Margreet Zwarteveen is Professor of Water Governance at UNESCO-IHE, Delft, the Netherlands since June 2014. Prior to that Margreet was an irrigation engineer and social scientist, working since 1998 at the Centre for Water and Climate at Wageningen University. From 2012 onwards she was an Associate Professor, and also assumed responsibilities for coordinating gender studies
Biography
Margreet Zwarteveen is Professor of Water Governance at UNESCO-IHE, Delft, the Netherlands since June 2014. Prior to that Margreet was an irrigation engineer and social scientist, working since 1998 at the Centre for Water and Climate at Wageningen University. From 2012 onwards she was an Associate Professor, and also assumed responsibilities for coordinating gender studies education at the Wageningen University. Margreet studies water allocation policies and practices, focusing on questions of equity and justice. Her research includes the study of different modalities of regulating water flows (technologies, institutions) and of ways to understand (knowledge) or legitimize these. She uses an interdisciplinary approach, seeing water allocation as the outcome of interactions between nature, technologies and society. In a project financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, she works with a number of colleagues from Benin, France and Morocco to study how the introduction of supposedly water efficient technologies (drip irrigation) is accompanied with, and causes, changes in water tenure relations and water distributions that favor some people more than others. An interesting new project that she is coordinating similarly sets out to explore how new investments in irrigation systems along the Nile in Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt re-allocate water and water-related benefits, tracing what this means for different groups of people and for ecosystems. This project is part of the CGIAR Water, Land and Ecosystems Program. In her work, Margreet favors an interdisciplinary approach, seeing water allocation as the outcome of interactions between nature, technologies and society.She is also involved in several research projects funded by NWO-WOTRO, such as The Globalization of Water Struggles and Hydropower development in the context of climate change.