Prof. Margreet Z. Zwarteveen

IHE Delft Institute for Water Education

In her work, Margreet Zwarteveen traverses and weaves together social science scholarship (political ecology, anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, feminist studies) with hydrology and engineering into a distinct and influential articulation of questions of justice and governance in water. In doing this, she is interested in making the use and management of water a firm ingredient of a wider politics of transformation. This importantly hinges on combining hydrological assessments of water dynamics with political-ecological and ethnographic understandings of how and why people use, share and care for water. As hydrologists and engineers use different methods, definitions and languages as compared to social scientists, the question of how to collaborate across disciplines also matters to Margreet. Until 2024, Margreet Zwarteveen was the coordinator of the project “Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability” (T2GS). The findings of this project are now being synthesized through a post-doc project funded by the Future Earth Programme and the Water for Development Partnership Programme. The findings also inspired the Care-ful irrigation project, which looks at how irrigators in different places in the world try to adopt their farming practices and crop choices to available waters. By carefully irrigating, they often change accepted irrigation conventions and definitions of efficiency.