Technical and policy instruments alone are insufficient to address sustainable water governance challenges. Greater grassroots ownership and activation, as forms of fostering public engagement, are required to ground these instruments in participatory research and collective action. This paper presents the AQUA MOTION project, which addresses this gap by building on the S+T+ARTS model to promote innovation at the nexus of science, technology, and the arts, embedding artistic research and digital technologies within water governance structures to stimulate systemic innovation.It is grounded in a quintuple helix collaboration, with Water Innovation Labs as multi-actor platforms combining public authorities, researchers, civil society, cultural organisations, and industry, working to jointly define locally grounded water challenges across geographical contexts in Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, and Italy. These challenges guide the artistic residencies, in which artists work with water scientists and communities to prototype new ways of sensing, visualizing, and narrating water systems. This is deployed through a two-phase residency model that links artistic experimentation to societal and policy-oriented scaling. We present the methodological approach of AQUA MOTION and illustrate how it contributes to anchoring artistic practices as drivers of water research and governance innovation.Early implementation across the Labs signals how the model may create new spaces for stakeholder dialogue, strengthen water literacy, and open imaginaries for sustainable water futures. Additionally, it is the ambition of AQUA MOTION to offer a transferable methodology for integrating artistic research into mission-oriented environmental governance, science communication, and community-based innovation through a challenge-driven process, with potential application in related environmental

Authors:
Catarina Duarte, Atlantic International Research Centre, Portugal
Florian Michahelles, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Fruzsina Dézsi, Pro Progressione, Hungary
Rui Monteiro, Rio Neiva, Portugal
Raquel Ledo Doval, Hortimare, Netherlands
Patrícia Carvalho, INOVA +, Portugal

About the Presenter(s)
Catarina Paes Duarte is Project Officer and Events and Network Manager at AIR Centre. Her main interests include cultural diplomacy, art-science dialogues and international cooperation. She is currently project manager of S+T+ARTS AQUA MOTION project

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