Water Security, Participatory Governance, and Dialogue Spaces for Change in Northern Sri Lanka

Water Security through Participatory Action Research in the Northern Province (WASPAR) is a project driven by the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, since March 2020. The project itself and some of the significant outcomes over the 3-year first phase of research will make up part of the upcoming Special Issue of this journal. As guest editors of the Special Issue, we bring this note as a preface for what is to come in the collection, while also positioning the six contributed papers and one invited paper within the themes of Water Security, Participatory Governance, and Dialogue Spaces for Change, the latter two as emergent themes in the search for the first, Water Security. WASPAR took as its starting point the limitations of existing institutional and social structures and their fragmented ways of water management. Instead, it put forward the search for a holistic, trans-disciplinary, and multi-stakeholder approach for water security in the Northern Province. In that search, water security and water governance would become more relevant keywords in the project's research vocabulary to replace water supply and water management.