Transferring water management knowledge: how actors, interaction and context influence the effectiveness of Dutch-funded projects in Romania

Countries around the world face pressing, often similar, water problems. International projects in which knowledge is transferred from one country to another can contribute to solving these problems. Building on the experiences of three Dutch-funded flood risk management projects in Romania, this research investigates the effectiveness of externally supported knowledge transfer projects. The focus of the research is on the dynamic interactions between actors and their diverse motivations, cognitions and resources. In various chapters, we introduce insights about policy implementation, policy and knowledge transfer, governance, evaluation, knowledge management and social learning. We use these insights to examine the supportiveness of Romania’s governance structure, the criteria affecting the effectiveness of knowledge transfer projects, the interactive process between actors with diverse knowledge backgrounds, processes of social learning and the influence of contextual factors. Furthermore, we compare the effectiveness of the three studied cases using the evaluation framework that was developed. We demonstrate that international water projects, which are implemented with external support, are less effective than hoped for. The interactions between various actors enable the sharing and acquisition of knowledge, but do often not result in the actual application of knowledge. Follow-up actions are needed but get stuck in the absence of an actor who is able and willing to coordinate or take the lead in the mobilization of (financial) resources. We recommend moving towards a longer term perspective on international water projects. Such a perspective involved that projects are seen as learning processes, which can form the building blocks for the realization of the desired outcomes