Why MELIA?

Research on water management is and has been a priority in national and Euro-Mediterranean projects, especially in the INCO-Med programme.

However, it has also been observed that the product of these research programs and projects find difficulties to transform in concrete proposals to improve the efficiency of water use and its management due to the lack of dialog between the different protagonists.  It find it also difficult to link with the all chain of decisions in respect to water management.

Sometimes, the experts enhance technical solutions for some problems, but often they do not consider the social, economic or political links and implications of technical solution, leading to the failure of the applications of their model.

On the other hand, the policy and decision makers make policies or take decisions on water management that imply enormous investment without considering the long-term effects from technical, system maintenance and socio-environmental point of view.  In most of the cases, the decisions related to water management ignores the opinion of the end users and do not call for their commitment and participation.

There exists a general perception that water management models and schemes are still constructed from points of view that ignores contributions from all the key stake-holders, specially users and citizens, and local cultural and economic sensibility, which are determinant to generate the necessary efficiency of water planning and management, and the collective concern on its issues.

Another general perception in the Mediterranean area is the lack of visibility of the important role that Science and Technology play in the sustainable development of the region.  Part of these problems is due to communication gaps between political bodies, administrative institutions, scientists, sociologists, lawyers, economists, end-users and citizens.

MELIA Community of Practice aims at structuring a dialogue among the key stakeholders concerned and affected by water use and management, such as scientists, professionals, decision makers, policy makers, water providers, media professionals, educators and citizens. In this view, there is a need for horizontal and vertical integration and dialogue.  These are the fundamental justifications behind MELIA CoP.The achievement of this dialog and the dissemination and exploitations of the recommendations obtained will create real added value at the European and Mediterranean scale.

The Core Group partnership of MELIA has been structured in a way to include, on the one hand, players with experience in the scientific, technical and socio-economic sectors, experienced in past or on-going European, national or regional projects and networks and committed to a dialog without prejudices.  On the other hand, other players such as basin management organisations, water suppliers to cities, industrial groups, agriculture water users, NGO with contrasted experience in day to day management of water related issues, knowing perfectly well the limits of the actual management systems, the expected demand and the possible baseline of the future conflicts. 

The presence of groups and administrations from different sectors and countries will allow MELIA CoP to create a wide dialogue and Forum to tackle the conflicts related to water availability, on the grounds of up to date scientific and technical knowledge, considering also social, economic and cultural perspectives. In this way MELIA CoP is in the condition to propose consensus scenarios for promoting a convergence of the water policies in the Euro-Mediterranean region.