Margreet Zwarteveen traverses and weaves together social science scholarship (political ecology, anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, feminist studies) with hydrology and engineering into a distinct and influential articulation of questions of justice and governance in water. She is a truly collaborative scholar and researcher: she attaches importance to establishing and nurturing long-term solidarities, alliances and coalitions in support of joint learning and the building of collectives.
In her recent research projects, she is becoming ever more interested in better inserting water in wider politics of transformation towards more healthy, sustainable and just ways of living. To do this, she combines hydrological assessments of water dynamics with political-ecological and ethnographic understandings of how and why people use, share and care for water. As hydrologists and engineers use different methods, definitions and language as compared to social scientists, the question of how to foster collaboration across disciplines is prominent here.
Margreet Zwarteveen co-leads a core work package on fisherfolk in the Climate Resilience in Diverse African Contexts project. Until 2024, she was the coordinator of the project Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability (T2GS). She currently leads a project follow-up aimed at synthesizing the project’s lessons for pathways to sustainability. This is a post-doc project funded by the Future Earth Programme and the IHE Delft Water for Development Partnership Programme. The findings of the T2GS project also inspired the Care-ful irrigation project, that Margreet is a senior collaborator in. It looks at how irrigators in different places in the world try to adapt farming practices and crop choices to water availability. By carefully irrigating, they often change accepted irrigation conventions and definitions of efficiency.
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.
Other information
The BLOG of the Water Governance group: https://flows.hypotheses.org/
Several webinars:
Caring matters in groundwater governance, a presentation as part of the CGIAR NEXUS Gains webinar series, held on the 26th of November 2024.
Introduction to a session on learning from failures November 2023, Water and Development Partnership Programme Symposium
Conversations in Political Ecology Seminar: Feminist Political Ecology January 2021, Lancaster University
Engaging with the Politics of Water Governance December 2017, IHE Delft Alumni Online Seminar