Klaas Schwartz is Professor Water Services Governance at IHE Delft and Professor Water Services Governance with the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.
The work of Klaas Schwartz revolves around governance and management questions of providing water services. His main research interests concern the adaptation of water operators to climate change in order to become climate resilient, the reform of public water utilities, service provisioning to low-income areas (‘pro-poor services’) and informal water provisioning. He is also interested in the integration of water services provisioning with broader questions of urban development.
In his work on utility transformations and water provisioning in low-income areas, a strong emphasis is placed on trying to understand the provisioning of services from the perspective of service provider (the utility or informal provider) and how operator decisions of service provisioning impact access to water services by different users.
Klaas Schwartz, who started working at IHE Delft in 1998, has been involved in research, education and training activities in the field of water services management and governance in various countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America.
Research Interests
- Climate Adaptation of Water Providers
- Water Utility Reforms and Transformations
- Water Service Provision to Low-Income Areas
- Informal and Small-Scale Water Providers
- Water Services and Integrated Urban Development
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.
Other information
Projects
Performance Enhancement of Water utilities in Kenya through benchmarking, collective learning and innovative financing (PEWAK) – Within this project, the input of the Water Services Management group concerns the analysis of strategies that water service providers in Kenya design and implement to provide water services to low-income areas. As part of this activity, a benchmarking system to compare strategies and performance of water service providers in serving low-income areas is developed and implemented.
Boosting Effectiveness of Water Operator Partnerships (BEWOP) - This project aims at assisting and enhancing the knowledge transfer and change processes, and hence to foster the effectiveness of water operator partnerships (WOPs). The BEWOP project is a collaboration of the UN-Habitat Global Water Operators’ Partnerships Alliance (GWOPA) and UNESCO-IHE. BEWOP is targeted towards the development of guidelines, trainings and tools that allow water operators to develop more effective partnerships to improve provisioning of water services.