Your Excellency Vice Minister Hu Seyi, respectable Steering Committee members, and other colleagues from the Ministry and from Gansu and Liaoning provincial water departments and case study offices.
I am very pleased to be here this morning at the official launch of the Central Case Study of the Water Resources Demand Management Project.
In February 2005 I travelled with some of you to both provinces for the official launch of the provincial case studies. It is great to hear today – 3 years after the project’s start - how much progress your teams have made in raising capacity for implementing integrated water resource management practises in the various case study contexts. I am pleased to hear that the project has been instrumental in providing guidance to a number of government plans, like for example the Shiyang River Basin Master Plan.
I am also pleased that some of the provincial case study activities will be extended and that additional activities are going to be implemented at provincial level till mid 2009. These activities will continue to address your priorities in water demand management in these two scarce river basins and in water scarce China in general. They will also include important work on the impacts of climate change and adaptation, an area which the UK intends to work with China under its future UK-China Adaptation Programme.
But today, our focus is on the Central Case Study, an incredibly important instrument to bring out lessons learnt, policy recommendations and guidelines and technical notes for nation-wide dissemination. An approach that has proved to be successful in other DFID funded projects.
Firstly, I like to reinforce the special nature of this project. WRDM has neither been designed as an investment project, nor as a research project or short-term policy study. It is, as we say in English, a project “at the coal face”, testing and building capacity at various levels on how to best implement the 2002 Water Law with respect to demand management. As you know, this is done in challenging conditions of not only water resources but also financial and human resources. It is based on the day-to-day work of your people in the various provincial, municipal and county level agencies, involving a range of stakeholders. Not at all an easy task… and therefore, the central case study dissemination work will not only focus on content – what to do - but also, and as important, on process – how to do it. The audience for the Central Case study is therefore diverse. This means that all dissemination materials and events would need to be well targeted and communicated, making full use of your champions of change in the provinces at national level.
Secondly, I like to express my sincere appreciation of your determination to appoint an excellent team of ministerial staff, representing the important departments within your Ministry. Building on a strong leadership of the Water Resources Department, the Central Case study team cannot do its job well without real involvement of other departments like, Planning and Programmes, Policy and Legislation, Rural Water, Finance, Science and Technology, etc. This is not just about dissemination and communication itself. It is also about the crucial ownership of, and coordination within the Ministry vis-à-vis the project’s recommendations and lessons learnt. I hope this will ensure sustainable impact at the end of dissemination phase.
Thirdly, I highly appreciate you putting in place a senior level Steering Committee to exercise leadership and provide supervision and strategic guidance. This will be an important management mechanism to ensure that the Central Case Study deliverables are achieved timely, are of high quality and well coordinated across departments.
Let me conclude by fully underlining Vice Minister Hu’s comprehensive observations and recommendations regarding the tasks ahead for the project team, and especially the Central Case Study.
I hope and expect the Central Case study to be implemented effectively and efficiently and look forward to being closely associated with forthcoming dissemination events. I am briefed that on the 26th of May, the Gansu experience in water resources modelling will be presented at a seminar co-hosted by Tsinghua University on “Advanced Tools for Water management”. This will be the first dissemination of project experiences and I am confident that many other occasions and events will follow. I wish you a productive and rewarding two years ahead of you.
Thank you.
