It’s been a busy and rewarding year for WPS Iraq and all its local partners in the Iraqi government and civil society. WPS’ work in Iraq began in 2020 with a variety of capacity-building activities for the Iraqi federal government, which also co-identified priorities for following WPS work. In the following years, WPS worked mostly with Iraqi NGOs to reach communities in the south of Iraq and support them in addressing water- related tensions. These NGOs were Al-Firdaws, specialising in mediation, and Humat Dijlah, focusing on environmental rights.
In 2024, the focus for WPS was to elevate the concerns and solutions raised by local communities in four governorates to the federal government. Our aim was to encourage better cooperation on all levels – between different levels of government (federal and provincial), as well as between public authorities and communities. We dove even deeper in encouraging various community members to share their ideas, and started planning ambitious activities alongside the government to share our findings.
- Elevating local perspectives
WPS worked in close collaboration with Humat Dijlah (The Tigris River Protectors Organisation) to conduct a series of activities with local communities in southern Iraq. This work built on past years of collaboration between WPS and Humat Dijlah, including on their yearly Dijlah Talks dialogue forum. Together, we surveyed engineers, farmers, activists, researchers, and public officials to better understand the water-related security impacts they experience. In July 2024, we brought some of them together for three focus groups, where they discussed shared issues and started to jointly identify solutions that could be implemented at the governorate level to mitigate some of those challenges.
To help address tensions over water between governorates, WPS’ work with Humat Dijlah culminated with an online public session in August 2024, bringing together all four governorates (Missan, Basra, Dhi Qar, and Wasit) to highlight the common experiences that united them, and discuss how local communities could organise to mitigate some of those challenges collaboratively.
WPS supplemented these activities with 13 interviews with Iraq-based experts on water and water-related security issues throughout the summer, including (current and former) government officials, academics, NGO representatives, and development agency staff. We also received input from 3 working groups from the 3rd GIZ Solution Lab held in Basra in July 2024. Armed with all of these findings, WPS identified a set of entry-points for collaborative water governance in southern Iraq and collected them in a policy brief which is due for publication in early 2025.
- Supporting policymaking and sharing our findings
WPS aims to make our work as accessible as possible to policymakers and other stakeholders interested in the water-security nexus in Iraq. In April 2024, WPS participated in the Baghdad International Water Conference, sharing experiences and lessons from our work with our local partners during a collective session titled “Enhancing capacity development for sustainable and peaceful water-based cooperation in Iraq.” WPS had the honour of welcoming the Dutch Ambassador to Iraq, Hans Sandee, to provide opening remarks for the session.
In order to reach the academic community, WPS has recently started a Knowledge Transfer initiative with selected universities in southern Iraq. We aim to encourage the take-up of our approach and tools, to inspire young researchers and professors to integrate good governance considerations and conflict sensitivity in their projects in the water sector, and encourage further research on the nexus.
WPS has a close working relationship with Iraqi authorities, who remained connected with WPS throughout the year. WPS recently finalised a dashboard for southern Iraq that visualises potential impacts of water-related changes on peoples’ decision to migrate. WPS organised a training session for the Ministry of Water Resources and the Ministry of the Environment in October, to discuss possible ways to integrate this dashboard into water-related decision-making within those ministries.
- Planning for 2025
The jewel in the crown of WPS Iraq is still to come! The WPS Symposium in Baghdad, originally planned for Autumn 2024 but postponed to Spring 2025 due to regional security conditions, will bring together all WPS partners in Iraq, from national- and governorate-level authorities, academic and research institutions, international organisations, and civil society, in order to facilitate passing on WPS tools and research results to organisations that can continue the work on the water-conflict nexus in Iraq.
The Symposium will culminate with a high-level roundtable for decision makers, focusing on concrete entry points to address water-related tensions in Iraq.
Follow our work
You can stay updated on WPS Iraq’s work by keeping an eye on the reports that we publish on the WPS website, as well as by following WPS on social media. We are preparing a set of videos to showcase the types of water-related tensions that we work on, and have a report in the works to describe in more detail the ways in which the WPS integrated approach has guided engagement in Iraq.
Source: Water, Peace and Security (WPS) partnership, December 19, 2024
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