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Effective water management depends not only on sound policies and evidence, but on the ability of institutions and people to apply them. Governments and organizations face growing pressures from climate impacts, competing water uses, and complex stakeholder demands, while often lacking the skills, tools, or institutional arrangements needed to respond effectively.
When knowledge and dialogue are not translated into action, even well-designed strategies fail to deliver lasting results.
Through this engagement pillar, SIWI supports partners in strengthening their ability to act on water-related decisions in real-world contexts. Our approach is demand-driven and grounded in evidence and experience. We work with partners to understand needs, priorities, and constraints, and to design capacity development processes that are relevant, owned, and sustainable.
SIWI does not implement projects or provide technical services. Instead, we work alongside governments, organizations, and networks to strengthen how decisions are made, applied, and sustained within institutions.
SIWI applies a structured, step-by-step approach to capacity development. This includes engaging stakeholders, assessing capacity needs, supporting joint action planning, and following through with implementation, learning, and reflection. By supporting institutions to apply what they have learned through dialogue, research, and shared experience, this pillar helps turn strategies into practice and commitments into action.
This approach supports learning and adaptation, enabling institutions to respond to uncertainty, adjust over time, and improve performance as conditions change.
Advice and capacity development are embedded across SIWI’s thematic areas, partnerships, and platforms. This includes tailored advisory support, learning processes, and capacity-focused initiatives linked to policy development and institutional reform. The aim is to ensure that SIWI’s work does not stop at recommendations, but supports meaningful follow-through and lasting change.
For partners and funders, SIWI offers trusted, impartial advice that strengthens institutional capacity without creating dependency. By focusing on learning, ownership, and long-term capability, SIWI helps ensure that investments lead to sustained improvements beyond individual interventions.
Insights, events, and outputs from SIWI’s advisory and capacity work.
Projects strengthening institutions’ ability to govern water effectively
Better rainwater management in the Zambezi watercourse may increase food security in the region, create jobs, and build resilient societies, suited to tackle the challenges from a changing climate. The project builds on experience from an Africa-wide project aimed at attracting investment in rainfed agriculture on the continent.
In Ethiopia, recurrent droughts, water pollution, deforestation and land degradation are all major threats to water security in the country. Tackling these is a big and complex task, for which a coordinated approach and strong water policy and legislation is needed. This is what the Ethiopia Water and Landscape Governance (EWLG) programme seeks to achieve.
This completed project established the foundations for source-to-sea management in two locations, expanded practical guidance, methods and tools through pilot testing the source-to-sea approach and captured and disseminated results and learning nationally, regionally, and globally.
Swedish port regions are entering a time of new and complex risks, shaped both by the climate crisis and broader societal changes. With the project Increasing the Preparedness of Swedish Port Regions, we want to better understand these challenges and work together to identify practical solutions.
