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Better, swifter and more responsive international coordination is needed within our global financial system for the containment of the pandemic and its effects. This requires better international tax coordination with a higher global minimum corporate tax, comprehensive coverage of sectors and firms, inclusion of all current tax havens and more generous redistribution of excess profits to developing nations based on user location. There also needs to be a more substantial and easier-to-access mechanism for debt relief and restructuring, one that generously suspends debt payments in periods of crises and provides financial support without strict and painful conditionalities.

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On 1 November 2021, Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte delivered a speech at COP-26 in Glasgow, Scotland. He stressed the history of the Netherlands in 'battling the elements for centuries. From North Sea floods to Caribbean storms' (GoN, 2021). He further stated that '(climate) adaptation is in our DNA' and stressed that sustainability innovations carry economic opportunities. He finished the speech with a statement that the world 'can count on the Kingdom of the Netherlands', in other words, that the Netherlands is open for business.

This panel discussion session explores some of the central dimensions of the Crisis in the Anthropocene that constitute global social challenges in the context of development studies The conference theme highlighted the profound human impact on our blue green brown planet that is already breaching planetary boundaries and pushing us beyond the roughly 1 5 C tipping point This threatens liveability and sustainability in many localities and regions and may well rapidly be off the scale of imaginability and survivability Inevitably as mounting empirical evidence and increasingly clear projections by the IPCC and other authoritative bodies show these impacts are unevenly spread both socially and spatially both now and over the coming decades The urgency of appropriate action is undeniable and we already know many dimensions of the required adaptations and transformations Yet progress mostly remains too slow These challenges are vital to the development studies community heterogenous as it is with our concerns for tackling poverty inequality deprivation and environmental degradation globally and locally Hence this symposium asks what the crisis means for development theory policy and practice and what development studies can and should be contributing to and indeed whether it is capable of addressing some key dimensions that warrant greater attention

On 1 November 2021, Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte delivered a speech at COP-26 in Glasgow, Scotland. He stressed the history of the Netherlands in “battling the elements for centuries. From North Sea floods to Caribbean storms” (GoN, 2021). He further stated that “(climate) adaptation is in our DNA” and stressed that sustainability innovations carry economic opportunities. He finished the speech with a statement that the world “can count on the Kingdom of the Netherlands”, in other words, that the Netherlands is open for business.

In the past two decades, integrated water resources management (IWRM) has come to represent a dominant policy narrative in the field of water policy and governance. However, IWRM has come under strong criticism in recent years for what critics see as a poor record of implementation and heavy emphasis on technocratic solutions. We outline how the present debate around IWRM has become narrowly construed by focusing exclusively on IWRM as an analytical and prescriptive concept. We argue that this narrow conceptualization of IWRM, or the prescriptive epistemic form, which sets forth a set of guidelines for implementation in accordance with the logic of instrumentality, has in part resulted in a stalemate manifested in less research on the subject and scarcer attention of policy makers. To help advance beyond the stalemate, we propose two additional epistemic forms: discursive, as a point of reference for the discussion of power and values in water management and practical, or experiential and context-based understanding of water management. Recognizing this diversity of epistemic forms of IWRM to include the discursive and practical can create a shared space for multiple conflicting epistemologies and allow ways of knowing of non-expert stakeholders, thereby lessening the polarized nature of the discourse. Our typology of three epistemic forms—prescriptive, discursive and practical—offers public policy scholars a heuristic tool to approach policy concepts from multiple dimensions. Recognizing multiple epistemic forms requires new skills from policy workers and analysts, as well as institutional arrangements for articulating and translating across these forms.

The travel of policy ideas across countries is a widely acknowledged phenomenon. Conventional approaches to the study of this process hinge on concepts such as ‘policy transfer’, ‘policy diffusion’, ‘lesson-drawing’ and ‘institutional isomorphism’. These approaches are influential in understanding public policy; however, they assume perfect rationality of actors, the stability of governance scales and the immutability of policy ideas in their travel. I propose policy translation as a new approach to counter these shortcomings and study the travel of policy ideas in order to shed light on pertaining policy questions, such as whether the travel of policy ideas may be navigated, and if so, how. I illustrate the relevance and value of policy translation with a case study from the water sector in Turkey.

The purpose of this study is to assess the potential of Digital Social Platforms (DSPs) to enhance the governance capacity by facilitating a process of collaborative learning in the Key Demonstration Cities (KDCs) and beyond. The analytical framework applied in this study includes three steps. The first step is the water Governance Capacity Framework (GCF), which is a comprehensive analysis of the main enabling conditions that determine the governance capacity needed to address specific water challenges. The second step is the in-depth case study, which is an analysis of collaborative learning where we specifically focus on how learning takes place among diverse actors, and how a particular socio-economic, political, cultural and technological setting influence the process and outcomes of information sharing and knowledge co-production for dealing with various urban water challenges. The third step includes a reflection on the characteristics and the potential of the DSP to enhance collaborative learning and thereby improve the capacity to jointly govern water challenges in cities.

Although social learning is a key element of multilevel flood risk governance, it is hardly studied. This paper addresses this knowledge gap. The paper aims to identify enabling conditions for social learning in multilevel flood risks governance arrangements.We first conceptualize social learning and draw up a conceptual framework consisting of enabling conditions for social learning, using the literature on adaptive co-management, sustainable land and water management, and integrated flood risk management. Next, we apply this framework to analyze social learning in the context of the Dutch Room for the River program. Our interview results reveal that social learning about integrated flood protection measures took place at multiple levels. We found that a strong personal commitment to learning and mutual interpersonal trust in working groups are key conditions for successful social learning. Based on our analysis, we conclude with some recommendations for enhancing social learning processes in future flood protection programs.

Although social learning is a key element of multilevel flood risk governance, it is hardly studied. This paper addresses this knowledge gap. The paper aims to identify enabl

Collaboration among multiple stakeholders is crucial in decentralised governance settings. The success of such collaboration hinges upon collaborative learning–the acquiring, translating, and disseminating of policy-relevant knowledge. However, despite much research, a knowledge gap persists in the public policy literature on the relationship between learning and policy change. It is debated whether learning is necessary and sufficient for policy change, and if so, under what conditions. To contribute to this debate, this paper examined whether collaborative learning has had any impact on the emergence and implementation of sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS) in Leicester, England. We first examined implementation of SuDS in Leicester, and then study collaborative learning focused on SuDS. We found that implementation of SuDS in Leicester is marginal despite active collaborative learning that has resulted in the change in beliefs and attitudes towards SuDS among all policy actors in the setting. Social dynamics factors and leadership of two SuDS champions proved crucial for collaborative learning. We conclude that collaborative learning, while essential for legitimacy of a policy innovation, is not sufficient for policy change and a national legal and institutional framework is required to incentivise broader SuDS practices in Leicester and England.

In recent decades, adaptive governance has been advocated for meeting the challenges of unpredictable and uncertain dynamics of Social-ecological Systems (SES) (Folke, 2006; Huitema et al., 2009). Scholars ascribe a multitude of virtues to adaptive governance, such as, for example, the preparedness of populations for disturbances associated with climate change (Pahl-Wostl, 2006). Adaptive governance stands for a set of meta-principles of governance which contribute to making societies less vulnerable to various shocks. What adaptive governance should look like has been discussed at length in the literature on SES (e.g. Huitema et al., 2009; Ostrom, 2010; Pahl-Wostl, 2008). However, little is known about how such adaptive governance emerges and how we need to think about purposeful institutional change in its regard. In this chapter, we want to specifically address these two issues. Hereby we argue that work on adaptive governance should to a greater extent focus on the role of agency in the emergence of adaptive governance in order to derive appropriate ways to bring the institutional dimensions of adaptive governance about. We develop this argument about deeper understanding of agency by discussing the emergence and functioning of polycentric governance, which is commonly seen as an essential part of adaptive governance.

This article investigates how the "constructivist turn" in public policy and international political economy informs the interaction of global ideas and local practice in water governance. We use the implementation of ideas associated with IntegratedWater Resources Management (IWRM) in the Lower Mekong river basin. This article provides some explanation of the attitudes in the villages in Cambodia due to the Sesan 2 Dam, which would see the relocation of thousands of people, damage fisheries, and inflict high coping costs on villagers. Based on 24 in-depth interviews with villagers, commune heads and local community leaders, we find diverse narratives which transcend the "pro or anti" dam narrative. We find four narrative types-myths, stories, noise and informed opinion, which relate to each other in degrees of social meaning and ideational force. Of these, the first two are more likely to be useful in terms of mobilization and policy-making. This typology provides a framework for analysis of social change in the studied villages and other contexts of policy translation. We should state that these four types are not separate from each other but are linked along two axis which together conscribe the four types of narratives outlined.

Cleaning wastewater and using it again for secondary purposes is a measure to address water scarcity in urban areas. However, upscaling of recycled water schemes is challenging, and little is known about the governance conditions which are required for this. This paper addresses this knowledge gap. Based on a review of governance literature we suggest that five governance conditions are necessary for a successful upscaling of recycled water schemes: (1) policy leadership, (2) policy coordination, (3) availability of financial resources, (4) awareness of a problem, and (5) the presence of a public forum. We applied these concepts in a case study on the upscaling of a recycled water scheme in Sabadell, Spain. We reviewed policy documents, conducted a set of 21 semi-structured interviews, and attended two policy meetings about the subject. Our results suggest that Sabadell meets the required conditions for upscaling reused water to a certain extent. However, a public forum is not well-developed. We discuss the implications of this and conclude with some suggestions for fu