Partnering with Civil Society for More Inclusive Water Solutions

Early engagement
Engaging CSOs throughout the project cycle—from diagnostics and design to implementation, monitoring, and evaluation—rather than limiting engagement to consultations enables CSOs to contribute knowledge of urban, peri-urban, and rural contexts, including informal settlements and water-stressed areas. This helps identify social and affordability risks early, tailor technical solutions to local realities, and ensure water and sanitation interventions respond to community needs.

Clear roles and expectations
Well-defined scopes of work and partnership arrangements enable CSOs to contribute effectively. Clear roles, such as community outreach, hygiene promotion, grievance redress support, or service monitoring, align expectations among utilities, local governments, and CSOs. Evidence from participatory governance and WASH initiatives shows that clarity of roles strengthens service delivery performance.

Inclusion of local and community-based organizations
Water user associations, women’s groups, cooperatives, youth associations, and farmer organizations bring legitimacy, contextual understanding, and trusted networks that facilitate community buy-in, promote equitable access, and strengthen ownership of systems.

Transparent communication and feedback
Structured feedback mechanisms in water projects—such as citizen scorecards, community audits, or joint monitoring committees—enable two-way communication between service providers and users. CSO-facilitated feedback loops strengthen accountability, help identify service gaps, and support adaptive management.

Capacity strengthening as a two-way process

Sustainable engagement requires mutual capacity strengthening. Projects may invest in CSO skills for facilitation, safeguards monitoring, or data collection, while CSOs strengthen government capacity on social inclusion, gender equality, and participatory governance. This two-way learning improves institutional responsiveness.

Improved inclusion and equity
In ADB’s Funafuti Water Supply and Sanitation Project in Tuvalu, CSOs and community organizations led household consultations and hygiene awareness campaigns for women and vulnerable households. Their trusted presence increased acceptance of new systems and improved equitable access.

Stronger project quality and relevance
CSOs provide socio-cultural insights that engineers and planners often lack. In India’s West Bengal Drinking Water Sector Improvement Project, the SIGMA Foundation co-developed Water Safety Plans grounded in local practices.

Enhanced social accountability and safeguards performance
In Tajikistan, the Dushanbe Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Project engaged a local youth organization to conduct willingness-to-pay surveys and to support tariff reform consultations, strengthening affordability analysis, transparency in tariff setting, and enhanced stakeholder trust.

Increased sustainability and long-term ownership
In Nepal’s Third Small Towns Water Supply and Sanitation Sector Project, water user and sanitation committees were trained in operations, maintenance, financial management, and governance. This support improved the sustainability of community-managed systems.

Innovation and adaptive learning

CSOs introduce social innovations such as behavior change campaigns, social enterprise models, digital feedback tools, and community-based monitoring systems that enhance learning and adaptability. In Nepal, CSOs trained local volunteers to use smartphones to capture household-level data on household water access, sanitation use, and hygiene behavior.

Map and assess CSO ecosystems early
Stakeholder mapping during project preparation helps identify credible partners with relevant expertise or geographic presence. Early partner identification improves alignment.

Co-design solutions through participatory methods
Participatory approaches, such as community co-creation workshops and human-centered design, foster shared ownership. Evidence from Nepal’s Small Towns Water Supply and Sanitation Sector Project indicates that co-designed water solutions increase willingness to pay and reduce system downtime.

Use CSOs to bridge engineering and social dimensions
CSOs help translate technical designs into culturally rooted solutions. In the South Tarawa Water Supply Project in Kiribati, CSOs helped ensure that technical design choices were grounded in social realities. During project preparation, CSO-led workshops and surveys captured community preferences and affordability constraints, feeding this evidence directly into the engineering process. As a result, infrastructure design decisions were better aligned with how households use them.

Integrate social accountability tools
Citizen report cards, community scorecards, and participatory audits have demonstrated success in improving service delivery. Evaluations from Cambodia under the Implementation of Social Accountability Framework (I-SAF) show improved service provider responsiveness when CSOs lead community monitoring.

Formalize partnerships through flexible procurement and financing modalities 
Recognizing CSOs as delivery partners enables contracting approaches aligned with their comparative advantages. ADB projects increasingly use partnership agreements and output-based approaches to support CSO roles in awareness raising, mobilization, capacity building, and monitoring. The Sourcebook for Engaging with Civil Society Organizations in ADB Operations provides practical guidance on flexible CSO-appropriate procurement modalities—such as output-based terms of reference, milestone-based payments, and simplified application procedures—that help project teams contract CSOs effectively, including smaller and community-based organizations.

Building on a growing portfolio of experience, ADB is moving beyond consultation and toward structured collaboration with civil society across the project cycle. In the water sector, evidence shows that such engagement enhances both the quality and durability of development outcomes.

Meaningful CSO engagement is central to achieving SDG 6 on water, SDG 5 on gender equality, and SDG 17 on partnerships. Projects designed and delivered with CSO participation are more inclusive, socially attuned, trusted, and sustainable. For ADB and other development partners, this requires institutionalizing and mainstreaming CSO engagement.

ADB’s new institutional civil society operational approach offers an opportunity to systematize these practices—strengthening the internal ADB CSO Anchors Network, clarifying engagement pathways across the project cycle, and providing staff with tools, guidance, and incentives. Water sector teams, in particular, can further operationalize participation by integrating CSO roles in design, capacity building, monitoring, and community-led operations and maintenance.

For policymakers and project officers, the implications are straightforward: invest early in CSO partnerships, resource these collaborations appropriately, and apply tested social accountability tools to enhance transparency and citizen feedback. Such actions accelerate progress toward resilient, inclusive, and community-owned water systems.

ADB’s water sector shows that when civil society is an active partner, projects reach further, last longer, and deliver more equitable benefits. As ADB deepens its collaboration with CSOs through an enhanced institutional approach, it is advancing a vision of water governance rooted in inclusion, trust, and shared responsibility.

The future of water security in Asia and the Pacific depends on more than infrastructure—it relies on partnerships that empower people to be part of the solution.

ADB Institutional Resources on Civil Society Engagement

Asian Development Bank (ADB). Civil Society Briefs.

ADB. 2025. Highlights of ADB’s Engagement with Civil Society Organizations 2024.

ADB. 2024. ADB Civil Society Approach: An Operational Approach to Enhanced Engagement, 2025–2030.

ADB. 2022. Working Together for Development Results: Lessons from ADB and Civil Society Organization Engagement in South Asia.

ADB. 2021. A Sourcebook for Engaging with Civil Society Organizations in Asian Development Bank Operations.