The 15^th Annual Research Postgraduate Conference
Special Session on Water Governance

General information

• This multidisciplinary Annual Research Postgraduate Conference provides a valuable platform for all research postgraduate students and academics for cross-disciplinary and international research interaction.
• This special session is an event organized by the Water Governance Research Programme (WGRP) under the auspices of the Faculty’s Public Policy Initiative (PPI).
• The Conference will be held at the Faculty of Social Sciences, the University of Hong Kong on June 6, 2015.

Objectives of special session

• To promote partnerships and strengthen communication among young scholars specializing in various water policy issues.
• To provide an opportunity for young scholars to reflect upon and deliberate on water governance issues.
• To invite young scholars to explore innovative and inter-disciplinary approaches to examine salient policy challenges associated with the interactions between the water sector and society, environment, and economy.

Call for abstracts

• This call for abstracts is addressed to research postgraduate students who are working in the field of water governance.
• The major thematic areas considered in this call include: transboundary issues and water rights implementation.
  • Transboundary issues have both geographical (e.g., rural-urban, provincial/SAR, interurban) and administrative (e.g., water agencies and others) dimensions. Problem areas may include how to address wicked phenomena such as upstream-downstream conflicts, open access sources (such as groundwater), tensions between asymmetrical systems, and silo mentalities.
  • Water rights implementation includes how water rights are defined, contested and exercised in practice at the user level. This may include exploring the interrelationships between formal systems, including allocations (such as the PRC Three Red Lines policy) and subaltern negotiation, “translation” and possibly appropriation into informal rights. Other possible topics include, but are not limited to, pricing, conservation strategies, nexus issues, and the implications of new technologies (e.g., in metering, system allocation and treatment/recycling). Of specific interest is how rights at all levels affect transboundary possibilities.

Deliverables

• To create a young scholar committee on water governance research to help promote sustained academic communication among junior researchers.
• To generate a research agenda, based on a coherent summary of accepted abstracts and presentations at the Conference.
• To explore future opportunities for inter-disciplinary and/or inter-institutional collaboration among young scholars.