From the end of World War II, the United Nations and Bretton Woods Institutions dominated the world water order. They facilitated funding for water infrastructure, and they defined norms, institutions and governance models. Thanks to their influence, river basin commissions and water user associations flourished around the world, and Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) plans have been drawn by hundreds of nations.

While this world water order had many problematic elements, the legitimacy of the key policy actors was clear, derived from the multilateral UN system. The Global Water Partnership, responsible for the rollout of IWRM plans, was founded by the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme. Regular reports by UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme and World Water Assessment Programme monitored progress on water governance, and UN-Water pursued the Millennium Development Goals and later the Sustainable Development Goals.

This multilateral order is now crumbling. Some new actors rose to global prominence in the past 15 or so years and have sought to commandeer the water agenda. One such actor is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which has positioned itself since 2009 as a central node and authority in water governance. It initiated the Water Governance Initiative, set up the Roundtable on Financing Water and co-hosts the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. Yet it has been characterised as “a club of rich countries” with a limited membership of 38 nation-states. Until recently, it has had a zero track record on water governance. How has the OECD risen to such prominence?

In a recent article in Water Alternatives, my co-authors and I examine strategies behind its emergence as a pre-eminent global advisor on water resources. We applied quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques to a corpus of 55 long documents produced by the OECD between 2009 and 2022. The total corpus constitutes more than 8000 pages. In addition to topic modelling, word frequency analysis and bibliographic analysis, we closely read a selection of reports and consulted the literature on the OECD and international organisations more generally. We applied insights from critical discourse studies to understand legitimation techniques. We discerned five such techniques.

First, the OECD followed a formula from its earlier engagement in other fields: first, manufacturing a declared consensus in contentious areas; second, formulating and disseminating blueprints for good governance; and third, developing and spreading corresponding frameworks to evaluate performance. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tool is an example. In water, the OECD came up with 12 principles of water governance and a framework of 36 indicators and 106 checklist questions to measure progress. As a result, complex and contextually dependent dynamics get reduced to a set of declared universal imperatives and indicators – a mechanical and politically naive rendering of water management.

The program’s second technique has focused on emphasising topics and themes with an established reputation, namely, “good governance” and “new public management”. These areas also connected strongly to seeking opportunities for private sector promotion. In contrast, clusters such as “water supply and sanitation”, “agriculture” and “climate change” received much less attention.

The third technique involved referencing a limited pool of external sources, mostly from other international organisations and consultancy groups, and underutilising the academic literature on the subject. We looked at 15 representative OECD documents; they referred to 965 different source documents. Out of these, the largest source domain was International Organisations, adding up to almost three times as much as academic sources. Of the 218 academic documents referred to, only 53% appeared in peer-reviewed journals. The OECD has referred much more readily to other International Organisations and private consulting companies than to peer-reviewed academic studies on water management and governance.

Fourth, the OECD referenced itself extensively in both formal citations and frequent in-text references. Of the 346 citations to International Organisations, more than half were citations to the OECD itself. This managed to strengthen an aura of credibility and make external criticism more difficult as its knowledge claims become circular. Fifth and finally, the OECD orchestrated temporary networks of actors to endorse its efforts and tools; for example, the Daegu Multi-Stakeholder Declaration launched in 2015 at the World Water Forum in Daegu, Korea, was coordinated by the “Global Coalition for Good Water Governance”, an entity that seems to no longer exist as of 2026.

Examined collectively, these techniques suggest the self-referential nature of the OECD’s authority in this new field. It bases its claims on a limited base of sources, prioritises self-referencing, consciously pursues familiar subjects that treat water management as a case study of New Public Management, and orchestrates ephemeral support networks. This is a weak grounding for authoritative knowledge claims. If the legitimacy gap of the OECD as an exclusive club and a newcomer in water is to be reduced, the organisation needs to become broader and more inclusive in its knowledge practices.

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