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T2SGS: Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability

T2SGS: Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability

Billions of people around the world rely for their everyday existence on groundwater. Efforts to intensify agriculture to meet growing food needs or improve productivity and profits also increasingly rely on groundwater for their success. The invisibility of groundwater, however, makes it notoriously difficult to know and account for and thus manage. This difficulty is compounded by two intrinsic tensions that characterize groundwater governance: between individual and collective interests and between short-term gains and longer-term sustainability.

This project comparatively studies promising grass-roots initiatives of people organizing around groundwater in places where pressures on the resource are particularly acute (India, Algeria, Morocco, USA, Chile, Peru, and Tanzania). Chosen because they defy or challenge conventional groundwater governance wisdom, the project’s hypothesis is that these initiatives contain new creative insights about grounded ways of dealing with groundwater governance dilemmas.

Focusing on practices – of knowing, accessing and sharing – the project combines qualitative ethnographic methods with hydrogeological and engineering insights to explore the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize these local initiatives. The project aspires to enunciate and normatively assess their logic and functioning in view of tracing overlaps or patterns that allow them to serve as more generic models for transformations to groundwater sustainability.

The overall aim is to create global action-research-capacity building collaborations to generate new inspirations for thinking about and dealing with the interconnections and interdependencies between humans and groundwater.

Project leader: Prof. M. Zwarteveen, University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands)

Principal investigators: Prof. F. Cleaver, University of Sheffield (United Kingdom), Prof. Flora Lu, University of California, Santa Cruz (United States), Dr. M. Kuper, French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (France), Dr. L. Börjeson, Stockholm University (Sweden), MA. S. Kulkarni, Society for Promoting Participative Eco-system management (India)

Find out more on the T2SGS project website
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Output

T2S Early-career researchers’ perspectives: Hind Ftouhi, CRESC‐ Centre de Recherche et d’Etudes sur les sociétés Contemporaines, T2SGS
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T2SGS podcast Episode 4: Practices of Circularity and Recharge
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T2GS podcast Episode 3: Colonial Circularities of California’s Hydrologic Frontiers: A Beacon and a Warning
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Ms. Uma Aslekar

Advanced Center for Water resources Development and Management (ACWADAM)

Dr. L. Börjeson

Stockholm University
Sweden

Prof. F. Cleaver

University of Sheffield
United Kingdom

Michelaina Johnson

University of California, Santa Cruz
United states

MA. S. Kulkarni

Society for Promoting Participative Eco-system management
India

Dr. Himanshu Kulkarni

Advanced Center for Water resources Development and Management

Dr. M. Kuper

French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development
France

Prof. Flora Lu

University of California, Santa Cruz
United States

Prof. M. Zwarteveen

University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Gold Matters: Sustainability Transformations in Gold Mining
TAPESTRY: Pathways to Sustainability in Marginal Environments
  • T2S Coordination Office

    Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
    Email: T2S@nwo.nl
    Postal address: PO Box 93461
    NL-2509 AL The Hague
    The Netherlands

  • Visiting address

    Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indië 300
    NL-2593 CE  The Hague
    The Netherlands

  • Grant Agreement

    This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 730211.
  • Links

    • www.belmontforum.org
    • www.norface.net