Collaboration and coordination in the United Nations 2023 Water Conference commitments

ABSTRACT The United Nations 2023 Water Conference brought together world leaders to commit to addressing water challenges and achieving water and sanitation for all. The conference resulted in the development of the Water Action Agenda (WAA), a collection of commitments from governments and organizations to address water issues. Achieving water security requires solutions that involve cross-sectoral coordination and collaboration between water and other resource governance sectors. Therefore, this research evaluates the collaboration and cross-sectoral coordination within the WAA through the lens of the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus to analyze the WAA commitments (n = 835). It quantitatively examines the amount of collaboration between organizations and the level of the multi-resource interconnections within the commitments. It then qualitatively analyzes how the WEF nexus is incorporated into the WAA. The results show that there is a high level of collaboration and multi-resource coordination across all the commitments and that the application of the WEF nexus includes increasing shifts from academic theorization toward implemented practice. However, limitations of the WAA are evident: there is limited accountability to ensure that commitments are fulfilled, and the commitments themselves may not represent the best actions to achieve water and sanitation for all.