Access to water and sanitation for all is central to achieving global justice for poor women and men. Yet the global aid architecture is still straining to solve what appears on the surface a simple problem: how to provide water and sanitation to the planet’s population. Despite successive global declarations and efforts, in 2008 over 2.6 billion people still lived without access to improved sanitation facilities and nearly 900 million people received drinking water from unimproved sources. At the core of this appalling situation is a global failure of collective action, despite repeated principles, declarations, and meetings.
As the global community rushes to mark the end of the Global Freshwater Decade 2005-2015 and the MDGs, it is worth pausing and looking at a range of contested pathways from past to present. Past lessons suggest that the wider global water and sanitation community need to rethink approaches and emphases, shifting from targets and global pronouncement to issues concerning sustainability, global/local mismatches, contested knowledge, equity, politics, and power.
Lyla Mehta’s work focusses on the politics of water and sanitation, scarcity and forced displacement. She uses the case of water to address conceptual debates concerning rights, access and power/knowledge interfaces in environment and development. She has been involved in advocacy work on water, dams and development issues with NGOs and social movements in India and Europe. Her books include The politics and poetics of water: naturalising scarcity in Western India, Displaced by development: confronting marginalisation and gender injustice, and The limits to scarcity: contesting the politics of allocation.
Off track, Onside? Realising the Water and Sanitation MDG May be Possible but What Will it Achieve?
Lyla Mehta, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex; Norwegian University of Life sciences
Coach House, Green College, UBC
March 28 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
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Mark Vessey has been invited to the University of Bristol to give the Blackwell-Bristol Lectures 2013 at the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition.
Dame Anne Salmond will give three talks on how different cultures define and communicate ways of being.
May 07, 2013The Global Civic Policy Society presents a Public Salon on Wednesday, June 5 from 7:30-9pm at the Vancouver Playhouse. A diverse range of speakers from very different walks of life will each spend 7 minutes speaking about something they are passionate about.- May 01, 2013Applicant Paul Yachnin (McGill University) and fifteen co-applicants including Green College Principal Mark Vessey received funding to begin their multi-disciplinary project entitled "Forms of conversion: religion, culture, and cognitive ecologies in early modern Europe and its worlds."
- April 26, 2013Green College resident Brittany Welsh describes how the daunting task of mounting four shows of Shakespeare's The Tempest helped and inspired her and her colleagues in ways she hadn't envisioned when she started down the Bard's path five months earlier.
January 04, 2013Seven Green College students volunteered at Lord Strathcona Elementary School in East Vancouver as part of UBC’s Community Learning Initiative TREK program, matching groups UBC students with elementary schools in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, and helping with reading and writing lessons and tutoring students on a one-on-one basis.
