The United Nations (UN) 2023 Water Conference was held from March 22–24 at the UN Headquarters in New York, USA. There was a clear message from Day 1 of the Conference: “we are not on track to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 on water and sanitation for all.” Moreover, business-as-usual approaches for water management do not seem effective facing the so-called triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss (What is the Triple Planetary Crisis? | UNFCCC). Hence, the Conference aimed to raise awareness of the global water crisis and to make agreements on concerted actions to mobilize all sectors, stakeholders, and countries toward the resolution of this global issue. Among them, the agreement to establish a UN Special Envoy for Water (different figure than the Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water), ground more than seven hundred voluntary commitments and pledges, and renew the political momentum in fora such as the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, held this July 2023, and the SDG Summit in September 2023 to follow up on the SDGs and Agenda 2030, as well as the commitments of the Decade for Action on Water (2018–2028).The UN, in fact, has promoted numerous initiatives to mobilize citizens around the SDGs. Presently, the UN has declared a total of 206 International Environmental Days to honor specific human and environmental subjects. Among them, only 40 are specifically related to the environment or socio-environmental issues. The majority of all of these declarations are followed by “mega-conferences”¹ related to the same subjects: that is, RAMSAR/wetlands sites, sustainable development, biodiversity, climate change, and the latest one is water. The UN states that these commemorative dates and fora are meant to “educate the public on issues of concern, to mobilize political will and resources to address global problems, and to celebrate and reinforce achievements of humanity” (United Nations, 2023) ). We have nothing against the raising of awareness and the need to take political action, but we would rather like to offer a reflection on two critical and historical challenges related to these global events: (a) the implementation of global water fora accords from global-to-local governance, and (b) the need for broader and inclusive participation of different stakeholders, with particular focus on water issues.

As stated in the title of this contribution, we want to start making the distinction about the need to address natural resources not only from environmental perspectives but also as socio-environmental matters, which involve the interaction of natural resources and societies. Because not every human has access to safe water and sanitation, there is a main World Water Day on 22 March; but the subject is also embedded in the World Wetlands Day (02 Feb), World Health Day (07 Apr), International Mother Earth Day (22 Apr), and World Environment Day (05 Jun), to mention a few among other development and climate change days and fora. The interconnectedness and indivisibility of global environmental problems are the “new” approaches adopted by the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda. However, these sustainability objectives require a change in the administrative culture of multilevel governments and institutions. Currently, the 2030 Agenda works in a “top-down” manner as international norms are implemented by nation-states and subsequently, sub-national authorities. Consequently, a centralized sectoral approach to address water objectives prevails (Cetina Arenas et. al., 2022; Pliego Alvarado & Kauffer, 2023).

Furthermore, the 2030 Agenda frames sustainable development as interconnected in nature (Aguilar Léon, 2022; Koff et. al., 2020). This should not only concern regions or political objectives, but interconnectedness should also include networks of interconnectedness stakeholders. The 2030 Agenda aims to promote dialogue, interactive participation, and coordinated strategies and actions. Stakeholders in this agenda include community water managers, local agencies and institutions, public water operators, environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academia, and so on. The inclusiveness of this agenda presents serious challenges to effective governance and the UN system of summitry has found it difficult to respond as meeting formats and content have not adapted. They have squarely fixed on the participation of representatives of nation- states. For example, the UN aforementioned ‘mega’ Conference on Water was held March 22–24, 2023, at the UN Headquarters in New York, USA. The authors of this article participated in official sessions as well as parallel events pre- and post-summit organized by environmental civil society. Despite the 2010 UN declaration of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, billions of people around the world still lack daily access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation services. Therefore, the media considered this to be the most important water-related event since the first UN Water Conference took place in 1977, in Mar de la Plata, Argentina, 47 years ago. The discussions in the 2023 conference were vibrant and informative but their impact must be questioned.

The official part of the Summit consisted of six plenary sessions and five so-called interactive dialogues on the following themes: (1) Water for health: access to water, sanitation, and hygiene, including human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. (2) Water for sustainable development: water assessment, water-energy-food nexus, and sustainable economic and urban development. (3) Water for climate, resilience, and the environment: from source to sea, biodiversity, climate, resilience and disaster risk reduction. (4) Water for cooperation: transboundary and international water cooperation, cross-sectoral cooperation, including scientific cooperation, and water across the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. (5) Decade for Action on Water (2018–2028). All of these dialogues are directly linked to the spectrum of targets included in SDG 6 and interlinked to some points of SDGs 1, 4, 11, 13, 16, and 17. For more depth on these topics, we list the concept papers for each dialogue in the references at the end of this article. The dialogues were all interconnected but not so broadly interactive as expected.

Due to the relevance and urgency of the issues to be addressed, the World Water Conference generated great expectations among stakeholders in different sectors, particularly from representatives of civil society organizations including Indigenous peoples and rural women. The civil association SENDAS AC, was one of the few Mexican organizations that obtained timely accreditation to participate in this summit also as member of the Fresh Water Action Network (FANMex), and the Latin American Redes del Agua (Water Networks), a platform of Latin American organized civil society that articulates efforts to guarantee the human right to water and sanitation and to advance policies of integrated water management with a focus on gender, environmental, and climate justice. SENDAS AC participated as part of these networks in civil society actions throughout the week of the conference.

Redes del Agua co-organized four highly relevant side events in collaboration with other international NGOs: the presentation of the Manifesto for Water Justice, the Heard from Unheard session, Action for Water and Human Rights, and finally Sanitation and Menstrual Health. These events aimed to put the human rights of the most marginalized people at the center of the international water agenda, and they were attended by Mr. Pedro Arrojo Agudo, Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, among other personalities. The Manifesto for Water Justice has been signed by more than six hundred thousand people and more than five hundred organizations. During the Conference, the Manifesto was delivered to the representatives of different countries and was read in the plenary of the General Assembly.

One of the main demands of Latin American civil society organizations during the UN Water Conference (and other regional processes) is the formal recognition of community-based water management as a fundamental cornerstone in rural and peri-urban areas in this region. Part of the demand is that these community organizations can be formally recognized in national water laws and constitutions, making them subject of law to management and access to public resources in order to meet the demands of water access and administration, which they already carry out for honorary community charges.

Nevertheless, although Redes del Agua was fully prepared to represent the needs and convey local realities from Latin America in this conference, the official sessions did not open space to listen these stakeholders during the so-called interactive dialogues. In general, these sessions gave priority to present the achievements of state members on water supply and sewer coverage. Few countries expressed the recognition of local communitarian water management. Civil society was present, as were representatives from indigenous communities, the opportunity to listen to unofficial unheard voices existed, but the official sessions did not seem ready to take it.

For the authors of this article, it was extremely important to be present both at the conference and at the parallel events. Mostly, to feed the analysis of the results of the “Water and Citizenship” project that we developed collaboratively between SENDAS and INECOL, with the support of the RISC-RISE Consortium, project PRONAII-Conacyt 318971, Rio Arronte and End of Water Poverty. Since 2022, we launched a campaign for the survey of citizen perceptions on water to learn first-hand the perceptions of urban and rural dwellers on the importance of water and its efficient use, provide a space for diverse opinions on the subject, and identify citizen knowledge on the human right to water and sanitation. These themes are aligned with the forementioned international conference and its parallel events. The sustainable and equitable use of water is also a matter of local aspiration, and the first results of the survey allow us to argue that the plurality of voices/opinions on the urgent water situation should be considered for a collaborative and reciprocal water management (Aguilar Cucurachi et al., 2023).

The World Water Conference and the pre- and post-conference activities and events aimed to position access to safe water as the number one priority of the various sustainable development agendas. However, the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, where water is a common good and not a commodity, was a bit diluted from the main focus of the summit. The Special Rapporteur on this right, Mr. Pedro Arrojo, wrote a post-conference statement where he expressed his disappointment at the lack of attention that the Conference gave to human rights, especially after the recommendations from the 2022 Human Rights Council Social Forum “Water for Human Rights and Sustainable Development,” which urged the Conference to incorporate a human rights-based approach to water and sanitation. “Such an approach was unfortunately neglected during the Conference, and appears nowhere in its outcome” (Arrojo Agudo, 2023). Mr. Arrojo urges all States to recognize the human rights to drinking water and sanitation in national laws and develop budgetary and other public policies to implement these rights for all, prioritizing those two billion rights holders in their policy, programs, and funding provisions. Furthermore, Mr. Arrojo highlights what he considered a defining moment of the Conference, which, however, happened in the margins of the official program: the Water Justice Manifesto (supported by Redes del Agua among other NGOs and representatives of Indigenous peoples, and various social movements up to five hundred organizations, and counting). This unprecedented document, with the capacity to broaden the participation of different stakeholders on urgent water issues, is still calling for the attention of Member States.

The 2030 Agenda aims to pursue “transformative development” under which “nobody is left behind.” Nonetheless, its summits continue to follow “business-as-usual” blueprints that impede the integration of human rights perspectives. This is astonishing given the widespread recognition of the importance of human rights approaches to water management. Koff and Maganda (2016) show how the European Union's rejection to implement human rights perspectives in their water cooperation projects undermine their legitimacy and sustainability. On the contrary, the literature on water solidarity during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Serrano & Gutierrez Torres, 2020) highlights the potential benefits of human rights approaches, which are driven by a plural system of stakeholders for resilience and sustainability.

The UN Water Conferences are presently a forum for declarations. Representatives of nation-states make declarations within the conferences and the UN transmits concerted declarations when they are finished. However, these forums would more effectively serve their purpose if they included opportunities for world leaders to listen. Representatives of civil society understand the daily challenges of water management faced by citizens in places where water is scarce. Indigenous community leaders can explain the links between marginalization and water access. Rural women's associations address gender bias in water systems. The Special Rapporteur's presence in the parallel sessions organized by civil society was as important for his listening as it was for his declarations. More than ever, it is urgent to reach multisectoral agreements where water management is promoted in politically coherent and equitable ways, taking into account citizen perceptions. This cannot be accomplished without spaces for community participation. The 2023 Water Conference began with the message that “we are not on track to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 on water and sanitation for all.” In our opinion, this reflects a clear challenge within the UN system to implement goal 17, which focuses on strengthening partnerships for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. If nobody is to be left behind in water provision, then nobody should be left behind in water governance.