The Shop

“WatShop – The science shop for sustainable water management” is one of the outputs of the EU project SciShops, which involves 18 public and private organizations from different EU Countries working together to create a new research method, based on a “bottom-up” approach where private citizens and civil society organizations are actively involved in the research process.

Led by the Department of Civil, Environmental, Architectural Engineering and Mathematics of University of Brescia, WatShop wants to support an active cooperation among civil society, public and private research institutes and companies, in order to build a smarter and more efficient system for the management of water. Like its “father” project, WatShop aims at showing the actual benefits of a community-based participatory research, that sees in the collaboration among beneficiaries (citizens and local organizations), researchers and contractors the key starting point to reach more effective results.

But what is a community-based participatory research approach (CBPR)?

It is a research method where scientists work together with associations, NGOs and civil society to create new forms of knowledge and better understand local problems. This type of approach can be used, for example, to obtain a change in the community. A Science Shop, therefore, is a research organization that makes its know-how available to associations and the civil society, in order to answer to research needs in an effective and participatory way.

How does this “bottom-up” approach work?

It is very simple: if you go to the Send us your idea page, you can send to the research team an idea or a project to work on to create a concrete action on the “Sustainable water management, control and consumption in a changing climate” theme. Water, the most precious natural resource, today more than ever, needs to be managed, controlled and used in a sustainable way, with special attention on its socio-economic and environment effects. The challenge implies the research for innovative and smart solutions to balance offer an demand keeping into consideration water disposal (water management), water control (defending the territory and the eco-system in wealth or scarcity conditions) and coordinating water use.