rural employment guarantee scheme aspirations of youth who were no longer interested in agriculture as well as alternative opportunities for livelihoods because of the location of industries um in the proximity of rural areas allowed for people to move away from agriculture and this caused the labor shortage in agriculture so whether it was a push or a pull factor the fact is that two very different narratives emerged from our research on one hand there was a narrative that water shortage was driving cropping pattern changes on the other hand there's also a narrative that cropping pattern changes were happening for other reasons and were changing the quantity of water used so i think this results in a chicken and egg problem which is does crop crop cropping changes drive water use and therefore what are availability or does water availability drive cropping pattern changes and how to think about this so from the net of all of these studies both the biophysical scientific research as well as the social science research a much more complex picture of the entire deltaic system emerges and yet although we see that both endogenous as well as exogenous changes both biophysical changes as well as socioeconomic changes drive how water use as well as land use in the delta over time research itself tends to be very siloed and therefore may not have may not capture this larger complexity so while science itself is disconnected and fragmented policy make the policy making process in turn tends to be very dogmatic so one example of this is that even today policy thinking remains surface water focused i call this surface water thinking in a groundwater world the data and this is census data show that groundwater dependence on the delta has increased over time and in fact the particular data shown in this figure may be a slight underestimate because it doesn't capture groundwater use in conjunctive use the second problem is that policy thinking has remained focused on large infrastructure neglecting the possibilities of rejuvenating traditional tank systems or or instituting rules for better ground water use so the map of the Kaviri delta shows that there is a lot of irrigated unirrigated plantations including presuppose the traditional tank system or from our field work showed that they were largely silted up and overgrown with presuppose now one reason for this is that the political economy of infrastructure projects in the water sector in India tend to be driven towards large infrastructure for obvious reasons there is a contractor neck a politician contractor nexus and the engineering focused agencies are also motivated to focus on these for obvious reasons now i think it's important to realize that if the world itself has changed and releases into the canal network have decreased for completely exogenous reasons there is and the obvious question would be why aren't we rejuvenating the existing source structures and and storing some and harvesting more of the rainwater after all the delta region does get 1200 mm rainfall a year and yet we find that due to the political economy reasons this does not emerge as an option the final point on policy is that policy remains agriculture focused even as agriculture is beginning to take over in places particularly along the coast this is then google earth image of the area near naga button in the cavity delta and you can see that there is a lot of aquaculture and if and a view of the historical google earth imagery over time will show that the area has expanded our own field research in the area showed that these areas are associated with extremely high salinity on both surface as well as groundwater now the question remains as to whether it's the aquaculture that's driving the salinity or the salinity that's driving the aquaculture but regardless the policy making remains very very agriculture focused and not really focused on what is happening between the freshwater salt water barrier in these places finally i think that there's a there's a huge gap in the practitioner community and our experience and understanding of NGOs in the in the region as well as throughout India reinforces this so there are several local civil society efforts to reunite tanks as well as to institute rules for for management of tanks as well as groundwater it's leading to the possibility of creating new governance structures it's also important to note that the types of leadership that's emerging in civil society is also very very different a lot of young people returning from cities who are more educated there are more local philanthropists sometimes non-resident Indians and there's a lot of corporate social responsibility money as well yet a lot of these efforts tend to be completely fragmented as these groups local groups often don't talk to each other there's very little common consensus in terms of what the problem is in different places what specifically worked in some places and didn't work and so on and each effort tends to reinvent the wheel so i think overall there are there remain significant gaps between science policy and practice that need to be fixed now i do think that these problems can be solved but i think it's first important to ask the much bigger question which is if it was 1970 today would we have been able to imagine what the Cauvery Delta would look like today and how and how it would evolve and if you're unable to do so then i think we should ask ourselves with what confidence do we build infrastructure projects and and make model projections all the way up to 2100 when we couldn't predict the past why do we think we would do better at predicting the future now i think there are three questions we might want to ask in order to do better at this one is to say what changes did occur over the last four decades in the coupled human environment system second knowing what we know today and understanding what we understand today about the nature of the coupling between the human environment system can we do a better job of anticipating change in the future and if so how do we act both in terms of policy and practice to nudge the system onto a more sustainable and equitable transition pathway so i'm going to make some very specific recommendations firstly we need to reform the kind of science that's done and the way science is done now when we speak to a lot of research organizations and universities they argue that they are not incentivized to do the kind of science that's needed to that's needed to be done so i think that i'm going to cite idrc's research called idrc canada's research quality plus framework which i think is extremely useful in creating a framework to judge what kind of science matters so that we can create a scientific establishment that values and incentivizes the right kind of science first science needs to be more rigorous and in my opinion rigorous science is transdisciplinary science it cannot be just civil engineering models or just sociological studies we need science that and research that's field-based and that will that will bridge across disciplinary barriers secondly research needs to be relevant if any field data that's connected that's collected should be based on primary research and should answer questions that actually managed that actually matter to the stakeholders third research needs to be useful any knowledge that's generated must be actually usable by the stakeholders in the region and finally research needs to be disseminated it needs to be packaged beyond academic papers to actually be absorbable by those stakeholders now while science needs to change policy making also needs to change and i think that there are similarly principles that we might apply to judge and and design better policy first policy needs to be more relevant a lot of the policy the question to ask is if the policy focus relevant to the local context as i said before we don't want to be doing service water policy in a groundwater world second policy needs to be therefore integrative it needs to include ground and surface water blue and green water human and society systems as appropriate now a lot of this of course would then depend on the knowledge systems that inform policy and i have said the knowledge system itself is fragmented often that's the reason why the policies is also fragmented and so both need to to go hand in hand you need integrative knowledge systems and therefore integrative policy which is essential to ensuring that unintended consequences do not occur third we need ways of being more imaginative in policy making now i think it's important that this is something that's not going to happen without better design of the policy process itself research that looks at historical studies of our data from the past isn't going to help us design what might work in the future now this idea of design and design thinking is well accepted in the corporate sector as well as other areas of development practice but often not in the science policy interface so i think that we deliberately need to design policy processes that ensure that actually actively involve solutioning and then actually result in a whole range of design in a whole range of different policies that we can then test that we can then test and implement and finally policy making needs to be adaptive i think one of the main lessons from all of our research in historical human environment systems is that systems change and it's quite difficult to imagine how systems will evolve over time when new technologies evolve in societies and cultures completely change values change norms change everything changes in the over the course of decades and so so assuming that a policy and an infrastructure project that we implement today will be relevant in the same way for the next hundred years is clearly wrong and therefore we need explicitly to design policy processes that are adaptive they take on board new information as well as new changes on the ground and update over time finally practice and i think this is a seriously neglected area in and when i speak of practice i'm speaking about civil society this is a seriously neglected area in in the science policy practice trifecta i think a lot of the focus particularly in the international community has been building government or agency capacity and i think that this is insufficient i referred to this earlier in my talk as well that a lot of the problems or the focus of policy on large infrastructure is driven by a particular political economy now we we need and and therefore it's not going to change completely on its own without some kind of external pressure so we need civil society organizations to active watchdogs and for that we need to strengthen civil society organizations so in my experience one problem is that civil society organizations in india although they are extremely engaged and they're extremely active they lack technical capacity so they don't have the ability to actually analyze data or or find discrepancies when discrepancies are reported and a lot of the data itself is deliberately designed where it is now being forced to be put in the public domain is designed to be to obfuscate it it often is that you'll have data sets that use different reference levels they use different units some are monthly some are daily some have only the reservoir level some have only the reservoir storage and making it really difficult to therefore piece the entire picture together and i think this is possible and putting tools in the hands of civil society organizations that allow them to then act as effective watchdogs becomes very very important second there's a lot of excellent local NGOs but there's relatively few platforms where they can exchange knowledge and experiences often NGOs have to reinvent the wheel each one figuring out each thing from scratch without being able to learn from others to see what elements of the solution worked and what didn't work and as a result of this you see a lot of copicato solutions which are all about deciliting or all about digging ditches but relatively little on what kind of what user association works what kind of governance system have actually worked in terms of regulating participatory groundwater management and so on. Finally civil society organizations need funding this is a serious problem in India there's been in recent years one of the biggest sources of money has been corporate social responsibility funds but corporate social responsibility funds tend to be very project focused and they tend to be very immediate result focused and as a result they tend to focus completely on structures again versus building technical capacity figuring out how to institute new governance norms and this sort of thing so i think there's a lot that needs to be done in terms of all three science policy and practice and the question we need to ask is whose capacity are we building and for what purpose i will argue that we need to build the capacity of all three but we need to build the capacity of all three in a concerted fashion so they are able to help each other science that is relevant rigorous useful and well communicated policy that is relevant imaginative integrative and adaptive and practice that's well informed funded and embedded in a culture of learning so that they are able to take data and actually evolve and adapt over time thank you thank you thank you dr finna for your for sharing your presentation which we just watched in the recording a very compelling case of of issues that are obviously very prominent in india but also i think in other countries as well i think the way you describe this triad with the broken links between science policy and practice is something that we could all to some extent identify with and and also i like very much how you brought this back at the end to the whose capacity are we building for what purpose we definitely need to do that because as you explained in the case of the cavalry basin which i think also we can see examples in other countries as well where lots of changes both in the physical environment and in water as well as in the socioeconomic environment have taken place but science has not and and and the various the policy and other functions have not been able to catch up and keep up with those changes and and understand and deal with them properly so the answer whether we've kept up is a clear no in the case that you have presented and then you say well if we look ahead we we couldn't have adapted anticipated all those changes of the situation we see now let's say 40 years ago or 50 years ago so we must really use 21st century skills and design thinking as you called it to do our work now to make sure that what we build capacity for is actually resilient and useful and helps to help society in the various functions that water provides and you talked about anticipatory changes and nudging the various systems for change in a more cohesive and interrelated way let me okay let me welcome modupe from Nigeria but joining from the UK and Diana in Colombia based in Delft and also Leon Hermans so welcome and others are welcomed earlier so it's a it's a wonderful opportunity we have to have discussion with Vina Dr. Vina you can ask questions I already suggest that you start doing that in the chat now all of us are here because of capacity development of responding to the changes that are taking place in our world and of course these have accelerated in these last months tremendously in ways that we could not really foresee before that when covid started hitting so we are we're we're looking certainly at change and what we can help to change in the systems like Dr. Vina has has suggested now we have a poll and Anna I ask you to invite you to put the poll up the first poll we just want to get a feeling from you our dear participants how ready are you to be change makers in relation to in the organization where you work and there are there are three options for you to choose from and after a little while we present the results on screen for us all to see and I noticed that there are a few of you who are have shared in the chat that you are at the moment between work so you're in between assignments and you're taking the chance to catch up so maybe you could answer these questions in relation to your previous work your previous assignment if that makes sense to you so with that Vina can I ask you to come on screen for all of us live we're so happy that you can join us today from Bengaluru in India and I will be kicking off with one question it really builds on what you have asked of course the the holy grail the you know the question we are after to look at together is how can we do better in capacity development where do we start you have sketched us that micro picture with the three links where do we start and my question would be which players are not taken seriously at the moment in your case study and how could we bring them into the discussion into the table what sort of capacity would that involve so can I ask you that question first yeah so I think civil society is generally not taken as seriously so when when we look at if I had to describe how mainstream agencies kind of think of civil society they think of them as we kind of do the real serious stuff right we build the big dams and we do the canals and all of that and you guys kind of work at the edges you kind of fix these little you know these little you can desolder little waterway here or you can you can dig up upon there and they think the little stuff is for civil society and the big stuff is for the serious engineering community um and I think that's problematic because that's basically framing the problem saying we know all the big answers and civil society is there to either just just just build acceptance of it or or do the little stuff on the side and I think this has kind of led to the the the dichotomy or that we have which is a lot of big dance in India for example are seeing the severe decline in inflows because because of groundwater overuse which is being done by millions of individual farmers and so it's not so basically that even the basic framing of separating out science and society of separating out infrastructure in society I think is a problem so I think unless we restore the equality of all of those three actors right of knowledge and and I would argue that knowledge is also undervalued in in the in the I'm going to put infrastructure building and policy in the same in the same category of policy but I think that even serious knowledge systems are undervalued in that a lot of the large infrastructure construction which happens is not based on any serious transparent data collection and modeling and so I think both at today I would argue that both science as well as practice or civil society are undervalued in the water sector um yeah and so I think that giving restoring both of them to their proper place in being able to actually inform policy would is the very first step that needs to be undertaken does I answer your question Martin I know I went a little bit all over the place thank you I think we're we're we are taking several perspectives on it and I think the participants already thank you so much for sharing questions and perspectives that will help us to expand that so let's go to Calitas and Calias and he says Vina what is the best approach to get buy-in from all stakeholders with a win-win model what is the approach to get buy-in from all key stakeholders with a win-win model um I mean I think the first step is I think we talked a lot this morning about trust for example and I think that uh that trust is uh the very first and and and in the previous in the panel discussion uh that was that happened earlier this morning um Hank talked about uh safe spaces and I think those are uh the creation of those two is the first step uh in being able to to create to start dialogue between all of the all of the stakeholders uh I don't I don't know there's always a win-win model I mean sometimes there is there are win wins and sometimes uh win wins need to be created by bringing in external resources by which I mean that for instance if you're in a basin which is already a closed basin that means there's no more water left to be allocated um you do need to then figure out you move from an age of developing water resources to reallocating or managing water resources more equitably and that means that you may not always find a win-win in the traditional sense but you can find a win-win if then you start integrating markets and figuring out how do we get a reduced food based how do we get more efficiency into the system how do we increase value addition because farmers don't and I'm speaking primarily of the agricultural sector for the moment farmers don't want um to use water for the sake of using water they want to use water because they want to earn an income and so focusing on uh creating those market linkages getting them better prices sometimes you might be able to create a win-win when you bring external sectors in uh as opposed to just staying within the water sector I don't know if that makes sense you may not be able to find a win-win within the water sector if you have only a certain amount of water but you might be able to increase income even as you keep water even as you place a limit on the total water abstracted by bringing in the agricultural sector looking at agricultural policy creating market linkages investing in value addition that sort of stuff so I think that the spaces may not necessarily all lie within the water sector right yep and um uh thank you for that I like to uh hook up with as many participants as we can so a comment of Deanna is from Colombia I completely agree with how civil society is seen the same experience um that is a top-down approach and lead to solutions that are not effective on the ground and then Deanna also asked a question then what mechanisms can be put in place to improve the communication the communication that's those nudges I guess that Vino was talking about earlier the communication between science policy and practitioners any ideas from lessons from other sectors so also beyond the water sector are the examples from your NGO experience perhaps your research center experience in other sectors that show us the way Vina um I think there are good examples in both uh education as well as the the field of medicine I know there was an excellent talk earlier this uh in the week about implementation science and IHE in specific uh specifically has been promoting the concept of implementation science and I think implementation science is a good example which arose from a different sector the field of medicine which basically said how do we learn from all of the practice that we've actually had uh systematize it so that we're actually making that um we're evolving a set of design principles from uh from from everything that we've done and then how do we apply that to uh to uh the practice of medicine so uh so I think that the the fact that in the medical area they were able to and there's a number of excellent books on this that they were able to take very very complex and fragmented experiences of millions of doctors all over the world and be able to collapse them into a set of very very um succinct set of principles that anybody could learn and practice on their own uh that shows that this kind of this kind of aggregation and distilling of of design principles is possible uh and there's been similar excellent examples in the education sector particularly in India where people have looked at uh lots and lots of research of what has really worked to improve um uh outcomes educational out attainment in uh in the K-12 in uh in K-12 schooling and they've found that um what is done in the first thousand days of a child's uh life is in terms of nutrition in terms of uh uh a whole range of interventions has very very long range impacts and so being able to collapse um complex information into a set of principles is really what that entire uh is what implementation science is but I think we can we need to do more and more of that in the water sector. Thank you Vina and thank you for introducing that in the context of implementation science and I think looking to learn from other sectors as well which is important and sometimes in my experience that isn't enough done in the water sectors I think a very welcome reminder prompted of course by a great question from Diana. I also see the question from Jayesh who said uh uh you know but uh do we have a plan about who will build whose capacity so I interpret your question as you're ready to get involved and helping to make those changes happen and that's a good point to segue to Anna for a moment and to see if the poll results can be shown on screen in relation to your attitude can you be a champion can you work on make change happen are you keen to do that so here is the result uh 27 percent I am ready to champion a change or just taking the leadership role as a champion in my workplace and uh 60 percent 59 percent I want to influence a change together with colleagues so that's very much an indication of that collective leadership that we see more and more in this 21st century and part of 21st century skills and for such complex issues that we talk about perhaps that's also a really uh a good approach if we are all champions we might not be as successful as we want and then 14 percent says well I think it's difficult because my organization resists change which of course is a reality in many places so we get a bit of feedback here how we ourselves self identify with what role we can play Anna that's fine we could maybe close that and then ask Vina Vina do you have some feedback on that on that poll result it's very positive so that's that's excellent and I think it also reflects back one of the one of the themes this morning of comments and I think it was Ishwar that asked that how do we create collective leadership and so I think I think that's point that because if you looked at it 60 percent of the people said they want to do it but not alone working together as a team with their colleagues and I think therefore this idea of how do we and maybe this is telling us something about maybe our leadership development when we when we when you put the categories we thought of sector organizations and then individuals but maybe teams is actually a way because it's less lonely and less frightening if you're doing it in clusters of people rather than expecting people to be sole champions all by themselves and maybe that's telling us that there's a different way we can think about our approach to capacity building but maybe maybe some kind of buddy system because it's it's quite terrifying if you have to take on such a daunting challenge all by yourself and maybe maybe that's telling us something yeah actually about you're the leadership champion so maybe you can reflect on that thank you yeah thank you for playing that back to me I in in the 21st century our definition of leadership which has of course changed a lot in these past years too is very much about a process of influence so when we talk about in this symposium about changes that we need to respond to to make to tweak how we do capacity development work and and Vina talked about some really major tweaks in the presentation today and the question is how can each of us be involved individually and collectively how can we be more skilled in the different roles we can play as a leader there's not one way of exercising leadership I champion is one but working as a team working as a thought leader there are several ways or as an enabling leader more like a facilitator especially in complex problems so I think there's once we start double clicking on that word of leadership and what that means to each of us there is a lot to explore and work with and Vina you yourself has you have experience with leadership training and and and some coaching could you perhaps share a little bit personally how that how that helped you yeah so um the of course I don't work within the government sector I I work for a non-profit organization so but I was and my my organization very recently and very kindly agreed to let me take leadership coaching I found leadership coaching to be very very useful and I think that it's because I think we forget sometimes and I think particularly in the developing world there is a little bit of an under emphasis on soft skills right in a sense we we value hard skills if you go and ask people in the state agency would you like to learn remote sensing in gi gi is or would you like to go for leadership coaching they would all say remote sensing in gi is because that's kind of what we emphasize as being valuable yet the minute you come into any kind of leadership position where you have to manage a team of more than you know more than two very quickly you realize that the technical stuff is easy I can build complex models which includes social scientists and natural scientists and you know I can figure out how they're all going to talk to each other but if I actually bring them into the room being able to make them speak to each other respectfully is a non-trivial challenge and so what you realize very very quickly is that we can find the intellectual horsepower to think about the the technical challenges and and by technical I'm using that broadly I mean across social science economics natural science whatever but but being able to drive a team of people to agree with each other find consensus and then actually manage change that's much harder and and I think that we also sometimes have a tendency to think that leaders are somehow born that somebody is born they've they were born a great leader and I think that the evidence clearly shows that this is a learnable skill leadership is a learnable skill which means that you can be given a set of very very specific tools to understand how you should how you should cope with all with different situations so for instance I when I work with the coach one of the things in each session we would work through one particular thing I was struggling with whether in my personal growth as a professional or in managing a team and and she would work me with through very very specific ways of managing them it could be a script of here's how you can speak it could be a realization of just being able to work through what's within your control and what's not in your control how can you enhance what you have and and diminish what's actually the barriers that are stopping you all of this stuff and I think teaching people the stuff helps and sometimes just saying that these things are important and as important as technical skills is the very first step right right thank you and I think you've answered Diana's question she thanks you for naming the elephant and how to persuade under such difficult conditions of vested interest environment what's your experience I think you shared that a bit and as a moderator I could very quickly share also that this this challenge of how to influence how to bring people together out of silos to get them to work together to trust each other to make significant changes happen is something that I as a as a water specialist my whole career in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work from very early on I found that my colleagues in the Asian Development Bank and other places where I worked didn't have the benefit of training as an influencer you know more into the psychology the interpersonal skills the emotional intelligence was mentioned this morning so I decided to shift my career and went back to learning more about those fields and I'm now helping people full time in this area which is very exciting one of the flagship programs I'm involved with is actually where water professionals go through and nine months program while they're on the job but in that nine months they learn the different ways of practicing leadership as well as getting coaching like Vina has been describing so so for sure it's possible to do that and leadership research about influencing is a very exciting field to that I warmly recommend all of you to take a look at and if there's anything I can help to introduce that to you or to connect you to resources then please do contact me I'm happy to do that and in fact since 2014 we have been introducing that in IHE in one of the summer courses on becoming a water leader which is a five-day five-day program very experiential learning all right so the let's see Kanita San says as you mentioned about the soft skill how about traditional knowledge have you managed to tap into these resources of traditional knowledge Vina can you yeah and I'm also going to while I respond to that I'm also going to respond to something that Jayesh put mentioned earlier which is whose capacity is being built and for what purpose and I think that this is those two are kind of relevant because in a sense if you say is the only form of knowledge scientific knowledge that we understand and and are taught in engineering schools and is no other form of knowledge relevant and what about the lived experiences of farmers they sometimes understand their aquifers better their streams better and they might not know how to frame it in a scientific way but that doesn't mean they understand the system so I do think that traditional knowledge matters a lot I would not like to say that we should use traditional knowledge necessarily blindly because we have to understand that even our traditional knowledge systems sometimes came with embedded power in equities for example so some of our traditional knowledge came with you know built and maybe cast inequities in the case of India so we do need to we want to incorporate it we want to acknowledge that all forms of knowledge are and knowing are valid but we also want to be careful about how and when we deploy that now in the context of what Jayesh said earlier whose skill is being built and for what I think it's I want to acknowledge the work that Aquadam itself does that's the organization that he belongs to in being able to train barefoot hydrogeologists where these are these these are really really grassroots people that they're training how to map aquifers and be able to manage their own aquifers better really really excellent work I think that's a really good blend of the what you would call the old and the new right because you're training people that are already traditional in those professions they already have traditional knowledge in those in those domains but you're kind of augmenting it with more modern understanding to be able to create a more full picture so you're not throwing out all of their deep rich understanding of the field but you're not also just taking it as is on on good faith um yeah I think I'll right and Anna is asking a question in order to link up to the fields of science policy and practice do we need to change the university's curriculum how would you link up all those fields without altering the knowledge that's now understood as required for a profession so we look more at the professional side and the education correct so I think that when it's important to say that when we talk about interdisciplinary knowledge we're not saying that everybody should become a jack of all trades I don't think that is what the claim is I think that if you if you can still have specialization if you give people the understanding that other disciplines and knowledge systems exist and they have value and if you're able to teach them that meta concept that other knowledge systems have value other disciplines have value and they and here's a language with which you can ask them questions and and engage with them so you're not necessarily making everybody study economics and sociology and at every possible subject you need you might just be studying three or four things but if you're taught in a very very explicit way to respect all knowledge systems and to be able to figure out so one of the things we teach we run an interdisciplinary PhD program at my institution one of the things we teach is philosophy of science for example so we say that even though this is your knowledge system this is kind of the framing of the epistemology and ontology and the way it looks at the world and these other disciplines look at the world in different ways and they can help you in these ways so without having to actually force everybody to do the five courses of economics and sociology and everything else which is really impossible but I think respect we can still teach just I hope that helps in right yeah all right meanwhile you have seen that we put up a second poll and the second poll is now that we have been going into this discussion and we are thinking about what changes to make who makes those various the capacity come from how we bring people together we've touched on a lot of perspectives the poll is about which do you think which level of intervention or focus is the most important and Anna do you think we are ready to show the results of that poll there we go so the question is where should the main change in capacity development happen as a result of our discussion right here is it more at the country and sector policy level that we see a majority there 60 percent and we see still moving lines in organization so perhaps that reflects something about the experience of organizations but earlier we said that you know we are we are able especially when we work together to make change happen in organizations too but also encouragingly about a third looks at the individual implication what each of us can do and how we can help other individuals to work with change in a more personal and individualized manner yeah wonderful to see that so that's a nice way of feedback sharing thank you Anna for putting that up I think we can we can take that off again and I have asked you a question because the way I would like to wrap up we have five minutes before we wrap up this very valuable and interesting session is to ask you what has been your main takeaway from this session where we discussed tough challenges on the ground with we could say systems the three systems that Veena mentioned that were broken in the case of the Calvary and then she gave very specific and insightful recommendations of how to fix that and implications for capacity development and her message is that as we look towards the future there's no way we can predict it's 30 40 50 years ahead so we must come with a new system new processes to design those processes of change and capacity development and it cannot be done in isolation one thing Veena maybe before we take a quick round of the takeaways what is the what is the role of different generations here and you know in my career I've been so in so many water meetings where the average age of the participants in the room was well I don't really want to say but you get the point so uh Veena how is that an important driver itself to get the more 21st century model of change introduced whereas some of the policies laws and procedures often are the legacy of the past generation right which is correct yeah I think that we we discussed it in the panel discussion this morning as well and firstly I have to say that Antonella who I wish we'd heard more of and who runs the youth solutions network really really brought this point of what the youth can contribute to the sector and specifically entrepreneurship and I'm going to use entrepreneurship very broadly but technology is one component of entrepreneurship now I really think that actually and until I had to be honest I will tell you until we had the panel discussion with Antonella a couple of weeks ago I hadn't thought about the role of youth in the sector so I'm very grateful for her to kind of stated that explicitly because it did make me realize that the sector is uh is is that is basically losing by not being able to harness the power and the energy and the skill sets of the youth of the youth today so I'll give you one really quick example when a couple of a few months ago we were approached by somebody to say you know can you help us think about this big idea in the water sector in India and so on and we started doing some research on what it is that NGOs on the ground needed in order for them to be able to act more effectively and a lot of the NGOs were describing doing some of the work that they were doing by paper and pen like they would be doing 50 60 years ago when in fact today the kinds of tools that exist in the public domain with google earth with open data kit with just a whole bunch of things they've completely transformed the way that things can be done and but because we continue to have similarly when we run our our training when we run our training for state agencies the sessions that generate the most excitement are the sessions which show people how to use GIS and remote sensing and open data kitten and google earth and so on because suddenly the young engineers who did not have any felt they were completely disempowered they had no tools in their hand to be able to overcome this big machine right and what what agencies are very hierarchical in top down but suddenly technology put a tool into their hand which suddenly made them empowered so I think that firstly creating a space bringing young people in and then giving technology into their into a set of technology tools into their hand can actually be a way to completely transform it from transform the sector because it gives these people the ability to make data transparent to report from the ground to collect data in ways that they were unempowered to collect and so on so I think it can be very very transformative if we bring you to use it to the sector but do so in a very very explicit way right right and I and again I often refer to them as emerging leaders and we don't just need them for to be future leaders as some people keep repeating we need to make changes now and we can do that in teams I am unable to reflect all of your takeaways but be sure that we carefully capture them however I do want to and thank you nice to see Bronwyn and Pete Filet from Brisbane and I want to give a quick feedback on Sydney Burns who has shared that something I'm thinking about as a result of the earlier poll result is to show us that many people are viewing themselves as part of a team of colleagues to influence change in their workplace how can we embrace this mindset at a sector level and reduce the competition between institutions to become individual sector champions and instead foster collaboration and collaboration towards a common goal what is fundamentally driving this competition and how can we support drivers for collaboration I think this is a for me resonates strongly with me I believe that's that's possible that I also resonates with me that this is one of the takeaways from this kind of discussion that we have right now and as we want to take that forward now I am going to ask Anna could you please come in for a moment and share how we can take this discussion forward the many valuable comments that are have been made in the chat yes sure in order to do that I'm going to quickly share my screen to share some slides that have already been attached to this webinar itself and you will be able to find it just above the chat function for those questions that have not been answered they'll be taken on to the post that will contain the recording of this webinar itself since most participants or some participants of the conference captive were not able to attend due to time zone constraints and the by doing so we open the discussion further than this live webinar I also want to encourage to make use of social media and the hashtag of the symposium itself and also to invite you to contribute to the DEFTA agenda by following the URL that you will find down below thank you and I'm going to give back the floor to you Walter thank you thank you and we have we are just a few minutes over our time to wrap up and I want to wrap up quickly by thanking all of you dear participants for joining so actively by your very informed comments and questions and really carrying this discussion forward just in that rich manner that we were all looking forward to I'd like to thank the team here at IHE Delft who is making all of this possible this is the first time that this symposium is transferred online that's a big step into the future right now and we acknowledge them for doing that and I'd like to warmly thank Dr. Vina Srinivasan about telling her impassioned story we could see the passion and we could see the you know the care also about what happens between these sectors and how we can find ways to notch these systems as she called it to develop capacity much more smartly into the future more collaboratively thank you for all of you for contributing your insights and sharing your feedback on the polls and the majority of you 60 percent was of the view that we can make change happen together by working as teams or in other forms of collaboration and that could go a very long way to address some of the shortcomings of the past solutions which don't really work anymore well today and definitely not not tomorrow and emerging leaders young leaders young professionals are definitely a part of that but the 21st century is for all of us so I think for those of us who are not quite that young it's our challenge to unlearn and from my coaching and leadership practice I know as I work with executives and more senior professionals and managers unlearning is not a very easy thing to do but it can be done too just like leadership can also be taught as Vina has shared with us her experience so Vina the last word for you with a short tip on how to take it forward and then we are closing well I have to say that I was more I learned more than I don't know than I think I imparted in this very very interesting but I would just like to make a quick comment about the online forum I don't know if you would have got people from so many different places in the world if it had been an in-house symposium and so it's really been a very fascinating discussion I hope that what I took away from what all of you said and from your questions on the role of bringing of the difficulty of CSO's traditional knowledge in being what are the ways in which we can actually bring science and society together what does it exactly take to bring that kind of dialogue together all of those are food for thought and thank you for attending and listening thank you so once again thank you and we'll take this discussion forward please keep joining the symposium as we work towards the Delft agenda but then importantly to implement that and stay in touch with each other as Bina said we are now opening that possibility of working together the kind of collaboration that we have talked about in this session thank you again and it's time to close thank you very much