Capacity Development and Cultural Heritage: Toward a New “Culture of Water”

In 2020 UN Water, the entity coordinating the United Nations’ work on water and sanitation, identified capacity development as one of the five accelerators required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal on Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6). In today’s practical application, capacity development is mostly financed to deliver a product specified in advance, not to arrange a longer time frame and process to structurally learn from various activities and discover sustainable development paths (Alaerts and Zevenbergen 2022). The inclusion of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage in our joint-learning efforts will help us enlarge capacity for a more sustainable culture of water.