InnWater is a 36-month Horizon Europe project that aims to renew multi-level, cross-sector water governance through social innovation, backed by economic and financial mechanisms that support the EU Green Deal while maintaining the sustainability of water systems. Its core idea is of the OECD that many water crises are governance crises, so the project does not focus only on hydrology or infrastructure, but on how institutions, stakeholders and incentives can work together better. To do this, InnWater developed and tested governance tools, citizen-engagement methods, economic models and a digital governance platform across 5 pilot sites in France, Italy, Spain, the UK and Hungary, each representing a different water challenge.
Methodologically, the project combines 4 strands: improved governance assessment, citizen engagement, economic and financial modelling, and an integrated governance platform. The governance side includes a diagnostic approach based on 16 principles across effectiveness, efficiency, trust and engagement, and sustainability/resilience. The economic side includes cross-sector and tariff-related modelling tools intended to help basin authorities, regulators and other decision-makers understand trade-offs between water use, economic activity and environmental objectives. Hungarian project partners contributed to many of these sub-topics. In a hands-on workshop at the Hungarian regulator MEKH Université de La Réunion and REKK demonstrated InnWater’s micro-simulation model for tariff design.
The project’s pilot-site work besides the local issues to explore functioned as a testing ground of the methodologies developed.
The Middle-Tisza pilot in Hungary was one of the 5 demonstration areas and focused on water allocation and retention in a lowland agricultural landscape. The region faces both floods and increasingly severe droughts, while water demand is rising across agriculture, drinking water, tourism, ecology, industry and other uses. REKK co-led the Tisza pilot tasks, with KÖTIVIZIG, the local water authority partner and operational host.
A large share of the Middle-Tisza work carried out by REKK and KÖTIVIZIG centred on farmland water retention. The project identified farmers as the key stakeholders because water balance was seen as the most critical issue in the region and because soils and the existing canal network offer significant - but underused - potential to store water between seasons. Their joint work combined KÖTIVIZIG’s territorial and hydrological knowledge and data with REKK’s economic and governance analysis. Early group discussions with farmers later shifted toward one-to-one exchanges when it became apparent that participation in retention measures would depend heavily on perceived risks and weak traditions of collective action overwhelmed by compensation expectations. This shift gave a more realistic view of farm-level decision making and of the institutional barriers to implementation beyond subsidies.
In practical terms, REKK and KÖTIVIZIG organised a sequence of stakeholder discussion on drought management, water allocation and the role of modelling and cost-benefit analysis. Workshops with farmers and water managers explored irrigation limits, soil moisture loss and the un-sustainability of current land use by presenting analyses on evaporation trends, soil moisture and interseasonal storage, identifying parcels suitable for retention, and discussing targeted inundation of agricultural land together with the need for compensation and cooperative arrangements.
The main outcome of the Middle-Tisza pilot was not an immediate land-use reform, but a much clearer diagnosis of why adaptation tends to fail. The project concluded that the main barriers are not technical water scarcity or lack of infrastructure; they are organizational, institutional and economic. Existing systems could deliver more off-season water, but incentives are misaligned, meso-level coordination is weak, and farmers are reluctant to take on risks without credible compensation and predictable rules. In that sense, the REKK-KÖTIVIZIG pilot made a concrete contribution: it reframed the regional problem from one of pure infrastructure deficit to one of governance design, incentive structures and collective-action capacity. That diagnosis, and the tested mix of stakeholder dialogue, governance assessment and economic reasoning, appears to be the pilot’s most important legacy within InnWater.
The Middle-Tisza pilot experiences were summarized in a policy brief and the colleagues of REKK and Kötivizig also published a detailed analysis of the 2025 drought events unfolded in the pilot area and the articulated policy innovations that the InnWater approach support in the Hungarian Journal of Hydrology.
