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Search Results for: wastewater

World Water Day 2017: Finally, the UN realized wastewater governance is important

This week, on March 22nd, we celebrated World Water Day. The theme for 2017 (and also the topic for the 2017 World Water Assessment Report) was the sudden realization that water that we use to flush toilets, wash dishes and produce goods and services is a waste unless we recover it (Wastewater: The Untapped Resource). […]

The politics of wastewater governance

My recent conversation with Dave Karpf, Mariana Medina, Mervyn Horgan and Andrew Biro on “the political” made me think about “the political” in sanitation and wastewater governance. I’ve written before here on why I study sanitation. The size of the problem is huge, and it is such a basic necessity. Yet almost a billion people […]

Notes from the field: Studying my own municipality’s solid waste and wastewater systems

I’ve been studying wastewater in Mexico for the better part of the last 20 years of my life. I have designed and built bench-scale effluent biological secondary and tertiary treatment systems and I have undertaken institutional ethnographic analyses of river basin organizations. I also have compared structures for sanitation governance across five states within the […]

Are River Basin Councils the Right Model of Water and Wastewater Governance in Mexico?

This is the abstract for my water policy talk. I’ve submitted it to the School of Public Administration at University of Victoria to see if they’re interested, although I’m happy to tailor it for other audiences. Are River Basin Councils the Right Model of Water and Wastewater Governance in Mexico? Lessons from a Case Study […]

Closing the hydrological cycle: Why studying wastewater policy is important in water governance

Water is scarce, we should learn how to manage the common pool resource, we need to design more robust institutions for water management, integrated watershed management is the way to go, etc. All of these are phrases that have become commonplace in the literature on water governance. Interestingly enough, the public seems to think about […]

The governance of wastewater and the culture of flushing

One of the things that has struck me a lot throughout the past five years that I have studied water policy is the absolute disconnect that exists between our understanding of the different elements of the hydrological cycle and their interconnectedness. The social sciences literature has examined in great detail issues of water scarcity, but […]

On writing by hand and always keeping a written record of everything

Last week, I attended the 2022 Discards Studies Conference: Exploring Disposal’s Past, Present, and Future in New York City. As a scholar of waste, wastewater and discards, this was a really key conference for me to attend. This was also my first conference after 3 months of COVID, COVID sequelae and pneumonia. Though I am […]

Project management for academics III: Juggling multiple writing/research projects

Recently, Dr. Gretchen Sneegas (Texas A&M University) asked me how I manage multiple writing projects, a situation she’s facing right now as a post-doctoral researcher. This is not uncommon, even as a doctoral students: in academia, we tend to work on several projects at the same time. The biggest challenge for me is how to […]

What are the differences between a Research Trajectory, a Research Programme and a Research Pipeline?

A few days ago, I saw a post in a discussion forum on how to write a Research Trajectory document. The conversation that ensued prompted me to consider how *I* viewed the different documents that we produce not only for job-seeking purposes (the Research Programme) but also for advancement reasons (the Research Trajectory), and for […]

A sequential framework for teaching how to write good research questions

The more theses I supervise, the more essays I read and the more papers I have to peer-review for publication, the more I realize how important it is to teach how to craft good research questions. Many students of mine come with a general idea of what they want to study for their thesis, but […]

Research trajectory

My research trajectory isn’t linear, but it’s cohesive. This narrative provides an overview of how I have moved from chemical engineering and wastewater treatment to the economics of technical change and technology transfer, to the comparative politics of environmental public policy from a spatial viewpoint. This story is also told in this blog post. A […]

On the economic geography of industrial decline in Mexico

When I tell people that I’m both a political scientist and a human geographer, they tend to be somewhat shocked. After all, I am in a public administration department, I publish in interdisciplinary journals, and attend conferences ranging from area-specific (International Association for the Study of the Commons, IASC) to discipline-specific (Midwest Political Science Association). […]

Can a soft path approach to water management fix Cape Town’s water crisis?

While I work on urban water governance issues, I’m not an expert on every city, and particularly, I am wary of offering any “silver bullet” kind of solutions to drought crises because cities are heterogeneous entities and therefore there is no single policy decision that will have the necessary impact. When I first started reading […]

Carving time to read: The AIC and Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump combination method

This semester has been a bit more hectic than I expected, and keeping everything under control hasn’t been an easy task. But despite whatever challenges I face, I am determined to stay on top of the literature. I’ve written before about having a repertoire of reading strategies (quick skim to determine what a paper is […]

Reading Notes of Books

I have read a lot of books, and on this page I am posting the ones I’ve read and of which I’ve posted my reading notes. Note: I don’t consider these “book reviews”, nor do I post my reading notes of every single book I read. I have categorized my posts by broad area (e.g. […]

“The art of letting go of things”: Toilets as places of refusal

Earlier today, I went to the small store around the corner from my Mom’s house. Their magazine exhibit is usually filled with trashy gossip magazines. but as someone who studies sanitation and wastewater governance, the cover of this magazine caught my eye immediately: it’s a photograph of a toilet being flushed (lucky for the readers, […]

The multiple faces of water insecurity

Wherever I go, I’m always “on”. That is, my researcher mind keeps looking for things that are associated with my research, or that seem to defy explanation. As I went into one of our favourite restaurants with my brother (who is visiting) and my Mom, I realized they didn’t have running water. A common hygiene […]

Writing a memorandum based on a synthetic note

In previous posts I have addressed how to write rhetorical precis (very brief, four sentence summaries of the reading you are doing), synthetic notes (brief summaries of articles, focusing on the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion as per the AIC method), and memorandums (longer, 1000-2000 word briefings that synthesize the content of an article, but also […]

Distinguishing between description and analysis in academic writing

When I switched from chemical engineering (my undergraduate degree) to political science and human geography (my doctoral degree), I went through economics of technical change and international marketing (my Masters). But the chemical engineering component was still very strong during my Masters. I remember reading comments from a professor’s marker (yes, my professor didn’t even […]

Studying policy change vs policy creation – policy cycle theories vs policy regime framework

Whenever anybody asks me what does a double-major in political science and human geography do in a public administration department, I tell them that I study comparative public policy and use cases of environment and resource governance to explore differences across national jurisdictions. I'm interdisciplinary. A chemical engineer, an economist of technical change, a political […]

Using prompts to motivate writing: Five strategies to get some words out

I just came back from a week in Paris attending a meeting of field experiments’ scholars, and I took the opportunity to do some fieldwork. There are perfectly good reasons why I study French water governance, specifically in Paris, but that discussion is reserved for another post. When I do fieldwork or when I am […]

Move Every Paper Forward Every Day (MEPFED) vs Work on One Project Each Day (WOPED)

For many years, I have advocated the Move Every Paper Forward Every Day (MEPFED) model of working. The MEPFED model basically says “every day, insert something related to each one of your research projects/papers on your To-Do list, so that collectively, every week you’ve moved most/all of your work forward“. MEPFED has worked for me […]

My year in review: 2016, an amazing year of successes

It almost feels awful to write that 2016 was perhaps my best year yet (professionally speaking), given all the losses of great artists, scientists and all the other negative things that happened this year. But it’s true. 2016 was, to me, an amazing year of success-after-success. 2016 in review, month by month I started the […]

On slow scholarship, time investments and good research

When looking at my publication record, many people have told me that they were amazed that I had published so much in such short period of time. While I am positively flattered that they think so, I don’t consider myself a particularly productive academic. Yes, I’ve published a lot in the past few years, the […]

KonMari your campus desk and office: The benefits of decluttering your academic life

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I often post photographs of what I’m doing, reading, and (often times) eating. Yesterday, I posted photos of how I had cleaned up my campus office (I’m officially on holidays, although I had to come into the office for 3 days in a row […]