On 20 June, OWN co-hosted an insightful panel discussion together with the School of Geography and the Environment, Africa Oxford Initiative and Stellenbosch University.
The event attracted a lot of interest and sparked thoughtful discussions guided by amazing panelists and a chair:
⭐ Farhana Sultana is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is also a faculty affiliate at Syracuse University in a range of departments. Her work focuses on water governance, climate justice and transnational feminist theories.
⭐ Lyla Mehta is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Development Studies. Her work focuses on water and sanitation, resource grabbing and the politics of sustainability. She has also worked with various UN agencies on the themes of Food Security, Nutrition, Water, and Sanitation.
⭐ Matthew Wingfield is a Research Fellow at the SARChI Chair on Land, Environment, and Sustainable Development at Stellenbosch University. His work has focussed on spaital and environmental justice in post-apartheid South Africa, with particular focus on environmental activism and climate justice. He is also the Political Education and Climate Science Secretary of the Climate Justice Charter Movement (CJCM).
⭐ Sam Taylor co-runs End Water Poverty, a global civil society coalition with 160 members working across 80 countries. Sam coordinates the global Claim Your Water Rights campaign, supporting context-specific, community-led action to enforce the human rights to water and sanitation at local and national level.
⭐ Chair: Catherine Fallon Grasham, Senior Research Associate, University of Oxford
The discussion touched upon how governance frameworks often remain on paper, how important it is to conceptualise justice, how climate justice and water justice are related, how spatial inequities manifest themselves in megacities, how important intersectionality lence is, how important it is to re-politicise who gets access to water, and why it is important to redistribute wealth in international development towards local organisations.
To learn more, you can watch the recording available on OWN's YouTube channel.
