Toolbox

Thirsty for Alternatives: Recommoning Water

Methods used

Cluster analysis

Content analysis

Systematic Literature Review

Participatory methods

Research focus & objectives

The research focus of this project is transboundary water governance with the objective of enhancing understandings around the complexities of transboundary water politics and the immaterial aspects of infrastructure development, operations, and financial flows in shared rivers.

Methods applied

Cluster analysis

Content analysis

Systematic Literature Review

Participatory methods

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Interviews

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Discourse analysis

Participant observation

Analytical tools & literature

Geographic Information System (GIS)

TWINS: Mirumachi, N. and Allan, J.A., 2007, November. Revisiting transboundary water governance: Power, conflict cooperation and the political economy. In Proceedings from CAIWA international conference on adaptive and integrated water management: Coping with scarcity. Basel, Switzerland (Vol. 1215).

Telecoupling: Liu, J., Hull, V., Batistella, M., DeFries, R., Dietz, T., Fu, F., Hertel, T.W., Izaurralde, R.C., Lambin, E.F., Li, S. and Martinelli, L.A., 2013. Framing sustainability in a telecoupled world. Ecology and Society, 18(2).

Financialization: Ahlers, R., Budds, J., Joshi, D., Merme, V. and Zwarteveen, M., 2015. Framing hydropower as green energy: assessing drivers, risks and tensions in the Eastern Himalayas. Earth System Dynamics, 6(1), pp.195-204.

Basins at Risk: Wolf, A.T., Yoffe, S.B. and Giordano, M., 2003. International waters: identifying basins at risk. Water policy, 5(1), pp.29-60.
Recommended resources
Open Development Mekong
Mekong Eye
The Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development
Center for Social Development Studies (CSDS)
WARECOD

Reflections and recommendations by the researcher

These processes are much longer than imagined, it is important to stretch your temporal lens of analysis and to historicize the research. Too often research on transboundary water politics and in particular conflict related research hops from one flash point issue to another and lacks the depth and historical realities of these processes. Particularly with hydraulic infrastructure - what is or is not constructed and for who and the subsequent outcomes of these power laden decisions are multidecadal issues. The contestations over these processes can endure for a lifetime, so it is recommended to expand the temporal lens of analysis.

Publication(s)

We invite you to read the paper published as part of this doctoral research:

Motta, S.; Wolf, A.T. and Schipper, E.L.F. 2023. Immaterial infrastructures and conflict in the Salween River Basin. Water Alternatives 16(3): 793-820

Researcher

Alejandra Francisca Burchard Levine

Alejandra Burchard Levine is a Canadian-born Spanish and Chilean PhD researcher specializing in water governance. She is part of the European Union Marie-Curie Innovation Training Network NEWAVE and conducts her research at Arcadis in the Netherlands while pursuing a PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Environmental Policy Analysis department. Her work focuses on the influence of private consultancy firms, particularly Dutch water consultancies, in the diffusion of water governance paradigms, with a keen interest in international cooperation and non-state actors’ roles in shaping global and local water and sustainability agendas. She holds a background in Chemical Engineering (McGill University, Canada) and a Masters in Environmental Science and Engineering (Tsinghua University, China) and has over a decade of experience in managing international cooperation projects in the water sector across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, collaborating with a wide range of industrial, governmental, non-profit, and consultancy partners.

Other collaborators

Marie Belland

I am an early-career researcher trained in political science whose main research interest is environmental urban politics. My PhD research project investigates land subsidence in the city of Semarang in Central Java, Indonesia. More precisely, I am studying multiple ways to know land subsidence and live in subsiding areas using ethnographic methods, and I actively engage in the pluralization of subsidence knowledge and practices. My research is informed by urban political ecology and science, feminist science, and technology studies theories.

Johannes Wagner

Johannes Wagner is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. His research examines water use and payment behaviours of rural water users in sub-Saharan Africa. His field-based study focuses on policy issues informing how rural users use and pay for drinking water across service delivery models, payment methods, and infrastructure types using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Prior to joining his PhD program, Johannes worked for four years as a policy advisor on behalf of the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) for the sustainable development of the water and sanitation sector in Mali.

Javier Rodríguez Ros

Javier is an agroecologist, photographer, and Ph.D. candidate at Wageningen University (WUR) working in the Group of Water Management, Actors, and Uses (G-EAU) at the Institute of Research for the Development (IRD). Throughout his career, he has worked and collaborated with different NGOs and research centers in Latin America and Africa exploring water governance and its impacts on society and ecosystems. In his research, he examines from a political ecology perspective the shifting policies and strategies that determine who, how, and what solutions are proposed, financed, implemented, and managed to respond to water challenges in the Segura river basin.