Approach and desired Outcome
Approach
Following the recommendations from the Johannesburg Plan of action to promote strong and effective partnerships the initiative catalyzed the discussion about the nature of the typical difficulties in such partnerships. It soon became obvious that the lack of common understanding ranged from the political down to the operational level. Already available supportive instruments did address many issues, but fell short of providing the necessary guidance to reach what we suggest to call "good water governance".
Our desk and literature research was soon to be complemented by stakeholder interviews and discussions in various international events and on different platforms. Several sketches of the policy-level document (formerly called "Code of Conduct", now "Policy Principles") were produced and discussed in an open consultation process. The operational guidance document ("Implementation Guidelines") was developed in collaboration with renowned experts in the field and submitted to a thorough review process. To ensure and verify the applicability to varying contexts, regional multi-stakeholder discussions and back-testings have been held before producing a "version 1" of the instruments.
Results
The outcome of this initiative are instruments that offer guidance for the design and implementation of transparent, effective, efficient and equitable Public-Private Partnerships in water supply and sanitation. The interlinked instruments start at the policy and decision-maker level by describing basic values, key factors, framework requirements and role models in a political document (the Policy Principles), translate the key factors onto the implementation phases of a typical PPP (the Implementation Guidelines) and complement the recommendations with references to supportive tools that exist elsewhere (the ToolContainer). Although consequently focusing on the involvement of the private sector in water supply and sanitation services, a large proportion of the content has proven to be equally applicable for systems managed by public utilities.
Outlook
As the instruments will be living documents, adapting with time, the experience from using the instruments will be systematically collected and fed back into the next versions - to ensure best practices are taken up and common pitfalls are being avoided. For the dissemination, feedback collection and further development of the instruments, a coordination unit is responsible for operational tasks and ensures institutional continuity. The present partners are open for new co-owners and invite all water supply and sanitation organizations to use the instruments and become "implementation partners" of the initiative.