SG - Can Words Order Water?

About Can Words Order Water?

Rivers are a shared phenomenon in our natural world. As patrimony of past, present and future generations, we all carry responsibility for them. But rivers remain under threat despite agreements and systems in place to manage, govern and protect them at the intersection of law, regulation and politics in a context of competing interests. Dr. Farhad Mukhtarov (EUR- ISS) will tour how we got here and dabble into what the future could be. His exploration will float us across time and space as he dives deeper into the conceptualisation of how we have collectively ordered freshwater resources in the past 150 years. This includes the makings of policy paradigms that contribute to riverine governance, management and protection. In this session he will wade into how we think and talk about freshwater and how (post)colonial approaches to rivers have shape-shifted. What does this tell us about the binaries of the rational and the relational? What do the challenges presented by new threats to rivers, require of the scientific community and all of those contributing to the institutions and arrangements to mitigate our relationship to rivers? How does expert knowledge and the limitations of ‘ways of knowing’ fit into this? You are invited to consider with us how power needs language in policy and, how problems and solutions are defined, legitimated and communicated to the publics. Dr. Mukhtarov will rely on examples from around the world to deconstruct the language of management. His insights will speak volumes at the intersection of policy and regulatory discourses, evolving power and legitimacy of governance structures. What do these insights point at for scientists and civil society?

About Dr. Farhad Mukhtarov

Dr. Farhad Mukhtarovis Assistant Professorof Governance and Public Policy at the International Institute of Social Sciences (ISS),Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). Dr. Mukhtarov is a social scientist with a profile at the inter-section of water policy and development studies. Theoretically, Farhad’s work is rooted in interpretive social science and significantly impacted various academic debates, e.g. the debate on how policy models travel across time and space. Especially impactful was his work on policy translation agents, actors that make policies move, such as international organisations (e.g. OECD, Global Water Partnership), national level players (global hydro-hubs, such as the Netherlands) and individual policy entrepreneurs/consultants engaged in projects.

Farhad has also contributed to public debates on public participation/social inclusion in development aid projects, water diplomacy for peace, planning and management of water, as well as the role of water in cultural history. Geographically, most of Farhad’s recent work focuses on Western Europe (e.g. England, the Netherlands) and the larger Mediterranean region (e.g. Turkey, Spain, Caucasus and Central Asia). Farhad published over 20 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and a few dozen book chapters, review essays, public interviews, policy reports, and professional magazine contributions.