The Water Dissensus – A Water Alternatives Forum

University Distinguished Professor of Law, Illinois Tech, Chicago-Kent College of Law. Professor Tarlock was born and educated in California. His mother’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints ancestors pushed a handcart from Nauvoo, Illinois, arriving in Salt Lake City in 1852. His father’s Italian immigrant parents settled in Fresno in 1914. His interest in western water issues dates from early visits to relatives in Provo, Utah who explained why ditches filled with running water ran through the city.

Tran Bich is currently a doctoral student at IHE - Delft Institute for Water Education, and at the Technical University of Delft since September 2021. She studies uncertainties in evapotranspiration derived from satellite data and how the implication of these uncertainties in the evaluation of water resources. Prior to her PhD, Tran Bich worked as a research assistant at IHE Delft on the Water Accounting Plus (WA+) framework, which uses open access earth observation data and spatially distributed hydrological models to the assessment of water resources at the basin level. She has conducted several studies on water management and is interested in the uncertainties of these data, models and assessments of water resources.

Rozemarijn ter Horst has been working as a lecturer and doctoral student in the Water Resources Management Group at Wageningen University since October 2020. She studies how quantitative models influence water management and governance. To show how models are political, Rozemarijn ter Horst focuses on case studies in which models are introduced in the hope of reducing or resolving conflicts over shared water resources. In these case studies, she explores how data and technologies play a role in identifying generally accepted development options and how and when contestations (can) take place in this process. The case studies include the federal Kaveri (or Cauvery) River, shared by Kerala, Karnata, Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherri, as well as the aquifers shared between Israel and Palestine. Her research draws on science and technology studies and constructivist theories, and she seeks to work closely with those who develop and implement the models. Before working with Wageningen University, Rozemarijn ter Horst worked at IHE Delft on water diplomacy, and remains affiliated as a visiting researcher on cross-border water governance.

Dr. Hosna Shewly is a senior researcher at the Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Her research interest lies in three interconnected areas- environmental governance, inequality, and activism in the global South. 

Neha Khandekar is a researcher and policy advisor on subject matter water, agriculture, climate change, and inclusion. She holds a masters in water management and has worked in the Indian and South Asian region at sub-national, national and regional levels for the last 11 years. https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehajankikhandekar/

Alan Nicol is Strategic Program Director, Water, Growth nand Inclusion International water Management Institute.

Dr. Nancy McCarthy earned a PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley in 1996, and a JD from the George Mason University School of Law in 2009. In 2010, McCarthy founded LEAD Analytics, a consulting firm with a focus on natural resource management, governance, institutions; property rights and land tenure systems; and responses to climate change.

Dr Scheba has studied South African water governance, the lived impacts, and the emergence and drivers of endemic and spectacular water crises, over the past 15 years. Most recently, the author has examined the management of  Cape Town 'Day Zero' and the COVID-19 crisis in relation to impacts on the urban dispossessed. This work has included engagement with the social movements African Water Commons Collective (AWCC) and Reclaim the City (RTC).

Insaf Mekki is lecturer and researcher at INRGREF ( l'Institut National de Recherches en Génie Rural, Eaux et Forêts), Tunis, Tunisia

Andrea K. Gerlak is the Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona and a Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment.

Grace Harmon is an international development professional and Program Coordinator at Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture in Washington DC. She was previously a Research Assistant with Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation and has a background in project management and qualitative and quantitative policy analysis. Her interests lie in community-led sustainable development, agriculture/food systems, and renewable energy solutions. 

Maria Rusca is a researcher in Water and Society. Her work focuses on the politics of urban waters, large water infrastructures and hydrological extremes in various geographical contexts and at different scales. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to further understandings of uneven distribution of disaster risk and inequalities in access to basic services, and how these are experienced. She was PI of INHAbIT cities and UNHIDE, focused on the dynamics of urban waters in sub-Saharan Africa.

Chris Perry originally qualified as an engineer before he studied economics (PhD, University of Stirling, 1976). He worked for World Bank for more than twenty years, allmost entirely on irrigation and water resources topics, spending ten of those years in India. After the World Bank, he was at the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka for five years, from whence he “retired” but he’s still busy, having been an Editor of the Journal of Agricultural Water Management for five years, and continuing to work on other research and projects.

Dipak Gyawali is a hydropower engineer-political economist, an academician with Nepal Academy of Science and Technology and used to chair Nepal Water Conservation Foundation. He was Nepal's minister for water resources in 2002/2003.

Gabrielle Bouleau is a political scientist at INRAE, France. Her research focuses on environmental politices and the greening of policies in France, Europe and the US. She documents how new environmental issues reach the agenda and how they result into new political decisions, new compentences and new indicators.

Dr. Marie-Helene Nassif is a Lebanese researcher in the fields of water and irrigation governance. She is interested in multi-disciplinary and systemic approaches of water management and policy analysis. She privileges and enjoys empirical research methods and has extensive experience about the Bekaa plain agrarian and hydraulic history. She currently works as a consultant with IWMI as the national coordinator of the regional ReWater MENA project.

Jude Cobbing is a consulting groundwater hydrologist with 20+ years' experience. He holds an MSc in hydrogeology from London University and a PhD in groundwater governance from Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. Jude has worked in South Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

Kris Hartley is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Program Leader of the Masters of Social Sciences in Sustainability and Development Studies in the Department of Public and International Affairs at City University of Hong Kong. He researches global-to-local policy transfer in the application of technology to sustainability transitions. Kris holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the National University of Singapore (Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy) and a Master of City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jonatan Godinez-Madrigal is a postdoctoral researcher on global transitions in water distribution regimes at IHE Delft. In his research, Jonatan bridges the dichotomy between objective, technical expertise and the more subjective socio-political expertise needed to understand complex socio-ecological issues. By combining mixed methods, such as longitudinal, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research, he is able to simultaneously study the historical, social, and biophysical dimensions of water-related conflicts and socio-technical transitions. 

Dr. Carl Middleton is an Assistant Professor and Deputy Director on the Graduate Studies in International Development Studies (MAIDS-GRID) Program, and Director of the Center for Social Development Studies (CSDS) in the Faculty of Political Science of Chulalongkorn University, Thailand.

Dr Karim Eid-Sabbagh is an independent researcher and documentary filmmaker based in Lebanon. His research focuses on political ecology, imperialism and sovereign development, water resource management, and agrarian transformation in social formations of the Global South.

Rossella Alba studies socio-ecological transformations and inequalities taking as a point of reference infrastructural relations and the governance of resources, and more particularly water. She works in an interdisciplinary manner by combining critical social science research with natural science approaches. ITHESys, Humboldt University, Germany

Linda Estelí Mendez-Barrientos is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where she leads the Environmental Policy & Justice Research Group (epjr), which is dedicated to understanding how inequality and power asymmetries shape institutional change processes and environmental justice. Linda is also the founder of s2e-Science to Empower, an environmental justice initiative that facilitates applied research to support the defense of human and nature rights. She is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, including the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (2016-2021), NSF Integrative Graduate Education & Research Traineeship (2015-2017), and European Commission Agris Mundus Scholarship (2008-2010). Born and raised in Nicaragua, she earned a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California Davis, and holds two master’s degrees, one on Water Management from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and the other on Tropical Agrarian Systems from Montpellier SupAgro in France.

Vishal Narain is Professor at MDI, Management Development Institute Gurgaon, India. He holds a PhD from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His academic interests are in analysis of public policy processes, water governance, peri-urban water security and vulnerability and adaptation to climate change. He has published widely on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of "Public policy: a view from the South (Cambridge University Press, 2018)" and recently co-edited "Water security, conflict and co-operation in peri-urban South Asia: Flows across boundaries (Springer, 2022)."

David A McDonald is Professor of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University in Canada, and Director of the Municipal Services Project.

Lyla Mehta is Professor at the Institute of Development Studies and Norwegian University of Life Sciences

Shilp Verma has around 20 years of experience in the water, energy, agriculture, and rural livelihoods domain. In his current role as Senior Researcher, Water-Energy-Food Policies, he leads the GIZ-IWMI project ‘Solar Irrigation Expansion in India’ and the ‘IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program’ besides providing leadership to IWMI’s work on sustainable resource management and economic growth in Asia and Africa.

Doug holds a PhD in Anthropology. He has over 40 years of experience in applied research, consulting, program design and evaluation and other services related to natural resources management, and especially water management. He has lived in India (2 years), Pakistan (4 years), Sri Lanka (17 years), Indonesia (9 months), Egypt (9 months), and South Africa (10 years); and made shorter working visits to many other Asian and African countries. His career began with 18 months of field research on irrigation management in a small village in Pakistan. He subsequently worked for over 20 years at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), where he held several senior positions including Deputy Director General of Programs and the founding Director for Africa. Since 2008, he has worked as an independent consultant for many international institutions and consulting firms. He has numerous publications, many reflecting his substantial interdisciplinary experience. He is a Global Fellow at the Robert B Daugherty Water for Food Institute at the University of Nebraska and is the Associate Editor for the “Dissensus Form” of the free online journal Water Alternatives. Doug now lives in Gainesville, Florida, USA.