The World Water Forum is an initiative of the World Water Council that has the aim of raising the awareness on water issues all over the world. As the main international event on water, it seeks to enable multi-stakeholder participation and dialogue to influence water policy making at a global level, thus assuring better living standards for people all over the world and a more responsible social behavior towards water issues in-line with the pursuit of sustainable development.

The World Water Fora are built on the knowledge, experience and input of different types of organizations active in the global water polity. It is a venture founded on the principles of collaboration, partnership and innovation.

In October 2003, the Board of Governors of the World Water Council awarded the organization of the 4th World Water Forum to Mexico. The Forum will take place in Mexico City in March 2006.

The main theme of the 4th World Water Forum is Local Actions for a Global Challenge. The organizers of the 4th Forum share the belief that, regardless of their root causes, water related problems have their greatest impacts at the local level. As a result, local actions are key for generating concrete results that, when amalgamated across sectors and regions, will move us closer to meeting the water-related targets set by the Millennium Development Goals, the WSSD Implementation Plan and Local Agenda 21.

Approaching water issues from a local perspective embraces the strong conviction that contemporary societies harbor a tremendous potential for addressing them, provided they are capable and willing to enable local action. Thus, the preparatory process and the activities of the 4th World Water Forum will seek to harness the practical, intellectual, financial, and political means to support local action on a global scale. The aim is to reach commitments to remove the barriers for local action and create opportunities for its thriving.

When reflecting on local action, it is important to consider it as a process which is not necessarily individual, small-scale, insular, or parochial. On the contrary, it usually requires multi-stakeholder participation, networking, synergy and collaboration amongst many different types of social actors and policy sectors. Perhaps a good way to proceed in the description of why local action is important in water policy processes is through the deployment of the subsidiarity principle.

In the field of water policy, the subsidiarity principle refers to the notion that decisions and actions upon each specific water issue or problematic should take place at the lowest competent authoritative level and as close to the citizens as possible. Accordingly, for each issue or problematic there is a most efficient and effective institutional-social array that should function at the lowest and most appropriate politico-administrative level, taking into account the prevailing demographic, physical, political, socio-economic, cultural and technical conditions. This situation implies that there are no universal solutions!

It is important then to emphasize that institutional-social arrays embarking on local actions are never devoid of history and future and the paths they take seemingly hinge on their capacity to adapt, innovate and procure a sense of collective purpose that every so often turn them into authentic democratic and vigorous political communities.

A local perspective should then recognize and address, for example, the value of new financing schemes supportive of local action, democratic and empowering institutions and political processes, the need to embark in capacity building and social learning processes, the importance of technological innovation and application science, the need to create ad hoc targeting and monitoring schemes, etc.

The 4th World Water Forum will review these and other decisive factors in the accomplishment of common goals, searching to enable an improved involvement and empowerment of local actors in the social construction of solutions to water issues and a more appropriate channeling of domestic and international support for local actions worldwide.