Many water crises are, at their root, crises of water governance and management. To effectively respond to water crises driven by governance and management failures, there is a need for empirical, comparable, global information on the state of public water management.
In an effort to fill this data gap, this technical note tests a novel data collection approach that relies on crowdsourcing data from multinational enterprises with operations across many geographies. The approach was piloted with six contributing multinational companies, and the results were validated in eight locations in the region of Southern California (United States) and the state of Maharashtra (India).
The pilot study suggests that the new data collection approach is scalable and has the potential to generate a global dataset of public water management capacity. The field validation exercise suggests that the collected data are mostly viewed as valid by local experts and stakeholders, but the exercise also identifies a number of weaknesses. Based on these findings, this paper presents an updated survey that improves upon the original survey used in the pilot study.