What This Report Covers
This Future Water Agenda report explores how collective action can better address shared water challenges at the catchment level. Drawing on the views of 291 water experts across 75 countries, the report examines how collaboration is currently working in practice and where it is falling short.
While there is a strong consensus that collective action is essential, efforts remain fragmented, with limited engagement in governance, financing, and cross-sector coordination. The report highlights the key challenges holding progress back, what defines credible and impactful collective action, and the practical shifts needed to move from isolated projects to more coordinated, scalable approaches that can deliver meaningful outcomes.
Transforming Collective Action for Shared Water Challenges is the second phase of WWF and GlobeScan’s Future Water Agenda research program and builds on last year’s findings, which highlighted the urgent need for greater investment in collective action to address shared water challenges.
Key Challenges:
- Challenge 1: Public‑private collaboration is disconnected across policy and levels of government, with weak relationships between sectors. Government and industry often act independently, with projects involving corporate targets not aligned with policy or government priorities. Lack of alignment across levels of government is a top barrier for industry. In many cases, both sectors do not engage to build relationships and trust and lack pathways to coordinate their efforts.
- Challenge 2: The patchwork of small projects serving corporate targets is not delivering on shared water challenges. With limited budgets, industry largely focuses on projects with water availability KPIs that have minimal impact at the catchment level, rather than catalytic collective action across sectors needed to address shared challenges, including flooding. Companies struggle to make the business case and find suitable opportunities for collective action.
- Challenge 3: Water governance is critical for scale and impact, but underfunded and not engaging key stakeholders. While there is broad recognition of the need for public sector involvement, it remains a blind spot for companies. Many important local actors, including communities, SMEs, growers, and Indigenous groups, are not sufficiently engaged, resulting in governance gaps that restrict coordination and the ability to achieve real scale and impact.
- Challenge 4: Financing collective action remains a major impediment to progress. While there are examples of success, efforts largely focus on projects rather than platforms. Viable collaborative financial models are perhaps the biggest barrier to scaling collective action, with existing funding approaches not fit for purpose and difficult to implement.
Three shifts to unlock collective action
- Shift 1: Transition from projects to platforms that prioritize catchment-level outcomes, strong governance, and robust impact monitoring. Moving from individual projects to collaborative platforms can address many governance challenges and also help tackle financing challenges. This must be done in a manner that brings the right people together under the right structures.
- Shift 2: Grow public-private sector collaboration by aligning to public policy, coordinating across government levels, mobilizing through catchment and basin platforms, and building relationships and capacity. This calls for aligning projects along with corporate water stewardship and goals to policy aims and catchment needs, fostering engagement that builds relationships and trust between sectors, better integrating efforts, and linking more to municipal government, SMEs, and other actors and stakeholders in the catchment.
- Shift 3: Develop new, collaborative financing models with incentives to fund governance, scale and deploy portfolios of projects, and ensure continuity and financial viability. To drive scale, we need to break the status quo of project-based financing and shift toward new collaborative financial models. This requires a number of re-thinks, from capital stacks to revenue models and incentive systems.
Delivering meaningful progress on water requires coordinated, system-level action. This report shares findings from the second phase of WWF’s and GlobeScan’s shared research program on The Future Water Agenda, which has been supported by leading organizations engaged in corporate water stewardship. The program has focused on gathering data, views, learnings, and guidance from the global water community to take stock of water stewardship to date, identify challenges, and uncover shifts that are needed to achieve the scale and impact required to take on global water risks and security.
Our 2025 Future Water Agenda report, “How Water Can Lead the Way for Sustainability and Collective Action”, highlighted the importance of collective action for tackling shared water challenges and the need to prioritize catchment-level water issues in value chains and river basins.
