We organize a regular international meeting, which includes an internal meeting for organizational matters. In addition, we also organize special public meetings such as international conferences, workshops, seminars, and similar events. Since 2012, the organisation of these meetings is funded with support from a range of institutions and through the collective effort of the members. See the list of our supporting institutions here.
Objectives and structure of the regular international meetings
The objective of the regular international meetings is to provide an opportunity for WATERLAT-GOBACIT members to meet and discuss plans for research projects, teaching, interventions, and other activities connected with the network’s interests. We focus our interests on the study of the political, social, cultural, economic, techno-infrastructural, administrative, public policy, health, among other, processes characterizing the government and management of water and water services.
Our meetings, as the rest of our activities, are oriented by the network’s objectives and research priorities. We collectively defined these objectives and priorities in our First International Meeting in 2009. The objectives and priorities are wide and flexible enough to allow a dialogue between different approaches, theoretical frameworks, research and action problems, and diverse empirical realities. However, at the same time our objectives and priorities clearly delineate a field of problems and an orientation that is critical of the status quo. Our network focuses on these questions from the perspective of political ecology, in a broad inter- and transdisciplinary approach.
We take advantage of the fact that the members of the network travel from different regions and countries for the regular international meetings to organize activities open to the general public, which allows us to share experiences and knowledge with a diversity of local actors in each site. For this reason part of our regular international meetings are open and involve the participation of academics, representatives of the public and civil society sectors, and interested members of the public more generally. In the link below, you can see details and information about our past regular and special public meetings. In addition, based on papers presented in our meetings and related network activities we develop a range of publications, including books, special issues in academic journals, working papers, etc. Visit our Publications page.
Although WATERLAT-GOBACIT is a network with a strong academic-scientific basis, our members include a diversity of actors from public and civil society organizations, social movements, and other areas of activity. For this reason, our meetings do not normally follow the conventional structure of academic-scientific events, such as congresses or conferences. We rather aim to promote participative forms such as round tables with speakers from different sectors, plenary sessions with active participation from the audience, public “conversations”, or workshops dedicated to produce tangible results such as draft research or intervention projects, educational strategies, vehicles for dissemination of information, etc. We also videotape interviews with some participants in our meetings who represent a diversity of viewpoints and interests. We make these interviews available in our Public Engagement web pages.