Bringing Governance Levels Closer Together through Water and Climate Resilience
Guest Blog by Dani Gaillard-Picher , who is Senior Policy Advisor for the Water Resilience Tracker at the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation. While working on my master’s degree in Global Development Management, I became fascinated by one persistent challenge in sustainable development: the gap between global processes and local action. I remember suggesting this subject as a thesis to one of my advisors who just sort of shook his head and said, “Ah yes, the eternal conundrum…” Central governments design policies. Local governments implement them. Yet, even when they agree on the same overall goals, global, national and local actors operate in entirely different political, institutional and practical spheres with very different time horizons. Sometimes the complexity of implementation is vastly underestimated or is not accompanied by sufficient resources. Policies that sometimes work beautifully on paper, struggle in practice. Years later, this “eternal conundrum” st...