Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems.
November 19th marks World Toilet Day, perhaps the one day that justifies what has been the bulk of my scholarly research for the past 11 years. When you realize that World Toilet Day was founded in 2001 by Jack Sim, from the World Toilet Organization, and that it’s only been in the past three years […]
– November 8, 2015
Today is the day that justifies my research (the governance and global politics of sanitation). Today is World Toilet Day. For the first time, the United Nations has recognized this day as a UN day. and while for some people it may be “scatological” to talk about toilets, sanitation, shitting and poo, all of these […]
– November 19, 2013
photo credit: ya3hs3 A question I get asked rather frequently in scholarly (and laypeople’s) circles is why do you do research on the politics and governance of wastewater?” The notion of what happens to water after anthropogenic activities have changed its properties (read: after we have polluted it) seems foreign to many individuals, even scholars […]
– November 15, 2011
One of the first things other academics ask me is “why are you interested in toilets?” For the vast majority of people, the biological function of waste excretion is an after thought, an activity that nobody wants to talk about, and often times, the mere thought of talking about shit grosses them out. I am, […]
– November 16, 2014
Telling anyone (even some of your academic peers) that you specialize in doing scholarly work on the global politics of sanitation and the governance of wastewater is sometimes the surest way to make people chuckle and laugh. When I first shared the news about World Toilet Day (organized by the World Toilet Organization and endorsed […]
– November 17, 2012
Back in 2014, I corresponded with Dr. Diane Coffey (at the time, completing her PhD at Princeton) and discussed some of her work with Dr. Dean Spears (as well as some of my own work) on behavioural approaches to understanding sanitation governance. I was particularly puzzled by the fact that they had found that notions […]
– October 4, 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
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
March 8th is International Women’s Day. I’ve written before about how gender is a dimension that is often mentioned in water governance scholarship, but I don’t believe it has been given enough emphasis throughout the many decades of research on the social sciences of water. I’ve also written about the fact that we have not […]
– March 7, 2015
While I’ve always prided myself in being gender-aware and gender-sensitive, I have to admit that it wasn’t until my good friend Janni Aragon (University of Victoria, Political Science) gave a guest lecture in my Public Policy class, early in my teaching days, on gender and environmental issues. Janni reminded me (and my students) about the […]
– March 8, 2014
I blog about my research and about other public policy issues that matter to me. In this page, I have attempted to compile blog posts about different types of research thoughts under different categories. Why do political science and policy sciences shun homelessness as a research focus? In this blog post, I explain my frustration […]
– July 15, 2016
I’m having an intense and really challenging week, one where I am feeling really conflicted. My weeks are usually like this, but this week I’m facing an interesting conundrum. I have a number of projects I need to finish off (not the least, changes to my book that I lost in the last round of […]
– October 24, 2013
This piece is, unfortunately, a bit late to the game because my WordPress blogging platform didn’t want to allow me to access my Dashboard (my site was under a spam attack, and thus I couldn’t access it). So, apologies to everyone for whom the debates have moved forward. Anyhow… A few days ago, I tweeted […]
– September 15, 2014
Thanks to Professor Tina Loo (Chair of the Department of History at The University of British Columbia, and an environmental historian), I was alerted to a feature in The Economist on sanitation in India, suggesting that changes in defecation practices and not only access to toilets was important. First of all. I think we all […]
– July 20, 2014
When analyzing complex phenomena, such as the lack of access to proper water supply and sanitation that more than 2.1 billion people in this world face, we tend to isolate components of the problem, without regard for other compounding factors that also influence how policy decisions are constructed. Thus, we often find ourselves blinded by […]
– May 31, 2014
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 am chairing and organizing two panels at the 14th Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), held 3-7 June 2013 in Kitafuji, Japan. The first one is New Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Commons Research and the second one is Complex Commons and Water Governance in Mexico. You can […]
– June 6, 2013
I had lunch with my Dad two weekends ago (my Dad is a lawyer and he has taught law as well, so his background is also academic) and he started asking me why had I chosen the academic path that I have in the past few years. Dad seemed especially fascinated by my interest in […]
– February 5, 2013
While admittedly my research strength is on wastewater governance, I am well versed on the water scarcity literature. One of the concepts that has gained notoriety in the social science literature is the idea of virtual water. From the World Water Council’s website: Virtual water is the amount of water that is embedded in food […]
– March 3, 2009
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