TROSA’s Rivers, Rights and Resilience Forum 2025: Building on a Legacy of Regional Collaboration

From May 5–7, 2025, TROSA, through its Rivers, Rights and Resilience Forum (RRRF), convened over 150 online participants from across South Asia and beyond for three days of insightful exchange, reflection, and recommitment to equitable water governance in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) river basins. TROSA hosted the online event marking a pivotal moment for the programme, now in its final year of implementation under current funding for phase II.

With the theme “Strengthening Cooperation for Equitable Water Governance”, the Forum underscored the growing urgency of safeguarding riverine ecosystems and the rights of communities who depend on them.

The participants included TROSA partners, researchers, civil society leaders, indigenous advocates, youth, and regional institutions who convened across multiple interactive sessions to explore pressing issues from the impacts of climate change to shrinking civic spaces in the region and reshaping narratives on transboundary water sharing to tools for measuring community resilience.

• The complexity of assessing resilience in layered geographies like the GBM underscores the value of community-led monitoring, local indicators, and participatory data tools that can help in documenting the lived realities of local people.
• Citizen science, journalism, storytelling, and data-driven reporting can reframe rivers as shared lifelines and spaces for collaboration rather than contention and challenge prevailing narratives about transboundary rivers as sources of conflict.
• The difficulty frontline communities face in accessing meaningful adaptation resources calls for mechanisms that are not only climate-just but also community-informed and locally accountable. Local voices are often absent from global finance mechanisms.

The RRRF 2025 underscored the commitment to amplifying grassroots voices and lived realities. Breakout sessions explored how community media, citizen science, and traditional ecological knowledge can inform national and regional decision-making.

A defining theme of the RRRF2025 was the value of partnership and regional solidarity. From Bangladesh’s flood-prone districts in the Brahmaputra to Nepal’s Mahakali basin and India’s Meghna estuary, stories shared by TROSA partners illustrated how regional cooperation grounded in mutual learning can build resilience from the ground up.

Despite differing national contexts, participants consistently highlighted how platforms like TROSA and forums like the RRRF have provided rare and vital spaces for trust-building, learning, and joint action across borders. These relationships remain one of TROSA’s most enduring legacies, and several speakers noted the importance of protecting and strengthening these networks as the programme looks toward its close.

Conversations sparked at RRRF 2025 must continue through TROSA’s partners, digital platforms, and shared knowledge infrastructure, laying the groundwork for future collective efforts, and reinforcing the value of sustained investment in long-term, partnership-focused and community-centred initiatives.

TROSA’s RRRF 2025 was a reminder that even as funding cycles shift, the solidarity built among communities, partners, and practitioners must remain a cornerstone for future initiatives in water governance in South Asia.