CECAN Fellowship: Developing a policy evaluation approach for water sector and local government collaboration on sustainable drainage solutions
Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) are becoming increasingly critical in addressing urban water management challenges. Effective implementation often requires collaboration between water companies, developers and local government, which can be complicated by a number of interrelated factors, such as: fragmented governance and policy frameworks where responsibilities and priorities differ across sectors; a lack of long-term accountability, particularly around ongoing maintenance and system performance monitoring over time; and the delivery of multiple, often synergistic benefits that matter differently to each stakeholder. Many of these benefits are also deeply embedded within broader and evolving environmental, social and economic systems making it difficult to isolate the contribution of SuDS alone.
These complexities make evaluation particularly challenging – measuring success and impact requires frameworks that can account for shared responsibilities, long timeframes, and the diverse and overlapping outcomes valued by different actors. Current evaluation approaches are often not sufficiently holistic, integrated, or designed to assess long-term, multi-sector collaborations. They struggle to reflect the full range of impacts SuDS deliver, to assess system-wide outcomes, and to evaluate how well these multi-stakeholder partnerships might function in practice. The result is a gap in our ability to understand, evidence, and improve the real-world effectiveness of local government and water sector collaboration on SuDS delivery, which this fellowship will address.
About Hannah
Formerly Head of International Operations at the Local Government Information Unit, Hannah is now a Senior Innovation Associate at Ofwat, where she works on the delivery of their £600m Innovation Fund. The Fund supports the development and rollout of innovative water projects while fostering a sustainable innovation ecosystem within the UK water sector. Drawing on her background in local government policy, one of her current focus areas is promoting collaboration between the water sector and local government to address shared challenges such as urban drainage, and she is particularly interested in place-based, catchment scale approaches to water management.
