From Insight to Implementation: Strategic Reflections from IWA 2025

A Proficient Projects and Advisory Perspective

The IWA Water and Development Congress & Exhibition 2025, held in Bangkok from 8–12 December, was a timely and necessary convergence for a sector under increasing pressure to deliver results, not rhetoric.

For Proficient Projects and Advisory, the Congress offered more than a global snapshot of water and sanitation challenges; it provided clear signals on where strategic advisory, institutional reform, and project delivery must now focus to unlock impact at scale.

Across five days of plenaries, technical sessions, high-level summits, and sector forums, one message was consistent: the future of water and sanitation will be determined less by the availability of solutions and more by the strength of the systems that deploy them.

Innovation Must Be Designed for Adoption

Innovation featured prominently throughout the Congress, but critically, the discourse has evolved. Rather than centring on technological novelty, discussions increasingly focused on whether innovations are bankable, governable, and operable within real institutional contexts.

From a Proficient Projects and Advisory standpoint, this shift is significant. Smart water systems, digital monitoring tools, AI-enabled analytics, and early warning platforms were repeatedly positioned as enablers of better decision-making and operational efficiency. However, speakers were equally candid that without regulatory alignment, workforce capacity, and sustainable financing models, such tools risk remaining confined to pilot programmes.

This reinforces a core principle of our advisory work: technology must be embedded within reform pathways that address institutions, incentives, and long-term operations. The Congress validated the need for advisory models that integrate technical design with governance, financial structuring, and implementation readiness.

Sanitation as Infrastructure, Economy, and Climate Strategy

Sanitation emerged as one of the most mature and action-oriented tracks of IWA 2025. Conversations moved decisively beyond access metrics to examine sanitation as a system that intersects public health, climate resilience, urban development, and circular economies.

Citywide inclusive sanitation, decentralised systems, and resource-oriented approaches were consistently highlighted as practical responses to rapid urbanisation and climate stress. Importantly, these discussions framed sanitation not as a cost centre, but as an infrastructure asset capable of generating environmental and economic returns through reuse, recovery, and resilience.

For Proficient Projects and Advisory, this aligns directly with our emphasis on structuring sanitation investments that are technically sound, financially viable, and institutionally anchored. The Congress reinforced that sanitation strategies must be planned with the same rigour as transport, energy, and water supply infrastructure, particularly in climate-vulnerable regions.

Utilities and Institutions Are the True Scale Constraint

Mid-week forums, including the Utility Leaders Forum and the International Water Regulators Forum, placed institutional performance firmly at the centre of the agenda. A recurring insight was that many countries already possess proven solutions, yet struggle to scale them due to fragmented governance, weak utility management, or misaligned regulatory frameworks.

From our perspective, this was one of the most consequential takeaways of the Congress. The discussion shifted from “what works” to “why what works is not scaling.” Utility leadership, organisational culture, financial sustainability, and regulatory clarity were repeatedly identified as decisive factors.

This underscores the growing demand for advisory support that goes beyond project preparation to include utility reform, performance benchmarking, governance diagnostics, and long-term institutional strengthening. The Congress affirmed that the path to SDG6 runs through capable institutions, not isolated interventions.

Climate Resilience as a Baseline, Not an Add-On

Climate resilience was no longer treated as a thematic strand, but as a baseline requirement across all water and sanitation planning. Flooding, drought, extreme weather, and water scarcity are now embedded assumptions rather than future risks.

Sessions on nature-based solutions, adaptive infrastructure, and integrated urban water management highlighted the need for planning frameworks that can absorb uncertainty and shock. For advisory firms, this represents a fundamental shift: climate resilience must be designed into projects from inception, reflected in financing structures, and reinforced through governance mechanisms.

At Proficient Projects and Advisory, this reinforces our approach of integrating climate risk assessment, resilience planning, and adaptive governance into infrastructure and public sector advisory from the outset.

Collaboration as an Operating Model

The Congress consistently emphasised that no single actor can deliver water security alone. Governments, utilities, development banks, private sector innovators, regulators, and communities were repeatedly positioned as co-producers of outcomes, not parallel stakeholders.

This has direct implications for how projects are conceived and delivered. Effective collaboration requires clear institutional roles, aligned incentives, and governance structures that enable coordination over the long term. The Congress validated the need for advisory frameworks that can convene actors, structure partnerships, and translate collaboration into executable programmes.

From Congress to Commitment

As the Congress concluded, the prevailing sentiment was clear: the sector does not lack knowledge, but it does face an execution gap. IWA 2025 provided frameworks, evidence, and shared language. The responsibility now lies in translating these into policies, investments, and projects that deliver lasting impact.

For Proficient Projects and Advisory, the Congress reaffirmed our strategic focus on bridging this gap. The future of water and sanitation depends on integrated advisory that aligns innovation with institutions, finance with governance, and ambition with implementation.

IWA 2025 was not an endpoint, but a checkpoint. The work ahead lies in turning insight into infrastructure, dialogue into delivery, and collaboration into measurable outcomes.