“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly — R. Buckminster Fuller
Our added value
Transitions in water and solid waste management often emerge incrementally — driven by regulatory changes, financial pressures, and evolving stakeholder interests — until the business landscape is fundamentally altered. The challenge lies not simply in developing an action plan, but in building the capacity to adapt continuously to changing circumstances and stakeholder expectations.
Sustainable Synergies supports infrastructure operators and the institutions that work with them by expanding their field of vision, integrating diverse expertise into a unified framework, developing capacity for new management models, and facilitating the strategic partnerships needed to act. Our distinctive contribution is equipping organisations with the intelligence tools necessary to adapt to resource efficiency imperatives — and translating that understanding into collaborative projects built on genuine organisational synergies rather than loose compromises.
The service
The learning architecture described in our approach unfolds through four concrete steps, each building on the previous, to support infrastructure operators managing the transition to circular economy models in the water and solid waste sector.:
- Knowledge Mapping: We begin by establishing a map of the knowledge landscape: who holds what kind of knowledge, and where each actor’s field of vision ends. This step directly addresses the structural ignorance that prevents operators from seeing systemic change from the inside. The map of knowledge territories is also, inevitably, a map of the gaps between them.
- System Modelling: We explore the relationships between knowledge components by testing hypotheses about how regulation and management mechanisms actually function. This is a learning process that leads to building a working model of how the system behaves — necessarily approximate and contextual, but valuable precisely because it unifies understanding across actors and surfaces the key variables driving change.
- Sense Making: We assist organizations in evaluating hypotheses and constructing future scenarios for water and solid waste services. By analyzing these scenarios within the context of local conditions, we convert systemic insights into a comprehensive understanding of the implications for infrastructure and capacity requirements, including planning, governance, investment, stakeholder engagement, and monitoring.
- Capacity Building: We design and support collaborative projects that mobilise stakeholders around new organisational framework aimed at fostering adaptation and optimising resource efficiency. These frameworks must be supported by a range of capacity tools that enable operators to meet stakeholders’ expectations and to maintain consistent service standards at reasonable costs despite of the growing pressures.
Who do we work for ?
Our clients operate at every level of the water and waste management system:
- International institutions — European Commission, UNDP, World Bank — supporting investment in water and waste infrastructure
- National governments — designing policy and regulation in water and waste management
- Local governments — organising water and waste services while navigating competing stakeholder demands
- Infrastructure operators — managing water and waste systems on the ground