My Google Scholar Citations profile can be found here My Academia.Edu profile can be found here. My ResearchGate profile can be found here. Please note: citations to my work should use the Pacheco-Vega last name, that is, BOTH last names, hyphenated, exactly as they appear on this page. Please refrain from using any other variation. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 15, 2016
I blog about my research and about other public policy issues that matter to me. In this page, I have attempted to compile blog posts about different types of research thoughts under different categories. Why do political science and policy sciences shun homelessness as a research focus? In this blog post, I explain my frustration […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 15, 2016
I spent this week at an authors’ workshop for a book on polycentricity and a special issue of a journal. This workshop was convened by Andreas Thiel, Dustin Garrick and Bill Blomquist, and generously partially funded by a grant that supports Andreas’ work. We were hosted at a familiar space for many of us, the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 19, 2015
November 19th marks World Toilet Day, perhaps the one day that justifies what has been the bulk of my scholarly research for the past 11 years. When you realize that World Toilet Day was founded in 2001 by Jack Sim, from the World Toilet Organization, and that it’s only been in the past three years […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 8, 2015
I promised I would post the crib of my talk at the UNESCO Chair & Institute for Comparative Human Rights, as well as the slides. If you are interested in reading the tweetage coming from the conference, you can do so here too. MY TALK: I want to take this opportunity to thank the UNESCO […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 20, 2015
While this has been in the works for quite a few months, I am thrilled that the time has come for me to visit the University of Connecticut, and nothing better than doing so within the context of a fantastic conference where I will be sharing the stage with, among several other outstanding academics, Dr. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 14, 2015
You can download a PDF version of my CV here: Long CV (all publications, grants funded, selected publications and presentations from the past 7 years, all teaching and student mentoring). CV corto en español (sólo publicaciones, financiamiento, etc.) RESEARCH INTERESTS Comparative public policy, environmental policy and politics, global environmental politics. Mixed methods, multiple methods. Water […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 29, 2015
I was going to write this blog post a long time ago, every since Ryan Briggs (Virginia Tech) alerted me to these posts by Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University), Ken Opalo (Stanford University) and Chris Blattman (Columbia University), but then the “worm wars” debate happened on Twitter, I got pulled into it (inadvertently and unwillingly) and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 1, 2015
As many of my readers know, I have a very strong connection to the late Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. My research has been strongly influenced by their scholarship, and their mentorship. Thus, it is a pleasure for me to come back to Bloomington to Indiana University’s Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 4, 2015
It’s rare to find a science journalist who will be passionate about sanitation, so when I came across Joe Turner and his work covering sanitation and soil science, I was fascinated. We struck a wonderful conversation about whether sanitation is “safe” and whether naming it a human right would ever change things and improve access. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 23, 2015
One of the first things other academics ask me is “why are you interested in toilets?” For the vast majority of people, the biological function of waste excretion is an after thought, an activity that nobody wants to talk about, and often times, the mere thought of talking about shit grosses them out. I am, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 16, 2014
Thanks to Professor Tina Loo (Chair of the Department of History at The University of British Columbia, and an environmental historian), I was alerted to a feature in The Economist on sanitation in India, suggesting that changes in defecation practices and not only access to toilets was important. First of all. I think we all […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 20, 2014
Most people who read my blog on a regular basis know that I write every single day of the week, either 2 hours in a row (from 4:00am to 6:00am), or in 4 blocks of 30 minutes every day, to ensure at least 10 hours of solid writing per week. What most people DON’T know […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 5, 2014
This week I have been participating in the 5th Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop (WOW5). I co-organized two panels in a Working Group on polycentric water governance, presented a paper on polycentric water governance in Mexico, and then co-presented the summary of our findings to a larger Working Group on polycentricity. I presented on my […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 21, 2014
When I was doing my doctorate, I took a variety of methods courses. Seeing as I had taken economics during my Masters and that I was originally a chemical engineer, I thought it was advisable to do coursework that would actually help me in a variety of situations. I took quantitative methods, qualitative methods, spatial […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 12, 2014
My current project on the politics of water privatization in Mexico has yielded three interesting sub-strands. The first one is an analysis of global trends in remunicipalization (the process whereby municipalities take back public water supply from private concession holders). The second one is a study of social struggles around water privatization in several Mexican […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 25, 2014
In my current study of water privatization in Mexico, I’ve been immersing myself in the literature on remunicipalization of public services delivery. This is not a random occurrence, and as I mentioned on Twitter, it makes sense as I delve more into the research. I’ve been a scholar of sanitation for over a decade. I’ve […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 4, 2014
My curse as an academic is that I am always thinking about stuff that is outside of my research area. I’m a specialist in comparative public policy who uses water, wastewater and solid waste as case studies for the study of cooperative behavior. I do, however, have a minor in economic geography, and an MBA, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 25, 2014
While the vast majority of my research is in water governance, and more specifically on wastewater and sanitation, I have always had an interest in solid waste. In fact, at the beginning of my PhD, I was more interested (and did more research) on hazardous waste and municipal garbage than I did on wastewater. In […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 20, 2014
By some people’s standards I could consider myself a very successful academic. I have a job I love at a prestigious, internationally-recognized institution, I have a low teaching load, have successfully raised extramural grant money to execute projects, I have brilliant students, both undergraduate and graduate. I absolutely love my research and have fantastic collaborators […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 20, 2014
Last year I had a conversation with a senior scholar, colleague and good friend of mine at CIDE (Dr. Mauricio Merino Huerta, one of Mexico’s foremost scholars of transparency and corruption). In that conversation, he mentioned how he was examining a research question that was pushing his own intellectual boundaries. When someone who is a […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 8, 2014
Like anybody who is sort of in-between an early-career-researcher (ECR) and a more seasoned, established scholar, I have spent the last few years thinking about where my research is taking me and exploring new topics and ideas. I have also gained access to different funding sources, something that of course has influenced my research trajectory. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 1, 2014
Whenever people ask me why I avoid some research questions I remind them that there are policy areas where I don’t think we can do much or where I feel that I cannot contribute. For years, I shunned the literature on water privatization because I was (and still am) in the politics of wastewater governance. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 4, 2014
One of the challenges I face as a multidisciplinary researcher who doesn’t accept the traditional, discipline-based boundaries rigidly set by traditional academic standards is to find the right balance of focus and diversification (and the right balance of writing what you want to write right now versus what you need to finish). For many years, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 27, 2013
I’m having an intense and really challenging week, one where I am feeling really conflicted. My weeks are usually like this, but this week I’m facing an interesting conundrum. I have a number of projects I need to finish off (not the least, changes to my book that I lost in the last round of […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 24, 2013
Recent Comments