Margreet Zwarteveen

Zwarteveen studies water allocation policies and practices, focusing on questions of equity and justice. Her research centres around how institutions, technologies and markets shape water allocation and regulate water flows, and of different ways to make sense or legitimize these. Zwarteveen uses an interdisciplinary approach, seeing water allocations as the outcome of interactions between nature, technologies and society.

The relation between power and water is central in the work of Zwarteveen, with explicit attention to gender. Her current research looks at re-allocations of water from agriculture and rural areas to cities and industries: how do these re-allocations happen, with what effects, and how are they expressed and supported by policies and knowledge? She for instance studies how the introduction of supposedly water efficient technologies (drip irrigation) goes accompanied with, and causes, changes in water tenure relations that favour some people more than others. Zwarteveen is also interested in questions emerging at the interface between science and policy when governing water, especially in relation to the challenges of dealing with complexities and uncertainties.

Zwarteveen is the coordinator of the project "Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability" , see https://t2sresearch.org/project/t2sgs/. Zwarteveen also is an enthusiastic member of two EU funded International Training networks: http://www.wegoitn.org/  and https://www.nextwatergovernance.net/.