Author: Paul Cairney

This blog post describes developments in the FORTH₂O Policy Innovation Partnership. A change in our leadership team, coupled with a heightened focus on project delivery, prompted us to renew our vision for FORTH₂O. Principal Investigator – Professor Paul Cairney – reflects on progress to date and the new direction of travel (a longer version appears on Cairney’s website).

The FORTH₂O vision involves three main aims:

1. To forge collaborations between partners across research, policy and practice, private and third sectors, environment and ecology, and local communities.
2. To combine our resources and insights on social, economic, environmental, and ecological policy challenges.
3. To foster a more connected, resilient, and equitable water system that better serves the needs of people and the environment.

We devoted 2024 to collaboration and discovery, using the idea of a ‘water system’ as a lens through which to express aims and ideas. For example, people understand the value of water in many ways, such as a resource to be used for households, recreation, business, and tourism, or conserved to protect biodiversity and local community. Hence, maintaining a sustainable water system requires us to identify how people, businesses, communities, and governments use water, and the trade-offs that arise.

Our FORTH₂O eDelphi study facilitated these discussions by seeking expert consensus on what policy changes they sought, including to mainstream water in policy agendas, and facilitate policy integration, via new collaborations and engagement with trade-offs, while harnessing our  FORTH₂O Data Lab and supporting a place-based approach to wellbeing, biodiversity, and water-related risks to communities. Further, our underpinning research – on collaborative policymaking, systems leadership, and policy coherence – suggest that a skilfully managed FORTH₂O project can encourage new networks and ideas to emerge, and address policy barriers associated with organisational short-termism, silo-working, and a lack of collective vision for the water ‘system’.

From 2025, the FORTH₂O Commissioning Fund provided approximately £800,000 to 13 projects engaging with the ‘optimisation challenge’ themes that emerged from FORTH₂O collaboration, including: policy influence, data, productivity and value, connections, supporting economic development, natural capital, wellbeing, and heritage. Then, we reflected on the project aims as a whole (discussed in Cairney’s post) and identified five Innovation Challenges to set an agenda for the last phase of commissioning (application deadline – 16th January 2026 at 5pm):

1. How can we incentivise businesses and communities to work collaboratively to develop, capture, and generate opportunities for wastewater recycling? 
2. How can we incentivise small and medium enterprise (SME) innovation to maximise water efficiency and create resilient catchments? 
3. How can we ensure that water remains high on public, media, and policy agendas? 
4. How can we use holistic approaches, such as systems thinking or multi-dimensional analysis of value, to surface policy trade-offs and encourage decisive action? 
5. How can we better understand – and boost – demand and investment in water outcomes?

2026 is the year of FORTH₂O delivery. We have recruited a new team of researchers to help us understand how to: foster policy change and keep water up the agenda, conceptualise and measure the value of natural resources like water, encourage cross-industry innovation, encourage place-based approaches, and support storytelling and stories of the cultural and natural heritage of water in the Forth. Please watch this space for new developments, including to welcome our new Innovation Challenge partners and expanded FORTH₂O team.