IHE Delft alumna hosts water justice podcast featuring Joyeeta Gupta

Fanian, who graduated from IHE Delft in 2013 with an MSc in Water Resource Management and earned her PhD on water risks and governance from Oxford University, is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. She said it was an obvious choice to invite Gupta as a podcast speaker: “Joyeeta has been working for many years on integrating elements of justice in water and climate discourses. She has been involved in multiple platforms and stands as a champion to push justice as a central focus for action.”

The podcast episode emphasises that "the important element comes down to how equitably water is governed and shared between different users and uses of water", Fanian said. “Further, a common understanding of water justice can advance discussions in policy arenas, but in a manner that accommodates equitable local, national, and international priorities and uses.”  

Now Fanian and Gupta are colleagues, but about a decade ago, the were student and teacher. Fanian said she enjoyed learning about environmental law from Gupta.

“I enjoyed her course as I learnt about the attention to detail and wording within that each article of law carries, and how to analyse that detail. I also learnt simple words that were previously mere words such as ‘should’ or ‘may’ suddenly carried a lot more weight than I thought they did,” she said. “There was also the part about the intricacies of global agreements, which are still applicable.”

Studying at IHE Delft, Fanian added, was “a pivotal learning experience that helped me to dive into new spaces and complexities of research and action. The network of friends and connections to alumni I formed during my time at IHE Delft has been invaluable, supporting me throughout my career. That IHE Delft connection is always strong in the water space; there have been many instances where I found people who also studied at IHE Delft.”