The challenges faced by urban water and sanitation utilities today—ranging from aging infrastructure to climate change, rapid urbanization, and growing inequalities in service access, and different economic zones in an urban environment —are too complex to be addressed by utilities alone. This is why multi-actor partnerships are crucial for a thriving enabling environment for utilities as front-line workers to provide services. Recent studies have highlighted that it is crucial to look at water, sanitation and solid waste in an integrated manner as basic services.

One of the most critical partners in this multiactor framework is the municipality or city authority. These local governments are often the legal custodians of water service provision in their jurisdictions, with the mandate to oversee, regulate, and support utilities.
City authorities ensure that all basic services are integrated into broader urban development plans, such as housing, public health, environmental protection, and climate resilience strategies. They also provide essential political and administrative support, which can be crucial for overcoming regulatory hurdles, facilitating permits, or mobilizing public funding. Municipal involvement also strengthens the long-term sustainability and scalability of water and sanitation services and solid waste management. When city authorities are engaged from the outset, they are more likely to adopt and institutionalize successful practices, replicate them across other departments or cities, and advocate for supportive policies at regional and national levels.
This session brings together experiences from various programmes on engaging multi stakeholder partnership in planning processes while featuring examples on how peer networks - support knowledge exchange across city governments, civil society, utilities, and technology partners in water, sanitation and solid waste.
Water as Leverage will be showcased as an example on how planning and finance solutions for urban water solutions from Nakuru, Kenya. Key principles of the Water as Leverage approach, such as inclusive planning from start to end, design-driven, bankability, global to local, multilevel action, and multistakeholder engagement will be highlighted from a utility perspective (VEI/Nawasco), included in the planning process.
The session will also explore strategies to strengthen collaborative governance by bringing together urban planning bodies, environmental regulators, public health institutions, civil society and community groups as key enablers for the city ecosystem.

Learnings and best practices on the power of peerlearning networks and regional partnerships (NFSSM Alliance , Parvat Manthan embedding resilience in climate-vulnerable hill cities, International Water Association network embarking on inclusive and resilient cities, CWISAN and FSM Network engaging in policy action and the scaling best practices) supporting knowledge exchange across cities.