International WaTERS Graduate Fellowship Announcement
The International WaTERS Network is pleased to announce its first cohort of Graduate
Fellows. These Fellows represent International WaTERS’ interdisciplinary approach,
with shared interest and dedication to water equity issues in key sites of the global South.
These Fellows will work in support of our pilot collaborative research in Lima, Peru;
Cape Town, South Africa; or Bangalore, India.
International WaTERS is a network of scholars and practitioners that considers water
governance one of the most critical issues for the 21st century. The Network advances the
understanding water resilience and security in the face of increasing climatic and
hydrologic variability through particular attention to the governance, socio-institutional,
and equity dimensions of this challenge, notably in the global South. International
WaTERS is currently funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada. Please see our website for more information: www.international-waters.org
Anuradha Sajjanhar
Anurada’s academic and professional experiences have led to a
growing interest in the political economy of water flows, particularly
in relation to agrarian livelihoods and urbanisation. She completed a
BA in English Literature from the University of York (UK) (20072010), followed by an MA in Sociology from the Delhi School of
Economics (2011-2013). Over the last two years, she has worked at
the Brookings Institution India Centre to study techniques of resource
distribution. She has focus on the structural legal-political institutions
governing food distribution and water ‘rights’, threats to water
sources, and drivers of food production. During the course of this
research, Anurada examined legal documents and Model Bills (both
national and state-specific), conducted interviews and domain
analyses, and analyzed data on food production, nutrition, and water
use. This multidisciplinary research has helped her understand the techniques of policy in development –
tools that will support her endeavor to analyze governance and urban-rural transformations in India’s
structural transition.
In the winter and summer of 2016, she will study the case of water use, politics, and inequity in
Bangalore by focusing our research on two case study sites, conducting interviews with government
officials, water system managers, urban and village users, and members of the local water scientific and
activist network. She has identified two sites of significance in and around Bangalore: first, the newly
industrialized zone in the North, and second, the peripheral rural zone from where water is being tapped
and trucked for the urban market. By studying these two sites, she wants to gain a strong understanding of
the governance structure being put in place to guarantee land and water and public services to new
industries and residential complexes in the construction area in the North, and at the same time, be able to
explain the system of water transference from the rural to the urban, and its effects on livelihoods and
ecologies in the rural areas where water is being tapped.
Lena Hommes
Lena is an MSc student of International Land and Water
Management at Wageningen University, The Netherlands.
During her Bachelor in International Development Studies she
became interested in topics of natural resource management
and particularly those related to water governance, large scale
hydraulic infrastructure developments and water rights. Within
that area of interest her BSc research focused on the political
dimensions of dam development in southeastern Turkey while
her Master thesis was about challenges of water management
in the watersheds of Lima, Peru.
To discover more about the latter topic, Lena is now planning another research project in the Lima region
with the support of the International WaTERS Graduate Fellowship. Her project will be about hydro-social
territories in Lima’s watersheds, thus the multidimensionality of water management that entwines aspects
such as physical water flows, hydraulic infrastructure as well as socio-cultural arrangements and discourses.
She will study three particular cases, namely about water transfers for Lima City, water contamination
through mining and groundwater extraction for agribusiness in order to show how arrangements about
water management become negotiated and contested by different actors on multiple scales. Lena’s research
is part of the International WaTERS Network and the Water Justice Alliance and will be realized under the
supervision of Prof. Dr. Ir. Rutgerd Boelens.
Mariel Mendoza Flores
Mariel Mendoza Flores is a Sociologist at The Pontifical Catholic
University of Peru and currently studying for a masters degree in Water
Resources Management at the same university. She has worked on an
interdisciplinary research project related to water scarcity in the basin of the
Ica river. Her interests focus on research about the provision of water and
sanitation services in urban and rural areas; as well as irrigation
organizations in rural communities. Currently she is a member of the “water
and city”. She will be working together with other members of the
International WaTERS Network on water issues in our pilot site of Lima,
Peru.
Lucy Rodina
Lyudmila (Lucy) Rodina is a PhD student at the Institute for
Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and a Liu
Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, at the University
of British Columbia. In her research, Lucy explores the
intersection of water governance and climate change in urban
contexts using a social-ecological systems approach. More
topically, she examines the nascent challenges to the
governance of urban water under changing precipitation
patterns, extreme flow events, droughts and freshwater quality
concerns. She seeks a deeper understanding of the ways in
which climate change affects both water resources and existing governance frameworks. What is at stake?
How well suited are urban water governance frameworks to dealing with these challenges? Lucy is also
interested in systematically investigating recent critical approaches resilience, and to evaluate the ways in
which resilience thinking can be successfully applied to urban water governance under climate change.
This will help to envision what a water resilient city would look like – a topic that remains relatively
unexplored.
Lucy completed her MA at IRES with Dr. Leila Harris, working on water governance and the
human right to water in South Africa. Before starting her Masters, Lucy was involved in a water
development project in Nepal, focused on building irrigation canals and shaping strategies for future water
development projects. Currently, Lucy is a Steering Committee member of the International Development
Research Network at UBC and a member of the EDGES research collaborative and the Program on Water
Governance. She is also a social media intern for the Water Ethics Network.