New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Página 3

New Water Policy and Practice - Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 Editorial: Welcome to New Water Policy and Practice Journal It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to New Water Policy and Practice Journal: a platform for the world’s emerging water leaders and thinkers. T he growing global water challenges are well documented. Increasing pressure on the world´s water resources has translated into new and more interconnected challenges. In response, water management has also changed over time with the introduction of new disciplines, new techniques, new language, and new thinking. Ecology, economics, and other social sciences have all progressively added to the historic hydrology and engineering base. More recently, sociology, anthropology, and social psychology have also become part of solution to the challenges of water management. This has required re-thinking of some of the previously integrated terms and encouraged a more rigorous definition of the concepts used by different specialists. There has been a shift from seeking solutions within individual scientific disciplines to multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinary solutions and, more recently and increasingly, to transdisciplinary thinking and approaches—to seeking solutions in the interstitial spaces between scientific disciplines. There has also been a shift towards globalisation of both problems and solutions. As problems become more connected, they are also increasingly globalised. Recognition of this globalisation of water problems has triggered awareness of the opportunity to draw ideas and possible solutions from a world of practical experiences in both similar and different contexts. To address the increasingly complex water challenges the world is facing, we need transversal approaches to develop new and innovative methods that link theory and practice, management and policy. The inspiration for New Water Policy and Practice Journal came from long experience and involvement in different dimensions of water management and governance, and from several highly integrated water education