The world has made remarkable progress on water security over the past two decades. The task now is to move from those steady, linear gains to the exponential progress that universal access demands. The most under-recognized accelerant is sustained and action-oriented attention from the legislators who write our laws and pass our budgets.
In 2026, there is real cause for encouragement in the water sector. Over the past two and a half decades, around 2.2 billion people — close to a quarter of humanity — gained access to safely managed drinking water. That is one of the great public-health achievements of our age, and the outcome of sustained investment, better science, and the daily labour of utilities, engineers and ministries the world over.
But the work is far from finished. Today, 2.1 billion people still lack water security. With just over four years remaining to deliver Sustainable Development Goal 6 — safe water and sanitation for all by 2030 — current trendlines will not get us there on time.
Our progress, impressive as it is, has been largely linear when the scale of the challenge and the needs of the world’s most vulnerable communities demand exponential. Each year we connect more households and commission more treatment plants; each year population growth, climate volatility, and ageing infrastructure offset much of the gain. The question that should occupy us is not whether we are moving, but how to move faster. At some date in the future, everyone on the planet will have access to safe drinking water. How can we pull that date closer to today?
The knowledge exists to solve these challenges. The engineering exists. The financial instruments exist. Political prioritization – political leadership, not political will – is lacking.
Ministers serve at the pleasure of parliaments
Ministers of water, public works, and infrastructure deliver a public good of extraordinary complexity. Yet they do so with only the powers their legislatures grant them: the laws on the books and the funds appropriated in the budget. A water minister cannot spend a shilling that parliament has not appropriated, nor enforce a standard that parliament has not enabled. Technical ministries, in other words, work at the pleasure of legislators. When legislators prioritise water and pass the enabling laws, protect the budget lines, and hold the executive to account, those ministries can move faster.
Legislators at national and subnational levels hold three powers that no other institution possesses: they write the laws, they vote the budgets, and they provide accountability. Lawmaking, financing and oversight are the engine of progress in the water sector. And yet, in much of the global water conversation, the legislative branch is still often treated as an afterthought.
Reinforcing the bridges between evidence and policy
The foundations are already in place; in most countries, working relationships between technical ministries and elected representatives already exist. We need to strengthen and use those collaborations more deliberately to accelerate progress in the water sector. The same is true of the relationship between evidence and policy. The water sector produces an abundance of excellent science, yet too little of it reaches the committee rooms where decisions are actually made. Denis Naughten, a former Irish Member of Parliament and long-standing advocate for bringing research closer to policymaking, has put the challenge plainly: scientists and politicians share the goal of a better society, he observes, but too often speak different languages, and research risks being “buried in academic publications” rather than shaping policy. “This,” he says of the gap between evidence and decision-making, “is the bridge we must build.”
Legislators are uniquely placed to do that bridge-building. They are the people who can convert ideas into accelerated action, and evidence into laws and budgets, and ensure they are properly implemented.
Two calls to action
At the Parliamentary Segment of the 11th World Water Forum’s preparatory process, convened in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in June 2026, that argument crystallised into two straightforward calls to action from the Global Parliamentary Water Network — one to the water sector, and one to legislators themselves.
The first is addressed to the water sector: reach out and reinforce relationships with the legislative branch. Too many water convenings still take place without a single legislator in the room; too many national water strategies are drawn up without consulting the parliamentary committees that will be asked to fund them. Water is political — the laws are political, the budgets are political — and the leaders who make those laws and vote those budgets should be at the table, briefed and consulted from day one. Make sure the data gets into the right hands and work with legislators to translate it into legislative action. And do not stop at national parliaments: governors, mayors and county councillors oversee the local utilities and municipal budgets closest to the communities we serve.
The second call is addressed to legislators: show up, and then do the harder work. Showing up at UN Water 2026, at the World Water Forum in Riyadh in 2027, and in our own committee rooms and constituency offices when we return home, is only the beginning. The harder work is partnership: sitting down with ministers of water, finance and health not as adversaries but as allies in acceleration; engaging the civil-society organisations who know our communities; and opening the door to the private finance without which the funding gap will never fully close. In Uganda we describe this as a three-legged stool — elected legislators, technical officials and civil society, working together. When the three legs are all strong, the stool holds. When one is missing, it collapses.
Getting ahead of the threats
The prize for getting this right is not abstract. Droughts will come, but famines are optional. Famine is, very largely, a failure of policy and preparation. Floods will come, but a cholera outbreak in their wake is not destiny, but a preventable lapse in readiness. Legislators can lead their countries to get ahead of these threats rather than forever responding to them: building resilience before the dry season, and hard-wiring resilient water and sanitation into health systems before the floodwaters rise. This is what distinguishes genuine political leadership from political will.
Political will is a sentiment; political leadership is a practice — the discipline of directing scarce resources at a challenge before it becomes a crisis. The shift from linear to exponential progress will come when we see more genuine leadership.
When parliaments prioritise water, the outcomes are tangible: stronger laws, larger and more reliable budgets, and sustained accountability for water, sanitation and hygiene — not only in households, but in the healthcare facilities and schools where the absence of water is indefensible. Consider that an estimated 17 million women each year give birth in health centres without adequate water, sanitation and hygiene. In 2026, that is unfathomable — and it is precisely the kind of injustice a determined legislature can help to end. Legislators can see to it that every health centre where a child is born has running water. They can ensure that every school has safe drinking water. And they can ensure that their governments are properly equipped for the transboundary diplomacy that water increasingly demands.
Water knows no borders
For water does not respect borders. Transboundary rivers, lakes and aquifers account for some 60 per cent of the world’s freshwater flows, and 153 countries share at least one international basin; yet only around a fifth of those countries have operational arrangements to manage their shared waters. As scarcity intensifies, the quality of that transboundary dialogue will help determine whether shared waters become a source of cooperation or of conflict. Here too, legislators have a part to play: funding and mandating a professional corps of water diplomats, ratifying the agreements that govern shared basins, and insisting that their countries come to the table prepared. When parliaments prioritise water, they unlock the human, financial and technical assets that the whole enterprise depends upon — for water, sanitation and hygiene at home, and for water diplomacy abroad.
The architecture for all of this already exists, and it is maturing. The Inter-Parliamentary Union convenes the world’s national legislatures; the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association links parliaments across more than 180 jurisdictions; Climate Parliament mobilises legislators on energy, climate and water; and networks such as ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) connect the mayors and councillors on the front line. Alongside them, the Global Parliamentary Water Network is founded on a simple conviction: parliaments write the laws and pass the budgets that can accelerate progress. The task is not to build a new institution, but to connect and strengthen the ones we already have, and to point them, together, at water.
Accelerated progress does not come from communiqués. It comes from a law passed in a national assembly, a budget line approved in committee, a governor who resolves that every healthcare facility in her district will have safe water, proper sanitation, and handwashing stations within five years. As the world’s water leaders prepare to gather in Abu Dhabi later this year, and Riyadh in 2027, our shared hope is modest in form and ambitious in substance: that the legislative branch will be found not on the margins of those gatherings but at their centre — and that the bridges we reinforce there, between evidence and policy and between technical and political leadership, will be the ones that finally carry us from linear progress to exponential.
This op-ed was originally published by The Water Diplomat on 6 August 2026.