Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems.
This week, on March 22nd, we celebrated World Water Day. The theme for 2017 (and also the topic for the 2017 World Water Assessment Report) was the sudden realization that water that we use to flush toilets, wash dishes and produce goods and services is a waste unless we recover it (Wastewater: The Untapped Resource). […]
– March 25, 2017
My recent conversation with Dave Karpf, Mariana Medina, Mervyn Horgan and Andrew Biro on “the political” made me think about “the political” in sanitation and wastewater governance. I’ve written before here on why I study sanitation. The size of the problem is huge, and it is such a basic necessity. Yet almost a billion people […]
– December 22, 2013
I’ve been studying wastewater in Mexico for the better part of the last 20 years of my life. I have designed and built bench-scale effluent biological secondary and tertiary treatment systems and I have undertaken institutional ethnographic analyses of river basin organizations. I also have compared structures for sanitation governance across five states within the […]
– April 21, 2013
This is the abstract for my water policy talk. I’ve submitted it to the School of Public Administration at University of Victoria to see if they’re interested, although I’m happy to tailor it for other audiences. Are River Basin Councils the Right Model of Water and Wastewater Governance in Mexico? Lessons from a Case Study […]
– May 5, 2009
Water is scarce, we should learn how to manage the common pool resource, we need to design more robust institutions for water management, integrated watershed management is the way to go, etc. All of these are phrases that have become commonplace in the literature on water governance. Interestingly enough, the public seems to think about […]
– February 14, 2009
One of the things that has struck me a lot throughout the past five years that I have studied water policy is the absolute disconnect that exists between our understanding of the different elements of the hydrological cycle and their interconnectedness. The social sciences literature has examined in great detail issues of water scarcity, but […]
– February 3, 2009
I am currently mentoring a few academics (my own PhD students and a few early-career TT scholars) and I am trying to teach them about how to frame their work in terms of the broader questions of a field, and a discipline. The kind of exercise I am executing, trying to teach how to connect […]
– November 15, 2024
Last week, I attended the 2022 Discards Studies Conference: Exploring Disposal’s Past, Present, and Future in New York City. As a scholar of waste, wastewater and discards, this was a really key conference for me to attend. This was also my first conference after 3 months of COVID, COVID sequelae and pneumonia. Though I am […]
– September 25, 2022
Recently, Dr. Gretchen Sneegas (Texas A&M University) asked me how I manage multiple writing projects, a situation she’s facing right now as a post-doctoral researcher. This is not uncommon, even as a doctoral students: in academia, we tend to work on several projects at the same time. The biggest challenge for me is how to […]
– September 13, 2020
A few days ago, I saw a post in a discussion forum on how to write a Research Trajectory document. The conversation that ensued prompted me to consider how *I* viewed the different documents that we produce not only for job-seeking purposes (the Research Programme) but also for advancement reasons (the Research Trajectory), and for […]
– April 17, 2020
The more theses I supervise, the more essays I read and the more papers I have to peer-review for publication, the more I realize how important it is to teach how to craft good research questions. Many students of mine come with a general idea of what they want to study for their thesis, but […]
– March 4, 2020
My research trajectory isn’t linear, but it’s cohesive. This narrative provides an overview of how I have moved from chemical engineering and wastewater treatment to the economics of technical change and technology transfer, to the comparative politics of environmental public policy from a spatial viewpoint. This story is also told in this blog post. A […]
– April 17, 2019
When I tell people that I’m both a political scientist and a human geographer, they tend to be somewhat shocked. After all, I am in a public administration department, I publish in interdisciplinary journals, and attend conferences ranging from area-specific (International Association for the Study of the Commons, IASC) to discipline-specific (Midwest Political Science Association). […]
– February 25, 2018
While I work on urban water governance issues, I’m not an expert on every city, and particularly, I am wary of offering any “silver bullet” kind of solutions to drought crises because cities are heterogeneous entities and therefore there is no single policy decision that will have the necessary impact. When I first started reading […]
– February 4, 2018
This semester has been a bit more hectic than I expected, and keeping everything under control hasn’t been an easy task. But despite whatever challenges I face, I am determined to stay on top of the literature. I’ve written before about having a repertoire of reading strategies (quick skim to determine what a paper is […]
– December 5, 2017
I have read a lot of books, and on this page I am posting the ones I’ve read and of which I’ve posted my reading notes. Note: I don’t consider these “book reviews”, nor do I post my reading notes of every single book I read. I have categorized my posts by broad area (e.g. […]
– August 26, 2017
Earlier today, I went to the small store around the corner from my Mom’s house. Their magazine exhibit is usually filled with trashy gossip magazines. but as someone who studies sanitation and wastewater governance, the cover of this magazine caught my eye immediately: it’s a photograph of a toilet being flushed (lucky for the readers, […]
– August 2, 2017
Wherever I go, I’m always “on”. That is, my researcher mind keeps looking for things that are associated with my research, or that seem to defy explanation. As I went into one of our favourite restaurants with my brother (who is visiting) and my Mom, I realized they didn’t have running water. A common hygiene […]
– August 2, 2017
In previous posts I have addressed how to write rhetorical precis (very brief, four sentence summaries of the reading you are doing), synthetic notes (brief summaries of articles, focusing on the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion as per the AIC method), and memorandums (longer, 1000-2000 word briefings that synthesize the content of an article, but also […]
– May 27, 2017
When I switched from chemical engineering (my undergraduate degree) to political science and human geography (my doctoral degree), I went through economics of technical change and international marketing (my Masters). But the chemical engineering component was still very strong during my Masters. I remember reading comments from a professor’s marker (yes, my professor didn’t even […]
– May 7, 2017
Whenever anybody asks me what does a double-major in political science and human geography do in a public administration department, I tell them that I study comparative public policy and use cases of environment and resource governance to explore differences across national jurisdictions. I'm interdisciplinary. A chemical engineer, an economist of technical change, a political […]
– March 13, 2017
I just came back from a week in Paris attending a meeting of field experiments’ scholars, and I took the opportunity to do some fieldwork. There are perfectly good reasons why I study French water governance, specifically in Paris, but that discussion is reserved for another post. When I do fieldwork or when I am […]
– March 8, 2017
For many years, I have advocated the Move Every Paper Forward Every Day (MEPFED) model of working. The MEPFED model basically says “every day, insert something related to each one of your research projects/papers on your To-Do list, so that collectively, every week you’ve moved most/all of your work forward“. MEPFED has worked for me […]
– February 4, 2017
It almost feels awful to write that 2016 was perhaps my best year yet (professionally speaking), given all the losses of great artists, scientists and all the other negative things that happened this year. But it’s true. 2016 was, to me, an amazing year of success-after-success. 2016 in review, month by month I started the […]
– December 31, 2016
When looking at my publication record, many people have told me that they were amazed that I had published so much in such short period of time. While I am positively flattered that they think so, I don’t consider myself a particularly productive academic. Yes, I’ve published a lot in the past few years, the […]
– October 8, 2016
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