Response to Svenska Dagbladet’s article published on 25 October (Sweden’s announcement)

GWPO’s IGO status | Host country agreement in Sweden - what happens next?

In the interview, the Minister appears to link this decision to information published in the SvD article series, specifically to SvD’s reporting on the number of partners reported in our database of registered partners, which has grown steadily over the years as new organisations have applied.

While we welcome fair scrutiny, we strongly believe that decisions affecting international partnerships should be guided by transparent dialogue and fact-based evidence. Unfortunately, we were not given an opportunity to clarify our position to the Minister before this decision was made public, nor have we received responses to our requests, submitted to Svenska Dagbladet, to clarify the facts. GWPO’s documented responses and factual clarifications regarding the series have largely been disregarded, yet it appears that the newspaper’s reporting may have impacted Sweden’s decision to initiate the process of ending its Host Country Agreement.

As we have extensively documented, GWPO was in the process of updating that database, in accordance with our rules and procedures, when SvD performed its interview with us and published its article. We have extensively rebutted the way that article wrongly described our partner system generally, and the process of updating it specifically (as well as many other factual errors and misrepresentations in the SvD article series).

GWPO was informed of the decision by the Swedish Government – to seek parliamentary approval to end the host-country relationship – only hours before the announcement was made public in the Swedish press. We were not consulted in advance, and we have not yet been given the opportunity to talk to the Minister or to present our side of the story in the Swedish media (unfiltered by the reporters at Svenska Dagbladet).

We are concerned that the Minister has not had the opportunity to examine the underlying facts, including the complex governing Statutes – which can only be changed by the Government of Sweden itself and other Sponsoring Partners, who together created those Statutes – that hindered our process of database “cleaning” which had already begun early this year. We have transparently acknowledged that we accelerated the database update process, which was well under way, when reporters began asking questions about it. We believe this swift responsiveness should be seen as to our credit and not treated as an admission of wrongdoing. Since the crisis and related audit of 2023, we have been striving to make improvements as swiftly as possible and in good faith.

We have previously documented how this article series also contains numerous misrepresentations of fact and ungrounded claims that had already been investigated by auditors and funders in 2023. No corruption was identified. All problems identified for improvement by the auditors were related to policies, procedures, and management routines. GWPO had problems to address, and we addressed them: all requests for improvement in 2023 were acted on by us, expeditiously.

Despite these problems at our global secretariat in Stockholm in 2023, we continued to produce impressive and positive results for water security, around the world and throughout this period, as documented in our annual report for 2023. Under new leadership since February 2024, we have continued a rapid process of governance reform and organizational improvement. Our requests for extensive corrections from the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper to reflect this reality – including corrections of basic facts and figures – have mostly been ignored.

GWPO has published comprehensive statements regarding the claims and misrepresentations made in the entire Svenska Dagbladet article series. We have underscored that our operative network of regional and country-level affiliates is where the work happens, and that this is different from the membership base of registered partners. We have reported transparently to all our funders and partners about our process of updating the partner database, and we have explained our efforts to deal with the complex rules in our governing Statutes, mentioned above, that make this update process time-consuming and difficult.

We repeat that creating or revising our Statutes is the responsibility of the Government of Sweden itself, together with the other nations and institutions that form our governing group of Sponsoring Partners. The Statutes precluded us from simply deleting partners without due process. We at GWPO do not have the authority to change these Statutes; nor does our global Steering Committee.

GWPO accepts that Sweden’s decisions reflect the change in priorities of its national government. But GWPO does not accept that a grave misrepresentation of the facts in a major Swedish newspaper is now identified publicly as contributing to the basis of a government decision of this import. We take strong exception to the actions of Svenska Dagbladet and will be filing a formal complaint with the Media Ombudsman of Sweden.

Parallel to this, we will continue to hold a constructive dialogue with the government of Sweden. We hope to have the opportunity to meet with Minister Dousa and present the other side of the GWP story. If the Swedish Parliament does vote to withdraw from its Host Country Agreement with GWPO, we will work cooperatively with the Government of Sweden to effect this change – just as the government has written to us – in an orderly manner.

We regret, however, the international impact that Sweden’s public announcement will have on the many important water programmes happening throughout the broader network of GWP Regional and Country Water Partnerships around the world; and we especially regret that the Government of Sweden has publicly referred to the flawed reporting of a single newspaper as part of the basis for its actions.

GWPO’s IGO status

Host country agreement in Sweden - what happens next?