My research is motivated by a keen interest in cooperation amongst agents. Why do people cooperate to manage common pool resources (CPR) and can we look at a wasted resource (wastewater) through the lenses of CPR theories? What drives firms to co-locate in the same geographical region even when they are potential competitors and how do clusters of allied (coupled/interconnected) industries respond to a multiplicity of stressors? What strategies do environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) use to put pressure on governments to reduce their pollutant emissions and what are the underlying reasons why these ENGOs build transnational coalitions? Under what circumstances do business use cooperative approaches to pollution control?

My research explores questions of multilevel and networked governance through cooperative approaches. Using a multidisciplinary analytical approach that borrows from the sociological, urban studies, planning, anthropological and policy sciences’ literatures, I examine case studies from the environmental field (specifically water, solid waste and hazardous/toxic waste), thus exploring new models of governing.

At the very core, my research (and teaching) are driven by a keen interest in narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor, in reducing overall poverty worldwide. I use my understanding of cross-national comparative public policy (and in particular my work in environmental policy) to provide research outputs that policy makers at the global (intergovernmental secretariats) and local (federal, provincial, regional and municipal) scale can use to improve human welfare.

My empirical research has found, amongst other things, that:

• River basin councils have proven innovative institutional reforms to govern water, yet they are ineffective in improving wastewater management at the municipal, provincial and federal levels.
• Environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) can successfully use coalition-building strategies to effectively put pressure on national governments to improve their pollution-control performance policy under specific circumstances that include campaigning for issues that have a direct effect on human health.
• Small cities with mono-industry structures will engage in countervailing strategies if faced with multiple stressors, whereas cities where there is potential for industrial diversification will broaden their repertoire of industries.

MY CURRENT RESEARCH AGENDA

7 years ago I decided to refocus my research to examining water through the social sciences lenses. I find it really hard to let go of the field of environmental economic geography and I am still interested in issues of industrial restructuring. Finally I am working again in the field of solid waste management, specifically looking at the politics of garbage. Much of my field research has been in Mexico.

Scholarly work on storytelling as a device to enhance the learning experience of students has shown the value of introducing learners to storytelling techniques. Some researchers have explored the use of storytelling to advance learning in the workplace (Swap et al 2001). For those of us who have been trained in the qualitative research methods, narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly 2000) is a key strategy that helps us advance our understanding of individual and collective behaviour.

Egan (1989) championed the use of storytelling as a non-mechanistic approach to teaching. It is clear to me, from the works I have reviewed while thinking about this topic, scholarly research has been and continues to be undertaken on how storytelling can be successfully in teaching contexts, and as a qualitative research strategy. It recently all “clicked” in my brain when I realized that I have been doing a lot of storytelling both in my teaching and in my research. And I wanted to pass that on to my own students.

My former doctoral supervisor, someone I profoundly respect as a scholar and as an educator, taught me always to look at data with a rigorous and analytical mind, and to tell a story around the data. He asked me to look at data and think critically and make sense of it. And that’s how I conduct research, and how I hope my own students will undertake theirs. I told my students recently that I want them to do rigorous research, empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed.

In the classroom, I tell my students stories around the topics I research and the relevance of those research projects for the advancement of our understanding of comparative environmental and public policy. And the interesting thing is, my students react very positively to storytelling. This week, I taught a class in “full low-tech mode” (e.g. without any power point nor visuals, only the chalkboard and my own voice). I drew a road map of what I wanted my students to learn and as I was drawing the pieces of the puzzle, I put them together in an overview for them to see.

Students reacted extremely well, some even to the point of commenting “dear Dr. Pacheco-Vega, I really prefer low-tech classes”. I will continue to mix technology-supported lectures with “low tech” ones, but the experience really left me pondering on how valuable storytelling can be in my own teaching, and how much of it I use in my own research.

The use of social networking sites (SNS) has become widespread in a variety of non-profit and social justice contexts. While before Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund would need to organize mail-in campaigns, now all it takes is a tweet, a Facebook wall message or a YouTube video to spark a movement.

Using insights gained from 10 years of empirical research in the field of environmental policy, as well as my experience as a power social media user, and drawing from the body of work of the sociology of networks, I posit that successful environmental activism campaigns are founded on the basis of a strong understanding and modeling of the
behaviour of participants in SNS.

Drawing from case studies I have analyzed in the past 10 years (and focusing on cases that have used social media in the past 24 months) I offer some general conclusions into how we can model the online behaviour of transnational environmental activists.

Traditional policy sciences had remained primarily focused on their own discipline. My training has been interdisciplinary almost from the start (from chemical engineering to business strategy to public policy to economic geography to environmental studies). My doctoral dissertation was an interdisciplinary study (though much of the subject matter was rooted in the emerging environmental economic geography field) with a policy analytical focus.

More recent policy analysis textbooks have begun to explore other disciplines (for example Michael Orsini and Miriam Smith’s Critical Policy Studies, 2007, UBC Press). You can read the front matter and Chapter 1 here. Last time I taught Public Policy at the undergraduate level I used Orsini and Smith’s book to spark my students’ interest in cross-disciplinary research. I wish the planning and policy analysis professions spoke to each other more often. Certainly, both fields would benefit from each other’s insights.

The Metro Vancouver area (formerly known as the Greater Vancouver Regional District – see map) pose interesting challenges for students of governance, urban planning and policy analysis. Metro Vancouver, as an organization, (from their “About/Frequently Asked Questions” page) is defined as follows:

Metro Vancouver is both a nonpartisan political body and corporate entity operating under provincial legislation as a ‘regional district’ and ‘greater boards’ on behalf of twenty-two member municipalities and one electoral area. The three primary roles are service delivery, planning, and political leadership.

Metro Vancouver’s core services, which are provided principally to municipalities, are the provision of drinking water, sewerage and drainage, and solid waste management. Regional parks and affordable housing are significant services provided directly to the public.

Metro Vancouver’s three main areas of planning and regulatory responsibility relate to: regional growth (land use through municipalities and transportation through TransLink); waste management (solid and liquid waste) and air quality management (a delegated Provincial function).

Finally, Metro Vancouver serves as the main political forum for discussion of significant community issues at the regional level. It acts as a facilitator, convenor, partner, advocate and a significant instrument for providing information and education to the community.

From a planning perspective, a regional governing body would appear as the best option to ensure essential public services delivery at the intermunicipal scale. A similar argument is made for watershed/river basin councils (given that watersheds transcend jurisdictional and political borders) However, as I have indicated before, effective cross-jurisdictional governance requires strong cooperative intergovernmental relations beyond purely high-level discussions. If municipalities are to provide services, their financial budgetary base should be strengthened. These insights would come from the policy sciences literature.

An analysis of the governing relationships between British Columbia and the Metro Vancouver area would be an interesting case for the literature on federalism and intergovernmental relations. It’s particularly relevant to remember that in the Canadian constitution, only provinces and the Federation have a standing (whereas municipalities don’t). Therefore, it is particularly challenging for municipalities to provide services that require increased funding, yet they don’t have the jurisdictional standing to claim it. Countries like Mexico have begun to increase funding devolution from the Federation to the municipality (not without their own problems, given that the states – equivalent to Canada’s provinces – have begun to see budgetary shortages).

Hat tips to Neil LaMontagne for sparking the conversation that led me to this reflection.

Both Kate Milberry and I maintain websites that are associated with our research. In my case, I have used this space to disseminate some of my ideas and findings. Both Kate and I have personal online spaces as well, where we may discuss non-scholarly endeavours. Recently, Kate wrote on her research site about how she found an internal inconsistency with speaking about free software while using proprietary software. This paragraph touched a nerve in me, particularly:

I have always liked and embraced Marx’s idea of praxis: the notion that theory without action is useless and action without theory even more ridiculous, and ultimately unsustainable. From the beginning of my academic career, I have criticized the academy for being out of touch with reality, for navel gazing and other forms of theoretical narcissism. I intended to be an activist, starting from the inside and working out, connecting ideas to action for social change “on the ground.” Not an academic content to warehouse my ideas securely within the ivory tower, speaking jargon to a select chosen few. [Kate Milberry on Geeks and Global Justice

I find myself in a similar conundrum rather frequently, particularly when it comes to studying environmental non-governmental organizations’ strategies to mobilize and put pressure on national and supra-national governments.

As an academic, I find myself wanting to be seen as having credibility. This credence may be due to my rigorous training (armed with a PhD) or it may be due to my research being solid and my work deemed worthy of being referred to. As someone who writes a personal blog, I find that I sometimes want to retreat to that ivory tower that Kate talks about for fear that my readers may not see me as an authority in my specific research fields. And as an activist, I struggle with studying activists. I try really hard to maintain a balanced position, non-biased and scholarly. I find that sometimes, I don’t think I can (or want to) do that because I do believe in the work that a certain ENGO is doing.

But I also share Kate’s goal – I also want to bring my research findings closer to the public, to the un-trained eye, speak to the issues that are affecting society and to influence policy design and implementation. I also strive for and want to effect change in the world I’m living in.

How can I balance my academic work with my activist role and with my community building role? How can I maintain credibility while still ensuring that I am not perceived as being a resident of the “ivory tower”? I’d really appreciate some insight on this.

What follows below my slides (hosted on Slide Share under a Creative Commons License – Non-Commercial, Attribution, Share-Alike) is an unedited crib of my talk. I borrow the term “crib” from Dr. danah boyd (who is a scholar of social media and youth) who publishes unedited typed notes of her talks and calls them crib. A crib of her latest research can be found here.

Good evening, and thank you everyone for coming. Thanks, first of all, to Doug and Jered for inviting me. I am very honored and flattered to be speaking to such an engaged group of citizens. I hope my talk will provide you with a quick overview of the way in which I think about water issues, and hopefully, you’ll learn some interesting stuff about water.

I have come to admit recently that I am a story teller. My research tells you a story. The story I’m interested in telling you has to do with my interest in questions of access to clean water and sanitation. I approach water problems from an interdisciplinary perspective, and while my PhD is interdisciplinary, I have a strong bias towards the social sciences. However, I also have an MBA and a chemical engineering background so I look at these issues from a variety of lenses.

If I had to summarize my research in a sentence, I can tell you that I have found tthat while we have the technology to treat water and recycle it (thus reducing the amount of water wasted) we don’t have the institutional arrangements to facilitate the adoption of these wastewater treatment technologies.

There is a reason why I always start my talks on water with a photograph like the one you are seeing on the cover slide. Yes, that is a photo of people collecting water in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is the quality of water these people are consuming. As you saw in the powerful documentary, Flow, there is a huge demand for clean drinking water in many developing countries. My work aims to contribute to increasing access to better water quality globally.

In the environmental public policy literature (and in every element of human life) we always have two elements: the politics and the policy. I confess that I practice a politics of fear, and a policy of hope. My notion of politics of fear means that I am more than happy to scare people with data. I have no qualms in scaring people and showing them the realities of environmental degradation. However, I am also a practitioner and an activist in some ways. Therefore, I practice a policy of hope. I offer potential technical and policy solutions. I also educate, not only my students, but everybody who will listen to me, about the need to look at water issues and not forget about how important they are in the light of current focus on climate change issues. We live in an interconnected world, so we must look at water issues as part of the global environmental change challenges.

Throughout my talk, I will share some terrifying facts that I hope will galvanize you to take action. And then I will close my talk by offering a few policy suggestions and highlighting the issues that need to be talked about. My hope is that after my talk, you will be compelled to engage in action to examine your own water consumption patterns and make substantial changes (for the good of humanity)

SLIDES 3 AND 4 – 3,900 children die every day from water-borne diseases. Nearly 41% of the world’s population lives in river basins under water stress. Less than 0.3% of the world’s water is freshwater. Less than 3% of the world’s water supply is available in lakes and rivers. With those facts, do you still feel compelled to take long showers, leave your tap open while brushing your teeth, wash the streets with the water hose? I sure hope not!

SLIDES 5 AND 6 – I love dispelling myths. That’s what made doing my doctoral research and my post-doctoral work so much fun. I enjoy shattering myths, like the one of Canada’s water abundance. If you juxtapose the graphs of water availability and water withdrawal, you’ll see that while Canada has a lot of water available (range of 1,700-5,00 m3/person/year) it also withdraws a lot of water (1,700 m3/person/year). If you do the math correctly, you’ll find that we will soon be in a negative water balance. As you can see, taken individually, these two graphs paint very different pictures. But that’s why we need to think about environmental problems in a holistic way. Canada is one of the countries with the highest water withdrawal rates (Slide 6). We need to re-think the way we approach water consumption and treatment.

Given my empirical research focus on Mexico (a country with one of the highest consumption rates by agricultural activities), it was somewhat shocking for me to find data indicating that in comparison, one (if not THE) main use of water in Canada is in energy production. (SLIDE 7).

There are numerous myths that I could dispel about the state of Canadian water, and numerous issues that need to be taken into account but have not. However, I am just going to highlight two (SLIDE 8). The first one is the rate of average daily water use in the residential sector. As you can see, it has been consistently in the vicinity of 300 litres per capita per day. The daily consumption of water in Africa is 10-20 litres per person per day. Canadians use between 15 and 20 times that. Time to re-think our consumptive patterns. The second graph shows the percentage of municipal population in sewers. Not 100%, as you can see. Well below. We need much more infrastructure for wastewater and sewerage.

SLIDE 9 – One of my most extensive research projects has been in the governance of wastewater and sanitation. This map shows you the distribution of wastewater facilities in Canada. I am currently working on launching a project to examine the state of wastewater policy across Canada, and I am hoping to use this as a baseline. Just for comparative purposes, Canada has less wastewater treatment facilities than the Lerma-Chapala river basin in Mexico does. Rather surprising, eh? In many ways, Canada’s state of sanitation wastewater and infrastructure appears to be much worse than Mexico.

SLIDE 10 – I will admit that I am a big proponent of water metering and water pricing as a policy mechanism to reduce water overconsumption and waste. I do not adhere to the idea of the commodification of water, and I confess that I still need to do more research on privatization of water supplies to define my position. But I am a firm believer that water should NOT be wasted. And I think that putting a price on water and measuring the supply will definitely help minimize excessive withdrawals. If you pay for it, you’ll think twice about wasting it. From the graph you can see that Canada has the cheapest cost of water ($ 0.31/cubic metre vs. $2.36/cubic metre in Germany). Again, time to re-think our consumptive patterns.

SLIDE 11 – I’m going to turn now to three tools that have helped me re-think the way I approach water problems. The first one is the concept of water stress. I have written on water stress previously on my blog, and I just want to show you that there are MANY areas all over North America under high water stress. Canada included.

SLIDE 12 – The second concept I’ve been exploring is the idea of virtual water (I also recently wrote about virtual water on my blog). Virtual water is the amount of water embedded in food or other products needed. For example, to manufacture 1 cup of coffee, you need 140 litres. That cup of coffee you are downing every morning? Yes, 140 litres of water were used in it. Time to re-think our behavioral patterns. I have personally shifted my diet from primarily meat to primarily vegetarian (producing meat consumes way more resources than vegetables).

SLIDE 13 – Finally, the third concept I’ve been exploring is the idea of a water footprint. Similar to the term coined by Dr. Mathis Wackernagel and Dr. Bill Rees (coincidentally, Dr. Wackernagel and I obtained our PhDs from The University of British Columbia, albeit in different programmes. Also, I do know the work of Dr. Rees very well), the water footprint borrows the main conceptual framework from the ecological footprint. The water footprint of a nation is defined as the volume of water needed to produce goods and serices consumed by the inhabitants of the country. I have also written about water footprint on my blog, but not to a large extent. However, there is an actual blog where the authors disseminate their findings on water footprinting. You can read it here. You can guess, yes – one of the highest water footprints is that of the United States of America. Not shocking, eh? Canada is, sadly, lagging not much behind.

SLIDE 14 – I would like to begin closing my talk (I promised it’d be short!) by re-emphasizing the issues I’ve been talking about in my research in the past five years. We need to start focusing on ways to close the hydrological cycle. What do I mean by that? I mean that we need to start paying attention on the red arrows in the graph you are looking at right now in this slide (14). We need to consider how we are going to treat water to the quality level we need. We also need to ensure that when we talk about water, we don’t talk solely about access to water, but also access to sanitation facilities and wastewater treatment. If we treat more water, we can replenish our water bodies. However, of course, it would be smarter if we didn’t consume so much water and/or if we didn’t pollute it in the first place.

SLIDE 15 – Finally, as I promised, I’m going to give you hope. I think that the biggest hope I have is that the documentary you saw tonight, the talks that my fellow presenters and I gave, and the interaction you will most definitely have with the exhibitors in the back of the room (Council of Canadians, Oxfam, Township of Langley’s Water Wise) will shape how you will behave in regards to water from now on.

I hope that Canadian politicians and bureaucrats realize that we need a cohesive, coherent and smart and sound nation-wide water policy.

I hope that Canada improves in regards to its inventories of water and water balances.

I hope that everybody in Canada begins to think about water and the hydrological cycle in an integrated way.

And I hope that you learned something from my talk. Feel free to contact me via e-mail, Twitter or dropping a comment on my blog. I am always available for speaking engagements, to talk to students and the public, and to share whatever little I have learned in regards to environmental public policy and water governance.

THANK YOU.

As I had mentioned to Julie, I had always wanted to be a Visiting Scholar or a Post-Doctoral Fellow at UCSD’s CUSMS but for one reason or another it had never happened. This year, I have applied and I’m still waitiing for the results. I have my fingers crossed that UCSD will want me to join the ranks of the visiting fellows that have participated in the program.

Julie’s piece on how San Diego and California more in general can attract well-educated, smart people is published below. I am very glad to have met Julie, and if I do move to San Diego, I look forward to more opportunities to interact in the near future.