How to drive successful legislative reform: Lessons from a roadmap on implementing water legislative changes

In 2023-24, Ricardo, with Australian Water Partnership funding, developed a roadmap to guide implementation of water law reforms in Vietnam (Figure 1). The reform requires coordination, investment, capacity building, and stakeholder engagement to achieve sustainable water management through tools like water accounting, licensing, planning, and river basin governance.

The roadmap, prepared by Laura Venables, Rachel von Gerhardt and Yvette Colton Principal Consultants, outlines a structured approach for legislative change, adaptable to any jurisdiction. Key insights include:

• Clear Policy Directions: Successful legislative change requires clarity on the problem, desired outcomes, and diverse, evidence-based perspectives to be considered. In real world settings it is common for policy underpinning legislative reform to fall short due to tokenistic consultation, political pressures, and unclear reform goals. Strategic leadership, inside and outside of government, is critical to overcoming these barriers.
• Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation: Implementation planning and ongoing assessment of success enablers and risks helps keep reform on track throughout its lifecycle. This may include gauging levels of political, cross-sector and stakeholder support, capacity and funding needs.
• Addressing Barriers: While legislation is being developed, various tasks can be undertaken to set it up for success. Identifying and resolving data gaps, securing funding and pilots, scoping and developing technical systems and governance, and capacity building are key examples.
• Engagement and Collaboration: Continuous stakeholder involvement underpins resilient legislative reform by drawing on diverse perspectives, fostering support, enabling adaptation based on experience and building compliance.
• Sector Influence: The water sector can drive policy innovation by providing practical insights based on experience to build justification for change, engaging early and throughout the legislative reform cycle to shape the policy agenda and engagement approach, building partnerships with policymakers, and conducting pilot projects to build confidence in policy directions.

The roadmap serves as a flexible guide for implementing legislative water reforms across all jurisdictions and scales. While implementing water reforms is rarely straightforward, following a practical process like that presented in this roadmap will help governments to prioritise and focus effort, build critical buy-in from key parties, and ensure reform objectives are being achieved throughout the reform cycle. Water sector engagement in the process will support better water management outcomes and drive innovation drawing on their operational experiences.