Jampel Dell’Angelo is Associate Professor of Water Governance in the Department of Environmental Policy Analysis at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is an environmental social scientist interested in the political economy of natural resources, in particular water. 

His research is on the multilevel dimensions of cooperation and conflict over freshwater resources. The focus of his research spans from socio-environmental dynamics of climate change adaption in community irrigation schemes of rural Kenya to global patterns of virtual water appropriation associated with transnational land investments. He employs mixed methods and builds on theoretical pluralism combining perspectives from the Bloomington School of Political Economy and the Barcelona School of Political Ecology. Believing in the necessity to conduct true interdisciplinary research to tackle complex water governance problems he draws on a socio-environmental synthesis approach.

Dell’Angelo is a Visiting Scholar and Member of the Ecohydrology Lab in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at University of California, Berkeley and an Environmental Governance Affiliate Scholar at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), Maryland. 

Dr. Dave Huitema is Professor of Environmental Policy at the Netherlands Open University and the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.  

Huitema and his group of colleagues focus on the adaptability of policy systems. For policy systems to be adaptable, learning needs to take place and agency needs to be developed to translate learning in policy change. This is why the team is analyzing for example the role of experiments, evaluation, and entrepreneurs in learning and policy innovation.

Currently Huitema fullfils several academic roles. He is deputy chair of the Department of Environmental Policy Analysis (EPA) at the IVM, vice-chair of the Department of Science of the Faculty of Management, Science and Technology at the Netherlands Open University (OU), member of the Research Committee of the latter Faculty, and he is one of the coordinators of the OU research program on Safety and the City. Huitema is member of the Governing Board of the Dutch National Research School for the Environmental Sciences (SENSE, representing the NL Open University), and he is a member of the editorial board of various academic journals (including "Ecology and Society" and “Global Environmental Change”).

Caterina is Scientific Project Manager at the Insitute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Trained as Environmental Engineer with a MSc in Water Resources Management at Delft University of Technology, she has always been interested in the socio-political dynamics underlying the engineering systems she was dealing with. She expanded her knowledge on this field attending the Master of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University as guest student. In particular she focused on the multi-scalar connections between the economic and the political, and between institutional and non-institutional policy-making, also addressing responses to policies by social movements, and the creation of alternative markets in which factors other than sole profitability are important.

Caterina has previously worked with the International Water Association (IWA) as Leadership and Members Engagement Officer, crossing multiple units: Water Policy and Regulation; Young Water Professionals and Fellows; Strategic Programmes (Digital Water). Her research experience in the water sector encompasses: agriculture and rural development; urban planning; flood risk assessment; water, environmental, climate policies and governance. Experienced in cross-disciplinary team working in international and local contexts, she has been collaborating with partners from public, private and non-profit sectors, mainly working in Europe (NL, Italy, Spain), with long and short-term missions abroad, including Africa (Ghana and Ethiopia), Canada, and China.  

Margreet Zwarteveen is Professor of Water Governance at IHE-Delft and the University of Amsterdam. Trained as both an irrigation engineer and a social scientist, Margreet is interested in water allocation policies, technologies and practices, and the knowledge that justify or inform these. She focuses her research and education on questions of (gender-) equity and justice. In her work, Margreet favours inter-or transdisciplinary approaches, seeing water flows and distributions as the outcome of interactions between natures, technologies and people. Margreet currently is a FIAS (French Institute for Advanced Studies) Fellow in Montpellier, to work on a project called “Caring water practices and practicing water care”. She is also the project leader of a large international research network T2SGS: Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability (funded by the Belmont-Norface Programme on Transformations to Sustainability) to study and learn from bottom-up initiatives to protect or share groundwater.

Maria Cristina Rulli is Professor of Hydrology at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Her research focuses on the mutual interaction between hydrological processes and humanity. She has investigated the effects of anthropogenic and natural disturbances such as land use change, climate change, forest fires, and new infrastructures on both the hydrological response and sediment yield of a variety of watersheds at different spatial and temporal scales. Recently, she has been investigating the impact of climate change, urbanization, deforestation, land degradation, population growth, changes in food consumption, changes in energy policies on the management of water and other natural resources. Her work has analyzed the effect of environmental externalities, interdependencies and teleconnections on natural resource availability. In particular, she has focused on the emergent phenomenon of Large Scale Land Acquisition (LSLA) and its implication for water, energy and food security. Her work has helped to define and quantify the global phenomenon of “water grabbing” and explored its impacts on water governance, rural livelihoods, and the emergence of water conflicts.  She is currently investigating global water and food security and environmental sustainability issues using the Food-Energy-Water Nexus perspective. She is studying the nexus existing between hydrological risk and food security. Specifically, she is analyzing the direct effects of hydrologic extremes (e.g., floods, droughts, landslides, hurricanes, typhoons) on food production and availability and the cascades effects on conflicts and human migrations occurrence. Her most recent research concentrates on the nexus between nutritional security and environmental resources especially water. In particular, focusing on food related diseases she is investigating if the available natural resources are able to meet sustainable diets helping to contrast food based diseases. 

Dr Jens Newig is full Professor of Governance and Sustainability at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. He is member of the Faculty of Sustainability and of the Centre for the Study of Democracy and director of Leuphana’s Institute for Sustainability Governance (INSUGO). A geo-ecologist by training with a doctoral degree in Law and an Habilitation in political science and systems science, Jens is now engaging in inter- and transdisdisciplinary governance research. Building on research projects funded inter alia by the European Research Council or the German Research Foundation, Jens and his team have published widely on issues of water governance, participatory, collaborative and globalized environmental and sustainability governance, aspiring produce but also to cumulate evidence in the field.

Nuria Hernández-Mora is a senior water policy expert. She has a PhD in Geography from the University of Seville (Spain, 2015) and MS degrees from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2001) and Cornell University (1995) in natural resources policy and administration. She has over 20 years of experience in research and consultancy focused on water policy evaluation and design, institutional analysis, water economics, public participation and drought management. She has collaborated with non-profit organizations, universities and research institutions, local, regional and national administrations, the European Commission and the World Bank. She is the author or coauthor of over 80 publications related to different aspects of water governance.