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Water is a basic human need, a finite life support system and a key to prosperity. Unplanned industrialisation, urbanisation and impact of liberalised import of wastes intended for recycling have negatively affected the water environments in India. This is further exaggerated by lack of discipline and a weak obligation towards conservation and pollution prevention. Measures have to be especially taken to resolve the groundwater problems. While groundwater resources are quite well assessed, overexploitation still occurs frequently. There has been a considerable lack in implementing existing policies as well as developing new laws and policies. To mitigate the problems, co‐operation needs to be mobilised at all levels of the federal set up with the stakeholders and the people at the lowest appropriate level concerning planning and decision making. Water must be considered as a national asset and a basic human right to be provided to citizens in proper quantity and safe quality with equity and fairness amongst the users.

Management of inter-organizational projects focuses on the collective benefits of a group of organizations on a shared activity for a limited period and the coordination among them. However, how learning is facilitated in the inter-organizational project remains under-developed in the literature.

This research analyses the exploitative learning process in the longest tunnel project on land in the Netherlands realized in a densely populated area. Data were collected through archived documents, in-depth interviews, site visits in the ethnographic research to analyze the actors, the daily practices and social situations in projects.

The empirical findings indicate that exploitative learning is promoted positively between the owner and the contractor and internally within the contractor. The most significant change that the exploitative learning process has led to is the change in mindset toward the collaboration. Project culture is considered to be shaped by exploitative learning in the inter-organizational project. However, there is a gap between the transfer of knowledge from the inter-organizational project to the parent organization.

The findings have implications for understanding learning in the inter-organizational project setting.

The purpose of this paper is to review previous research on public appointments to systematize existing knowledge, identify gaps and discuss implications for future research in this field.

This paper is based on a systematic literature review, carried out using the Scopus database. We selected academic articles published in journals ranked in the 2018 CABS Academic Journal Guide plus public administration articles in journals classified by Google as falling within the areas of public policy and administration. The papers were analysed according to four categories: geographical area, theoretical framework, research method and organizational setting.

Results show the lack of research regarding areas like Latin America or East Asia; from a theoretical viewpoint, given the lack of explicit theoretical approaches, future research should have more formal and clear theoretical frameworks. Moreover, given the dominance of case study and review/reflection studies, alternative research methods, such as surveys or mixed methods are suggested for future works.

We identify a new research agenda to revive the focus on public appointments as a tool for intra- and inter-organizational governance in the public sector. Specifically, we argue that how the process of public appointments is managed has huge democratic implications, and public managers have a key role to play in that respect by designing effective governance systems and organizational procedures. The selection of papers has been limited to articles published in peer- review journals ranked in the 2018 CABS Guide; no distinctions have been made regarding journals' positioning in the ranking. Moreover, this work takes a managerial and organizational approach, while the research on public appointments is clearly interdisciplinary, with previous contributions coming mainly from political scientists.

Despite the relevant body of literature on this topic, this study represents the first manuscript to summarize the state of the art of this theme, providing a research agenda on this very relevant but quite neglected issue in public governance.