The overall aim of the Department is to support and catalyse lasting transformations towards water sustainability, by developing and experimenting with approaches to protect, use, share, manage and interact with water and water-based ecosystems in ways that also align with or contribute to wider societal goals of justice, peace, safety and wellbeing. 

As a new staff member of this Department you will be involved in further developing the group’s education and research related to the following two (interrelated) research themes of the department: Water and Urbanisation & Water Rights and Justice. 

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the development and implementation of research on “water and urbanization”; and “water rights and justice”, in continuous interaction with partner organizations within and beyond academia;
• Actively produce and mobilize research findings to contribute to ongoing global and national policy debates about water justice and uneven development. This includes but is not limited to topics like climate change adaptation, resilience, urbanization, (waste)water services, and agrarian change;
• Identify funding opportunities and lead in the acquisition of projects to implement the thematic areas of the department;
• Collaborate in the development of - and eventually teach in - the new MSc education programmes of IHE-Delft on Water & Sustainable Development, with specific contributions to relevant study profiles;
• Lecture in courses in the current Water Management and Governance MSc programme;
• Acquire and help implementing international capacity development, advisory and other projects;
• Collaborate, contribute, and/or lead departmental initiatives for staff development, knowledge sharing, outreach and societal impact;

• has a social science PhD degree in a discipline related to water governance (such as anthropology, sociology, planning, humanities, human geography, development studies, public administration);
• demonstrates commitment and/or experience in, explicit appreciation of, and support for, inter and transdisciplinary approaches to producing knowledge or testing solutions;
• demonstrates commitment to and/or experience with scientific plurality, among others by ctively promoting comparisons and discussions between different theories, methods, definitions, and epistemologies;
• demonstrates commitment to and/or experience with problem-orientation and research methodologies (participatory action research; LivingLabs; citizen science) that increase the problem solving potential of research, and that actively promote mutual learning between all involved;
• passes requirements for university teaching qualification;
• has a proven track record in funding acquisition;
• is fluent in English, and preferably also in Spanish and/or French. 

Fixed-term contract: 1 year which might be extended for a longer period.

The employment contract is for 1,0 fte / 38 hours per week.

This position is a temporary position for 1 year, which might be extended for a longer period. The position of either Lecturer or Senior Lecturer will be determined based on qualifications of the candidate, and candidates should specify which position they are applying for. The candidate is expected to start as soon as possible, but preferably before the 1st of March 2022. The position is based in Delft, The Netherlands. A competitive salary is offered depending on qualifications and experience in accordance with the conditions of employment for Dutch Universities.

IHE Delft Institute for Water Education (IHE Delft)

IHE Delft is the largest international graduate water education facility in the world and is based in Delft, the Netherlands. The mission of IHE Delft is to work in partnership to strengthen capacity in the water sector, to achieve global sustainable development. IHE Delft has a permanent staff of 200 of which more than 100 are academics from all over the world, while about 250 guest lecturers from academia and industry contribute to our educational programmes. Each year 750 professionals (including about 200 new MSc students per year) attend courses at IHE Delft. The Institute has an international staff & student community with English as the working language.

IHE Delft Institute for Water Education (IHE Delft) is a unique knowledge institute in the Dutch research and educational landscape, combining excellence in research and PhD training with a mission to strengthen capacity in the water sector and support sustainable development, especially in the Global South. Partnerships are integral to achieving this mission, and the institute forges strong and lasting partnerships with universities, government agencies, NGOs, and private sector institutions in the Netherlands, across Europe and around the world. Water is the unifying theme, and IHE Delft’s ambition is to make a tangible contribution to achieving all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in which water is key. Research, education, and institutional strengthening form the three pillars of the institute’s activities and together contribute to achieving its overall mission.

Water and urbanization and Water Rights and Justice

As a new staff member of this Department you will be involved in further developing the group’s education and research related to the following two (interrelated) research themes of the department:

Water and urbanization
addresses the compounding and interrelated societal and ecological challenges and opportunities related to urban expansion or growth. Central here is the acknowledgment that growing pressures on water and the watery environment - as well as the resulting pollutions, scarcities, degradations and depletions - are the outcome of specific histories and practices of exploitation or ‘development’. Engaging in more sustainable and/or resilient futures, therefore, importantly hinges on identifying and critically questioning these histories and practices, the developmental pathways that they support and are part of, as well as the science and technologies that support them or help make them possible. Those working on this theme are concerned with processes of urbanization to look at how the making of cities and sustaining life in cities responds to and/or requires transformations elsewhere – shaping and altering not just flows of water, but also flows of other primary resources as well as flows of money and people. The theme of urbanization is both concerned with how such processes produce unevenness within city boundaries, but also by how urban expansion happens through the fundamental restructuring of rural landscapes in ways that are often highly unequal. Understanding how the distribution of water and water-related risks within and across cities intersects with wider social inequalities and processes of change and differentiation is central to this theme.

Water Rights and Justice
develops approaches and tools to understand water governance as a question of justice. This includes creating sensitivity to and systematically documenting how ways of sharing water or water-related incomes and benefits are often inequitable, often as the result of wider processes of uneven development that tend to reproduce intersecting societal differences such as those based on class, gender or ethnicity, religion etc. Understanding the processes of uneven development that produce such differences requires engagement with theories of urbanization or agrarian transformation (the topic of theme 3). Theoretically, the theme takes inspiration from and engages with an emerging body of philosophical, critical, feminist and legal scholarship on water and environmental justice. It mobilizes this scholarship to engage in empirical investigations of how injustices become manifest and can be challenged in and around water. In this theme, collaborations with civil society groups and activists are important.