Under Pressure: Building Relational Water Stewardship Capability in Buyer‐Driven Agri‐Food Chains

Buyers increasingly demand water stewardship, yet it is hard to operationalize because water risk is place‐based, collective and only partly auditable. We develop Relational Water Stewardship Capability (RWSC), the relational capacity through which buyers, exporters and intermediaries align incentives, produce credible evidence and test water‐saving practice while protecting yield and quality. Evidence comes from an abductive multiple‐case study of the Tunisian date sector: 32 interviews, 15 days of observation and 190 documents. Three mechanisms generate RWSC: reframing water as a threat to supply continuity, cofinanced field trials that yield locally credible evidence and boundary spanning to producer organizations and agronomists. Contrasting cases show RWSC fails where buyer power lacks recognition and investment and where shared objectives meet no capital at producer level. We specify three pathways from dyadic capability to collective resource and find the fiscal one binding. Over a fossil aquifer, the process slows depletion without reversing it.