WEBINAR: Anahí Ocampo-Melgar on water governance in Chile

On Monday, the 3rd of October 2022, the PECS working group on collaborative governance and management hosted another webinar: Michael Schoon invited Anahí Ocampo-Melgar to talk about ‘Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary challenges exploring water management in Chile from a socio-eco-hydrological approach’.

Researching water issues like scarcity, use, and management is increasingly “wicked”, not only because of climate uncertainties but for society’s contradictory expectations. In this scenario, science is increasingly being contested and politicized, an arena for which we are not prepared… And we should. Researching water in Chile has the added complication of being the most neoliberal and market-based water management system facing 12 consecutive years of less-than-average rainfall, and having recently gone through a failed process of drafting a new Constitution. What does that mean for researchers and water research projects? The presentation will invite you to navigate along three different projects while placing them in their political and environmental context in order to reflect on how research has been shaped by context and how research is slowly shaping policy by being more inter and transdisciplinary. The presentation invites listeners to think about the future of collaborative governance researchers and the role that we may be taking inadvertently.

Dr. Ocampo-Melgar is an assistant professor at the University of Chile in the Department of Forestry Management and its Environment. Anahí has a Ph.D. in Arid Lands Resource Sciences  from the University of Arizona, an MSc in Integrated Planning for rural development and environmental management from Spain, and an Environmental Engineering degree from Bolivia. Her research interests include:  Integrated analysis of social-ecological systems, climate change adaptation, knowledge co-production for environmental management and sustainable development. Over the last couple of years, Dr. Ocampo-Melgar has been researching water security, climate change and participation in the Chilean context.

You can listen to the recording of the webinar here.

All other past webinars hosted on behalf of the PECS Collaborative Working Group are available here.

Text by Michael Schoon/ Upload by Johanna Hofmann