Powerful concepts emerge from genuine thinking about hard problems. The policy and funding systems that surround water management then do to those concepts what water does to soft rock: wear them smooth until nothing sharp remains. For the institutional habits that protect this process from examination, see Governance Cannot Reflect on Itself. For the knowledge that gets lost and rediscovered in the same motion, see The Loop of Reinvented Knowledge.

The labels that water management borrows from genuine thinking — nature based solutions, climate resilience, integrated management, evidence based practice — are required by policy and funding systems before they are understood, applied before they are tested, and hollowed out in the process.

A concept earns its label through hard thinking. Nature based solutions emerged from a real insight: that ecosystems can perform water management functions that infrastructure performs less well and at greater cost, and that working with natural processes is often more durable than working against them. Climate resilience named something genuinely important: that systems need to be designed not for the conditions of the past but for the uncertainty of the future. Evidence based practice insisted that interventions be grounded in what actually works rather than what sounds plausible. These were useful tools. They carried real content.

Then they entered the policy and decision-making chain.

A concept that becomes a policy priority becomes a requirement. International frameworks commit signatories to it. National strategies mandate it. Programme guidelines require it. Approval processes check for it. At each step, the concept acquires more authority and less definition. By the time it reaches the engineer rehabilitating a canal, or the water manager designing a community intervention, it has become a paragraph in an introduction — present because its absence would raise questions, not because it is shaping any decision being made.

The people writing that paragraph are not acting in bad faith. They are responding rationally to a legitimate pressure. The project needs approval. The approval requires the label. The label is applied. This happens at every level of the chain simultaneously, which means the hollowing out is not a local failure of integrity but a systemic outcome of how the chain is structured.

The tragedy is not just that the label loses meaning. It is that the loss of meaning destroys the thinking tool that the label was pointing at. Nature based solutions, when the concept still carried content, gave practitioners a genuine framework for evaluating whether an intervention was working with or against natural processes. Once the label can be applied to almost anything — because almost anything can be described as working with nature if the description is written carefully enough — that evaluative function disappears. The label that was meant to sharpen thinking becomes a reason not to think.

There is a further irony that this pattern shares with The Loop of Reinvented Knowledge. The practices now travelling under the label of nature based solutions are frequently centuries old. Communities in Bangladesh, in the Nile delta, in the Dutch polders, managed water by working with natural processes long before the concept had a name. The label did not discover these practices. It repackaged them in language that policy systems could process — which is not without value, but is much less than it claims to be.

The same cycle now visibly forming around evidence based practice is worth watching. The original insistence was sound: interventions should be designed and evaluated against evidence of what works. Imported into a policy chain that requires the label without the rigour, it produces a new documentary genre — the evidence base section — that cites studies selectively, treats correlation as causation, and calls the result evidence based. The label has been separated from the practice it was meant to enforce.

When a label is required by the policy or funding system surrounding a project, treat that requirement as a prompt for scrutiny rather than compliance. Ask what the concept meant before it became mandatory, what specific decisions it should be shaping in this project, and whether those decisions are actually different because of it. If the answer is that the label is in the introduction but nowhere else, the concept has been applied as decoration. Strip it back to the original insight and work from there — or name honestly that the requirement is administrative rather than substantive.

When the same evasion operates through causal attribution rather than vocabulary, see The Incomplete Attribution. When crisis briefly creates conditions in which hollow labels can be replaced by genuine rethinking, see Never Waste a Good Crisis. When technical vocabulary is used to substitute for governance solutions, see Technical Solutions for Social Problems.