Governance assessment for circular economy based on water resources (GOCIWA)

This document presents the main output from Task 4.1: A tool for Governance assessment for circular economy based on water Resources (GOCIWA). Our objective is to provide a manual for systematic, qualitative assessment of the conditions, drivers and barriers to circular economy based on water-smart solutions in different governance contexts. GOCIWA builds on previous tools for water governance assessment but pays more attention to multi-sector interactions and the interplay between social and material factors. It was developed through an extensive literature review, then tested in the project demonstration cases and revised. The assessment consists of five steps; definition of scope, by mapping focal action situations, descriptive assessment of the wider societal contexts, structural context and specific context in question, and evaluation, where the descriptive findings are related to a set of evaluative questions, to identify and nominally rank barriers and drivers stemming from the different context levels. The evaluation is summarised in a simple scorecard, which provides an overview of the alignment across contexts and dimensions and provides a starting point for stakeholder dialogue and comparison between cases. The five steps are carefully explained and accompanied by simple assessment charts, operationalizing the key topics and questions for each step. Furthermore, the tool provides a detailed manual for application and support material, in form of an exemplary interview guide and an Excel sheet for data collection and analysis.