A few weeks ago I participated in a cross-national, multi-institution workshop on the political aspects of water resources. This workshop is one of two organized by Dr. Edith Kauffer from the Center for Studies in Applied Anthropology (CIESAS) Unidad Sureste. The Sureste branch of CIESAS is focused on studying and analyzing social issues in the […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 28, 2013
Academics work really hard, it’s a fact. Ever since I became an academic (e.g. ever since I started working in a research setting, which was two years before I even completed my undergraduate degree), my expectations of holidays were pretty much erased. I worked in a research lab where I was doing bench-scale wastewater treatment […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 14, 2013
I have written grant proposals for research projects and successfully obtained funding to conduct research before, without much problem. But in the past couple of years, I’ve experienced my share of rejection. I will admit I wasn’t used to rejection (neither in publishing nor in grant-writing), so being denied funding came as a shock to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 21, 2013
I give a lot of talks and present a lot of my work at conferences, both nationally and internationally. But this 2013, for a number of circumstances (mostly, personal and some logistical), I hadn’t been able to present my papers at the conferences I had already scheduled. So being able to present at the Latin […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 16, 2013
I am chairing and organizing two panels at the 14th Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), held 3-7 June 2013 in Kitafuji, Japan. The first one is New Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Commons Research and the second one is Complex Commons and Water Governance in Mexico. You can […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 6, 2013
We are inviting proposals for papers for the following panel: Space, scale and geopolitics in the global governance of waste Panel proposal for the 2014 International Studies Association conference: Spaces and Places: Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization, Toronto (ON), Canada. Panel co-convenors: Dr. Kate O’Neill (Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA) kmoneill[@]berkeley[.]edu Dr. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 23, 2013
A month or so ago, I began writing a document that mapped my writing output and my research trajectory. More than the research trajectory that other writers and myself have referred to at some points (i.e., the roadmap of what research output you need by when in order to achieve tenure, a-la-Karen Kelsky), the document […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 17, 2013
For the past couple of decades, I have been a scholar of cooperative behavior. I have studied how cooperation among agents occurs, within a broad variety of contexts. I have demonstrated that environmental activists build strategic relationships and form transnational coalitions to put pressure on nation states (Pacheco-Vega 2005a, b, Pacheco-Vega, Weibust and Fox 2010). […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 18, 2013
I had lunch with my Dad two weekends ago (my Dad is a lawyer and he has taught law as well, so his background is also academic) and he started asking me why had I chosen the academic path that I have in the past few years. Dad seemed especially fascinated by my interest in […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 5, 2013
For the longest time, I have been fascinated with waste, although for some reason that is not 100% clear to me, I haven’t devoted much time to studying the scholarship around sustainable consumption. I’m currently engaged in a number of projects around the socio-political dynamics of informal recycling (waste picking) and as a result, I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 25, 2013
My Research Philosophy and Methodological Orientation My research is, by nature, interdisciplinary, though I primarily use conceptual frameworks derived from the political science and human geography literatures to study comparative public policy issues. I explore questions of networked governance through the study of environmental issues at the urban (local) and cross-national (global) scales. My current […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 20, 2013
I have engaged in a number of interesting projects throughout the years. The following is just a sample of my funded projects over the last decade. Design elements for a climate policy evaluation office in Mexico: Conceptual framework and institutional architectures. With funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through World Wildlife […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 20, 2013
Telling anyone (even some of your academic peers) that you specialize in doing scholarly work on the global politics of sanitation and the governance of wastewater is sometimes the surest way to make people chuckle and laugh. When I first shared the news about World Toilet Day (organized by the World Toilet Organization and endorsed […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 17, 2012
While I acknowledge myself as a multi-methods scholar, and I have done quantitative work, much of my empirical work involves qualitative data. Conducting structured and semi-structured interviews, engaging in participant observation, and running focus groups, are all forms of qualitative research. My work studying the Lerma-Chapala river basin council involved sitting in dozens of meetings […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– September 8, 2012
While the interactions between food security and water is not my field of scholarly research, I have always had concerns about the amount of freshwater used in agricultural production. From the materials that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) produced to promote World Water Day 2012 (whose theme this year is Water and Food Security), […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 22, 2012
photo credit: ya3hs3 A question I get asked rather frequently in scholarly (and laypeople’s) circles is why do you do research on the politics and governance of wastewater?” The notion of what happens to water after anthropogenic activities have changed its properties (read: after we have polluted it) seems foreign to many individuals, even scholars […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– November 15, 2011
Every scholar is required at some point to lay out a research plan and to showcase their research agenda. Given the broad variety of topics and issue areas that I have worked on (call it intellectual curiosity), I sometimes struggle to answer the kind of questions that for other scholars may sound easy. I sometimes […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– October 13, 2011
I have been reading Jamie Linton’s book What Is Water (UBC Press, 2010). Linton’s book builds a theoretical framework based on relational dialectics. Linton explores humans in their relationship to water (in some ways, achieving a degree of reification of water that almost borders with making water an actual living entity). Normally, I never write […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 22, 2011
World Water Day was instituted as an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. The theme for 2011 is Water for Cities. I recently spoke at the Western Division of the Canadian Association of Geographers, hosted by Simon Fraser University, on the urban […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 20, 2011
I’m often asked to provide my specialized opinion on matters associated with my research on urban sustainability, water governance, transnational mobilizations and environmental policy in North America (with a special focus on Mexico) or my teaching in environmental politics and public policy. Below are selected instances of media coverage of my work. My social media […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 26, 2009
I am fully aware that my research work has implications for environmental public policy at all levels, from the local community to the global arena. I’ve studied a number of phenomena that are of relevance and require paying attention to, like the governance of wastewater, the mobilization strategies of environmental activist groups, and the impacts […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 9, 2009
As I mentioned, I was invited by Doug Van Spronsen and Jered Love from WaterDrop to give a keynote talk at their inaugural event “The Global Water Crisis”. I am both honored and flattered that they invited me to their first event, and I do hope I contributed to the discussions we had. What follows […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 23, 2009
You might recall that I wrote a few days back about an invitation that Jered Love and Doug Van Spronsen from WaterDrop made recently. Jered and Doug asked me if I’d be willing to speak about the state of Canadian water within the global water issues context. Of course, I accepted gladly because I believe […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 22, 2009
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
– March 5, 2009
Scheduled Appearances: I plan to attend the following conferences (pending funding!): International Studies Association 2017 (Baltimore, Maryland, USA) Midwest Political Science Association 2017 (Chicago, Illinois, USA) Western Political Science Association 2017 (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) Canadian Political Science Association 2017 (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) International Association for the Study of the Commons 2017 (IASC) (Utrecht, The […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 5, 2009
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