Descriptive Fields
Water challenges rarely fit into neat boxes. Droughts, pollution, competing uses, and climate risks cut across sectors and territories, while decisions are spread across multiple institutions and levels of governance. This is why InnWater builds on two closely linked foundations: Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), which encourages managing water, land, and related resources as one interconnected system, and multi-level governance, which focuses on how responsibilities, policies, and resources can be aligned across local, basin, national, and European levels.
Across the five pilot sites, from La Réunion to the Middle Tisza basin, InnWater shows that integrated thinking only becomes effective when coordination mechanisms actually work in practice: shared planning, clear roles, inclusive participation, and the capacity to adapt over time. In this section, we first introduce the core concepts and why they matter, then we look at how they translate into practical coordination, drawing on concrete examples and the kinds of tools and participatory approaches tested within the project.