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Urban water governance: Privatization, scale mismatch and infrastructure

Whenever anybody complains to me that I focus on urban water governance (and yes, there ARE scholars in Mexico who question me because I am interested in how water in cities is governed), my first impression is to want to send them to read scholarly literature. This is often not the best idea, because our writing is, sometimes, indeed incredibly dense, obtuse and hard to understand. I’ve taken to blog about my own research because it helps others and helps me clarify what I am studying.

Because I am based out of Aguascalientes, a smaller city (1 million people) in central Mexico, I have to fly into Mexico City on a regular basis. I have several projects located there, I often guest-lecture at other institutions and at CIDE in its Santa Fe campus and the most important thing, because Mexican water governance (and environmental policy) is so centralized, I have to be in Mexico City to attend important national-level and international meetings.

I was flying into Mexico City this past week, and as I often do, I started taking photographs as we landed. I did the same when we took off the previous week. Having an aerial overview of a city reminds me of why I study urban water governance. First, because it is a clear depiction of scale mismatch. The issues that smaller cities face aren’t the same that megacities like Mexico City do. The scale at which we govern isn’t necessarily the scale at which we need to respond to issues. Second, because it reminds me of issues of privatization, marketization and commodification (a literature I am enjoying currently). Provision of water at this mega-scale necessitates innovative and creative institutional arrangements for service delivery. And third, because it always reminds me of the need for robust, well-maintained infrastructure. As a chemical engineer (yes, I did chemical engineering before my PhD), I am keenly aware of the technical difficulties in providing safe water all over a city. These problems exacerbate as cities expand.

It’s also important to remind ourselves about the heterogeneity of cities when we think about urban water governance. A couple of weeks ago I was in Tempe (Arizona) visiting the Institute for Global Sustainability and the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity (CSID) at Arizona State University (ASU) to give a talk on polycentric water governance in Mexico. I flew through Houston, and as we were descending, I was bewildered. My own perception of Texas is that its cities face droughts. When I looked at the city of Houston, with such a visible water abundance, I was reminded that cities worldwide are all different.

Because of this heterogeneity within an urban system , we need to think through these issues on a regular basis. We can’t afford to design policy responses to water scarcity that are solely focused on alleviating hotspots. We need to look at the water system in a holistic way. My research aims to emphasize the closed nature of the hydrological cycle. In doing so, I go back to the literature spearheaded by Matthew Gandy on urban metabolism. This is an interesting challenge and one I’m keen to explore more as my research progresses.

Posted in academia, research, water governance, water policy.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 19, 2014

Gender, water and sanitation: Some thoughts for International Women’s Day 2014

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 many struggles that women face on an everyday basis. I’m well aware that environmental studies have also been perceived as “feminized” in that taking care of the environment has also been seen as a more “nurturing” activity and thus one proper for women. But strangely enough, I don’t think we have studied environmental issues through a gender lens enough. The intersections of gender and environment, gender and water and gender and sanitation are many, although gender issues do not only refer to women (my friend Ed Carr recently published a co-authored paper on gender and adaptation to climatic change that I believe will pave the road for further and much needed work on this important and understudied topic). I myself have started doing some work on gender and sanitation policy in Mexico, particularly as it relates to menstrual hygiene management.


Photo credit: UNICEF Ethiopia

In recent years the connections between gender and sanitation have been perceived by a number of organizations, who have been doing some excellent work. The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council recently partnered with the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights to undertake an event to raise awareness on gender, human rights and sanitation. The UNESCO Institute for Water Education (UNESCO-IHE) organized an event on gender and water and emergency responses this year. WaterAid, another organization whose work I follow closely, recently organized a walk and shared some terrifying statistics on the impact of lack of proper sanitation and water poverty on women:

There are also 1.25 billion women and girls around the world without proper toilets, and many associated burdens. This is a crisis in health, in education, in economic development and in gender equality that simply cannot continue,” said Ms Wheen.

Some notable statistics on women and water and sanitation:
• An estimated 384 million women and girls are without safe water, and 1.25 billion do not have improved sanitation.
• Some 526 million women are forced to defecate in the open for lack of facilities.
• Women and girls without toilets spend an estimated 97 billion hours each year trying to find a safe place to go.
• Average primary school completion rates for boys in sub-Saharan Africa stand at 56%, but only 46% for girls.


Photo credit: World Bank Photo Collection

Think about it. An estimated 200 million work hours are spent by women collecting water for their households. Women bear the brunt of water collection spending up to 5 hours every day on this task. Given that much of their time is spent in water-fetching, many girls in developing countries often skip school as they are needed at home. Even worse, these young women often skip school during their menstruating days as they lack the dignity of a latrine to relieve themselves and water to clean up. When these girls and women are forced to relieve themselves in the dark, they become targets for potential sexual violence and/or physical attacks. Thus the need for a comprehensive, global menstrual hygiene management plan.

As I wrote last year, we still have a long ways to go to make solid advances in gender and sanitation. On International Women’s Day, here is to a more inclusive and comprehensive plan to address gender issues in water and sanitation governance.

Posted in academia, bridging academia and practice, sanitation, wastewater, water governance, water policy.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 8, 2014

Breaking the vicious cycle of grant writing and research funding

As I have mentioned before, I’m very lucky in that my institution is extremely supportive of my (and my colleagues’) research endeavours. There are a number of (internal) sources of funding to support scholarly research, from support via start-up funds, to individual research accounts, to competing for internal research grants, to funding conference travel. Because I have international collaborators and I’ve worked a lot within the Canadian and Mexican research funding systems, I’m very familiar with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, and with CONACyT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia, National Council for Science and Technology) in Mexico. I’m a little less familiar with the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States of America, but I still know their processes a bit. I’m also a bit familiar with European (mostly French and British) granting bodies.


The grant writing cycle, according to PhD Comics (c) Jorge Cham

What seems to be the commonality in all of these is the presence of a vicious cycle of grant funding and grant writing. In order to advance your research, you need to do experiments, undertake fieldwork, participate in academic conferences and workshops. All of these activities, of course, require funding. Which, quite obviously, you don’t have as you start your academic career. More annoying is the fact that most granting agencies will demand from you previous experience managing funded projects and success winning grants. Which you can’t do, of course, because you don’t have the funding yet to execute the research activities required to gain new insights, create new knowledge, and of course, gain confidence in writing new grants so that you can get funding to do more research.

My first year back from Canada and arriving to Mexico, I became increasingly frustrated with the vicious cycle of grant funding and grant writing. I kept writing grant proposals, many of which were unsuccessful. I can tell you the proposed projects were fantastic, and I even received some nice commentaries “awesome proposed research, but we don’t have the money to fund you, so, SORRY”.

Last year and this year, however, I have got quite a bit of a break. I’ve successfully submitted a few grant proposals that have been externally funded and now enable me to mobilize resources in a way I couldn’t do before. And of course, with each successful proposal, I gain a lot more confidence in my abilities to secure extramural funding. So, I feel as though this is a virtuous cycle now: the more successful my grant proposals are, the more I seem to be able to write better requests for funding. But I’m also aware of how capricious these funding cycles can be. For all we know, I may have secured a lot of funding for this year, but I may hit a dry spell in the next two years too.

The funniest and most ironic part of this vicious cycle is that having to manage extramural funding, I’ve learned A LOT of stuff (tricks, techniques, reporting processes, even how much do things cost) that I wouldn’t have been able to learn had I not actually gotten projects funded. Getting my projects funded and executing them has actually enabled me to write better grant proposals, propose better and more robust research designs, and learn the ropes of externally-funded project management (which include budgeting, financial reporting, writing technical reports, etc). Again, as I mention, my institution is extremely generous with internal grants, but not all institutions are, and this frustrates me to no end. I thing we ought to break the vicious cycle of grant funding and grant writing.

I just don’t really know how.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 7, 2014

The spatial, political and human dimensions of water infrastructure

Like anybody who is sort of in-between an early-career-researcher (ECR) and a more seasoned, established scholar, I have spent the last few years thinking about where my research is taking me and exploring new topics and ideas. I have also gained access to different funding sources, something that of course has influenced my research trajectory. When I began my doctoral research, I was 100% sure that what I was interested in was cooperative behaviour. My Masters’ degree thesis is focused on strategic alliances between biotech firms and large pharmaceutical companies. As my PhD dissertation work progressed, I learned about voluntary approaches to environmental policy instruments, which was also based on cooperation. Lately, I have been doing on water conflict, transboundary water governance, water privatization and bottled water. All of this, of course, in addition to my already-known research programme on wastewater and sanitation governance.

I have been considering what to call my current research programme. With the exception of my project on informal waste recyclers, a large portion of my scholarship is focused on water infrastructure. I am interested in access to water, privatization of municipal water supply, polycentric governance and cross-scalar dynamics. And of course, sanitation ties into this work. So I’ve considered the possibility of calling (at least for now) my research programme, “the spatial, political and human dimensions of water infrastructure“.

In opening my research trajectory to the study of spatial dimensions, I am bringing my interdisciplinary training together. I am trained as a political scientist, and a human geographer. Thus, I am interested in the politics of water infrastructure, across multiple scales. However, as any interdisciplinary researcher can tell you, I am also interested in the human dimensions (cognitive, social, anthropological) of water infrastructure. I want to understand individual behaviour, and also collective behaviour.

Will I continue to favor neoinstitutional theories in my work? Of course. I am puzzled by the formation of rules and norms. I am fascinated by the ways in which individuals react to institutional complexity. I don’t reject any other theoretical or analytical framework. I can approach problems from multiple perspectives, and that is what makes my research so interesting.

Will I continue to study transnational environmental movements? Of course, too. Activists are part of the civil society-government-industry triad, and as such, their behaviour is definitely something I am intrigued by. I am, as well, a comparativist. So yes, I will continue to explore environmental policy-making in Canada, the US and Mexico. Having a more defined research programme doesn’t preclude me from doing other kind of stuff.

Will I continue to do sanitation, even if I now do some work on climate politics? Of course, without a question. Sanitation was, and continues to be my first and foremost interest. The size of the problem and the imperious necessity of solution are two very strong drivers. 2.1 billion people lack proper sanitation and 950 million continue to practice open defecation because they lack the dignity of a toilet. I don’t plan on giving up the opportunity to help increase access, narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and try my hardest at eliminating inequalities.

I’m just a bit more focused in my research work now, I think.

Posted in academia, environmental policy, governance, research, sanitation, waste, wastewater.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 1, 2014

Reshaping incentives: Encouraging tap water instead of bottled water

Much of the neoinstitutional and rational choice theory work that I’ve read has focused on incentive structures, rules and how these shape norms, behaviours and attitude changes in individuals. My research has examined behavioural change, but mostly from the perspective of industrial factory owners and their decision-making processes when confronted with tight environmental regulation. In my newest project, I am looking at how tap water and bottled water individual decision-making is done. This means, when confronted with the choice of ordering bottled water at a restaurant or requesting a glass of tap water, what do individuals do?

This an interesting area of research for me because, if faced with the choice myself, I will always choose a glass of tap water. This phenomenon (having to force restaurant owners to provide tap water instead of allowing them to impose a purchase of bottled water) is growing in Mexico. I was confronted with this when I lived in Vancouver, where the norm (despite having EXCELLENT quality tap water) was to serve me with a bottle of water. This pissed me off to no end, not only because of my scholarly research, but because the imposition actually shifts control of beverage choice, from the consumer to the supplier (in this case, the restaurant). Recently, the health authorities of Mexico City decided to impose a new legislative requirement on restaurants: you can’t force consumers to buy bottled water, you must provide clean, safe, potable drinking water for them.

As someone who uses neoinstitutional theory in much of his research, I’m interested in how rules and norms are constructed, stabilized and institutionalized. Thus I find it fascinating to understand how this recently-imposed bylaw will be enforced and whether it will lead to any behavioural change. I’ve long suspected that behavioural changes in water consumption are multifactorial: there are many reasons why bottled water consumption has grown exponentially in the last few years. It can’t be only the fact that bottled water is readily available or that tap water in Mexico has been routinely shunned because of badly maintained water supply infrastructure. I’m keen to delve more into this issue in the next year or so.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 27, 2014

Tenure-track position in Latin American or Mexican history at CIDE Region Centro

I am hereby reproducing the English-language call for applications for a tenure-track position in Latin American or Mexican History at CIDE Region Centro. Happy to answer questions on CIDE, the Region Centro campus, and life in Aguascalientes.

Applications are invited for the post of a tenure track assistant professor in modern Mexican and/or history of the Americas in the División de Historia, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), based in the Región Centro campus in the city of Aguascalientes, Mexico. Candidates should be available to take up the post in August 2014. Preferred candidates will have a research agenda linked to any of the following sub-disciplines: economic history, environmental history, regional comparative history, borderlands history, historical demography and geography, or digital history.
Candidates must have completed their Ph.D. degree before August 1st, 2014.

CIDE is an institute for research in social sciences with both national and international prestige. The Región Centro Campus was founded in 2011 and today it offers a bachelor degree program in Government and Public Finance, a Master’s degree in Regional and Environmental Economics, and two Interdisciplinary Study Programs, one in Drug Policy, and another in Regional Studies. The successful candidate will be expected to collaborate in one or more of these programs, as well as in the International History Master’s degree offered by the División de Historia. The candidate will be able to benefit from the
proximity of the Instituto Nacional de Geografía Estadística e Informática (INEGI) and the Fondo de Información y Documentación para la Industria de México (INFOTEC), both of which are based in the city of Aguascalientes.

Candidates must send the following documents in PDF format to the address below before March 31st, 2014: a covering letter; three references and some written assessments of their teaching skills (if they have them); an example of their written work (for example, a published or accepted article, or a book chapter or Ph.D. thesis chapter); and a project briefing outlining their future plans for research and teaching. These documents should be addressed to:

Search Committee
División de Historia
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Carretera México-Toluca #3655
Colonia Lomas de Santa Fe
México, D.F. 01210
México
Tel. (0052) 5557279826
And submitted by email to luis.barron@cide.edu & janet.rodriguez@cide.edu

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 26, 2014

In defense of service for junior scholars

I had been brewing this idea of blogging about service (the often-ingrate, unpaid, time-consuming activity of contributing to our discipline, to our department and our university/institution). The truth is, I do DO a lot of service, and I don’t regret it nor do I think it has hindered my research. Much to the contrary, being able to participate in institutional governance, and to serve on association committees and editorial boards has been incredibly eye-opening for me.

I have participated in 2 search committees for tenure-track faculty since I arrived at CIDE. I have also participated in an overhead committee (e.g. an ad-hoc decision-making committee on how to assign and spend overhead), and I am currently my campus’ representative to the library at CIDE. In addition, I’m the associate editor for a journal and I serve in six other editorial boards. I am on the Executive Committee of a Section of a scholarly association, the Chair of Professional Development of another. Plus, I peer-review about a journal manuscript per week, grant proposals, book proposals and entire book manuscripts.

Admittedly, I have the privilege of special circumstances: I’m single, have some RA support, a low teaching load, and I speed-read, touch-type 100 words per minute and have quasi-eidetic memory. So yes, I definitely can do a lot more service than someone with a 4/4 teaching load, married or single-parent with two kids. And I am the first one to acknowledge this privilege.

But if we want to have a voice in shared governance, if we want to be on top of our fields, if we want someone else to go to bat for us when we request help in our academic circles, we DO need to contribute and the best way to contribute, in addition of course to publishing papers, is to provide constructive feedback when we are asked to, to participate in shared-governance committees, to peer-review for journals and publishing houses, and to contribute to our discipline, our department and our institution.

So yes, I am defending service, and I know that most pre-tenure scholars may not want to take on any of this (and may be advised to do “the least service you can”). But I can’t vouch for that strategy. I have gained a lot of skills from actually doing stuff that is not 100% my research, and I can say this has helped me advance my career. As Christopher Lynn puts it:

So, what’s the take-home message? Do service willy nilly? Not hardly. But don’t shy away from it either. Everyone is busy, but your willingness to take on just a little more will be greatly appreciated &, to invoke some of my favorite evo theory, it is a costly honest signal of your willingness to cooperate that will reward you with unforeseen dividends!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 25, 2014

Polycentricity in Mexican water governance: Toward a research agenda (seminar at CSID, ASU)

As those who follow my research agenda know, I study water governance using common pool resource theories, championed by Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. On Monday March 3rd, I will be in Tempe (Arizona) giving a seminar at the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity (CSID) of Arizona State University (ASU). The seminar is entitled “Polycentricity in Mexican water governance: Toward a research agenda“. I will be discussing my work studying non-hierarchical models of water governance and the implications for a research agenda in polycentricity theory. We will be meeting at Wrigley Hall in room 481 at 12:00 noon. The seminar will go on for about an hour. I am not 100% sure we’ll have streaming, but if we do, I’ll let everyone know.

Polycentricity in Mexican water governance: Toward a research agenda
Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega
Assistant Professor, Public Administration Division
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)

Water governance in Mexico has experienced substantial shifts in the past decade. Starting in 2004, with several reforms to the Ley de Aguas Nacionales (National Water Law), two new models of water-governing organizations have been implemented: the old-fashioned Consejos de Cuenca (river basin councils), and the allegedly-new-and-improved Organismos de Cuenca (river basin organization). This sudden change in organizational and institutional design is argued to be a response to the need to pursue “integrated water resources management” (IWRM). Contemporary Mexican water policy provides fertile ground to explore questions of complex commons governance, whose lessons can potentially be transferred to other countries. This talk will outline the complexity in governing water as a commons in Mexico, and more importantly, whether we can apply a polycentric governance approach to its study. The talk lays out a research agenda for the study of polycentric water governance in Mexico, and offers a few preliminary insights on which areas of Mexican water policy would be better suited for this kind of application of polycentricity theory.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 25, 2014

Academia and public engagement in English and Spanish: Not an easy task

The recent discussions on academics’ engagement (or lack thereof) reminded me about a particularity of my own circumstances now that I reside in Mexico, and after living in Canada for over 15 years. Both in academia and in my personal life, I am (for the most part) immersed in a Spanish-speaking world. My parents speak in Spanish to me, I have to teach in Spanish, and Spanish is the working language in Mexico, generally. That said, my native language is no longer Spanish. I think, write, read and speak in English. My academic life is primarily in English. My social media feeds are all maintained in English. I blog in English, I don’t blog in Spanish.

This puts me in a really awkward position. I do want to reach out to the Mexican public, and Mexican policy makers. To do so, I need to publish in Spanish. And while I do publish academic journal articles and book chapters in Spanish (quite a lot), I don’t write op-eds in Spanish often enough, I rarely tweet in Spanish, and I definitely do NOT blog in Spanish. Yet, the counter-punch is that I want to be competitive, relevant internationally and I want my academic peers in the global arena to respect my work and my scholarship. To do that, I need to present at international conferences in English, publish in English, and write on social media platforms in English. It’s the lingua franca of global academia.

So I’m stuck between rock and a hard place, where I’m criticized by Mexican scholars for not blogging and tweeting and publishing more op-eds in Spanish, where I’m sometimes questioned for wanting to teach courses in English instead of Spanish and where I am also frowned upon by some people because I talk with my Mexico-based English-speaking students and colleagues in, well, English. But at the same time, we recognize that to be a world-class academic institution, we need to imitate what is happening in Portugal, The Netherlands and even France, where universities are teaching entire graduate and undergraduate programmes in English.

This frustration is something that keeps coming up, particularly as I wrote 4 (yes, you read that right, FOUR) pieces in Spanish (1 book chapter, 1 conference papers and 2 journal article manuscripts for peer-review) in Spanish during the months of January and February 2014. In contrast, I’ve only written one journal article manuscript in English over the same period. I need to publish more in English, both because the journals that are considered most prestigious, both within Mexican academia and the international one are in English, and because I want my scholarship to be read more broadly. The worst thing is that I have a work ethic where I don’t translate my research papers in Spanish into English, but I create an entirely new piece, even if I am using the same datasets or interview data.

So, what to do? At a time when we as professors are being asked to do much more all the time (read the Kristof piece in case you doubt me), do I really have the time to write original research pieces in English and Spanish, AND undertake public engagement in English AND Spanish, AND contribute to my discipline and community? I am not sure, to be honest. But I think I am going to continue doing what I do. I am going to engage with the public in both languages only as far as I can, not much more. I am going to continue blogging, tweeting and writing scholarly pieces in English.

For better or worse, that’s what I think I need to do to reach a global audience.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 18, 2014

On the challenges of public engagement for marginalized academic voices

I had promised myself that I wouldn’t waste any more of my brain space or time on Nicholas Kristof’s ill-written piece decrying the inability of political science professors to “stay relevant” and “engage”. Even before he wrote his piece, I had already written about why it’s challenging for a public policy professor like me to engage as a “public intellectual” (do note the quotation marks, as I think that label is somewhat self-aggrandizing). Plenty of my fellow academics (including several not in the political science discipline per se) have debunked his piece. Tom Pepinsky’s piece was particularly engaging for me. Tobias Denskus makes a great series of points from the development field viewpoint. I particularly liked Marc Bellemare and Corey Robin‘s pieces who aren’t surprised to find that Kristof wants to save something/one else yet again. After all, as Marc said, “the NYT merely selling what its readers wants to buy”. Personally, I rarely read the NYT, to be quite honest. I read my Twitter stream and use it both as an information channel AND an engagement channel. If the people I follow post (or retweet) interesting links, I’ll go and read them too. I stay on top of things through my social media platforms, and I engage both with fellow academics AND with the general public through them.

As I said on Twitter, I knew perfectly that Kristof was doing link-baiting and click-baiting. He wanted to piss off academics who take it upon themselves to (on top of the work they already do) engage with the general public, policy-makers and communities at large. Those of us who thrive on public engagement were annoyed enough that we tweeted, retweeted, wrote pieces in response, and had dialogues on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

Now, what struck me in the whole kerfuffle, and the reason that prompted me to write this post was the repeated process where the pieces most retweeted and engaged upon (even by Kristof himself) were those of white males. You could always say that it was only those academics who took it upon themselves to write a piece in response, and I’m grateful that they did. But there were several women who wrote very smart take-downs of Kristof’s column, and I saw less conversation and publicizing of those while I followed the conversation on Twitter. Five of the ones I liked best were authored by women (Erica Chenoweth, Pat Thomson, Paige Brown and Janet Stemdemwell, and a very funny one by Clarissa)

Corey does bring an important point that I think was missed in the entire discussion. There is a need for the public to listen to the voices of academics on the margins: adjuncts, up-and-coming graduate students, female scholars, people of color, and, as Zara noted to me on Twitter, disabled and queer academics. The problem is that we don’t listen to those voices enough, most likely because they don’t feel safe enough to engage publicly. So, why would a queer disabled academic want to engage if her voice would be drowned and dismissed on the basis of disability or sexual identity? It wouldn’t make sense and it would only perpetuate the problem.

Ed Carr provides a set of constructive ideas on how Kristof could contribute to the discourse by examining topics that are relevant to us as professors, and to academics in general. I would want to add one topic to the list, and (eventually, but not today as I’m pressed for time) to provide my own set of suggestions. Kristof should examine the challenges that traditionally marginalized academic voices face in engaging with the public and policy makers. And he should amplify those voices. Not because they need to be saved, but because they deserve to be heard.

Posted in academia, bridging academia and practice, bridging media and academia.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 18, 2014