Plock’s International Training Centre for Local Actors (CIFAL Plock, Poland) celebrated the World Water Day with Central and Eastern European municipalities during a three-day training event highlighting the region’s key challenges with water management in urban areas in the face of increasing urbanisation. Hosted from 22 to 24 March 2011, the event paired a training workshop with a one day conference gathering experts who explored current trends in regional urban water management, dealing with topics such as water in real estate developments, remote sensing methods for quality and quantity assessment of inland water, water and energy related problems and innovative solutions for revitalizing waterfronts in European cities, and presentation of case studies and good practices from cities of the region, including Plock itself. Speakers from the Netherlands also shared with the audience – 80 participants – the age-long and renowned experience of their country and municipalities in terms of water management.

 

The two-day workshop that was organized in the wake of the conference   gave 30 participants the opportunity to further look at water-related topic and issues in an urban context, and share their experience while developing towards one European water approach and changing from a centrally planned culture to one of decentralisation and more local autonomy. Despite the varied levels of fiscal, administrative, and political decentralisation across current European Union pre-accession and current EU states, every municipality must equally comply with EU Water Framework Directive. This Directive includes prescriptive policies especially aimed at increasing public participation and multi-stakeholder approaches to quality water management principles using a river basin management approach.    Participants represented municipalities from Slovakia, Croatia, The Netherlands, Hungary, Albania, Serbia, and many others across the region. They started the workshop by self-assessing the situation of their municipality vis-à-vis a certain number of indicators (legal framework, implementation of waterfront management concepts and innovations, conduction of needs assessments, integration of water planning with other urban services, multi-stakeholder participation, etc.). This self-evaluation part stressed common shortcomings regarding water management projects – especially à propos public participation and needs assessments, and public satisfaction measurement. It was followed by an asset sharing phase where workshop participants presented to their peers their city’s main strengths in water management. Next stage saw participants breaking into groups to further discuss selected issues of particular importance, they identified during the self-assessment and asset sharing process (EU-national- local government coordination, multi-stakeholder participation and involvement of citizens in planning processes; monitoring and evaluation).

 

The events were organized under the patronage of the Polish Ministry of Infrastructure and the Ministry of Regional Development, with the financial support of Veolia Environnement, and the organizational support of SWITCH, the University of Warsaw, the Centre for Public-Private Partnership and PWC.   For more information on UNITAR Local Development and CIFALs training events please see:

 

http://www.unitar.org/event/

and for more information on CIFAL Plock please see

http://www.cifalplock.eu/