What Just Happened in New York?
Two weeks ago, I woke up well before dawn in Manhattan, took a taxi to the airport, and watched the sun rise as I snoozed in the stratosphere. About five hours later, I landed in Oregon. Plum, apple, and cherry trees tried to insist, despite the wet valley and deep snow in the mountains, that this was indeed spring. Trilliums, crocus, and hellebores tried to chip in with trout-lilies and wild rhododendrons. My office woodshed is almost empty, and I fear it will be barren before I am ready to stop making fires in my woodstove. Even so, I was glad to be away from the gray streets of New York.
AGWA sent a good-sized delegation to the UN Water Conference, joining some 10,000 other people there. And the meeting arguably swallowed up much of our time over the previous two months even for the staff and partners who didn’t go. Was the meeting useful? important? worthwhile? Given the investment of time and effort by so many thousands, these are fair questions.
To the best of my knowledge, the UN did not set any explicit standard to judge the success of the conference, which was perhaps a wise precondition on their part.
Given that caveat, and on reflection in the soggy quiet of Oregon, I had several observations:
Young professionals were perhaps more present and engaged than at any other water meeting I’ve attended. Even when they weren’t on stage, I felt them listening — hopeful and skeptical — to what they were hearing. I spoke with many of them. These were my best moments of the conference.
I saw a generational shift in who drove the agendas. Organizations that have often led in the international water space for decades drew small audiences. Those groups seem to still have most of the funding. But the energy and agendas were set by younger generations and smaller organizations — people in their 50s, 40s, and 30s. Often they were well established, but their messages were breaking through. This generational shift seems like a long time in coming.
Equity and justice, climate resilience (especially as a systemic solution), nature-based solutions drew the energy. And audiences viewed these topics as the cost of entrance — if you weren’t bringing a lot of substance and evidence to the table, just mentioning these issues was not enough to hold attention. Ideally, you were addressing all three topics, with evidence.
Do these observations adjust our strategy in some way? AGWA is a small organization, mostly not well aligned with traditional funding paths, working on emerging issues that seemed incomprehensible even less than a decade ago in a room crowded with groups using the language of water resilience but often without the substance. Sometimes more than others, I can feel the gap between what we are trying to do and what we have the resources to accomplish.
Still, Ingrid led a team effort to define our commitment to the Water Action Agenda — the voluntary commitments that the UN asked groups to pledge to in advance. We struggled with these, because they seemed like a public promise of how we want to move the needle going forward. How should we make a significant and useful difference despite the number of our staff. We focused on the size of the problems rather than on the size of our budgets.
Looking around the rooms in New York, at the excitement and hope in the young professionals there, I know that was the right choice.
I was glad to come home after New York to a spring delayed, yet assured by signs that spring will truly arrive.
John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA