Advances in Groundwater Governance (PDF)

Elena López Gunn is the Founder and Director of ICATALIST and a Cheney Fellow at University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. Elena finished her PhD at King's College, London. She also holds a Masters from the University of Cambridge. She was an Associate Professor at IE Business school and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics as Alcoa Research Fellow. Professionally, Elena has collaborated with a number of organizations including UNESCO, FAO, UNDP, EU DG Research and Innovation, universities (Spanish and Dutch) and river basin agencies, the England and Wales Environment Agency, as well as the private sector like Repsol, and NGOs like Transparency International-Spanish Chapter. She has published on a range of topics mainly related to water security, social innovation, collaborative decision making, water governance, evaluation of public policy, knowledge management and transfer. Her current main focus is climate change adaptation, DRR and socio-ecological systems. She has recently worked as Technical Expert for the International Atomic Agency on projects related to groundwater governance and capacity building. Elena lives in Madrid with her husband, Dave, and her three fabulous children.

Kirstin I. Conti has 10 years experience in the environmental and water policy sectors. As a child, Kirstin's favorite gardening project was creating a compost bin - placing worms in a compost box and feeding them produce scraps. Years later her love for nature led her to her major in Earth Systems at Stanford University, which is an interdisciplinary program focused on environmental problem solving. At that time, her experiences in the classroom and conducting field research in in the Southern Africa region sparked her passionate for a career in water management. Her professional experiences revealed the complexity of managing shared water resources. As an environmental consultant in San Francisco, she witnessed stakeholder conflicts prevent the effective management of California's water. She completed a Masters of Laws at University of Dundee and her doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam and the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (IGRAC). Her focus is improving groundwater governance and conflict prevention mechanisms for the purpose of ensuring that our most abundant fresh water resource, groundwater, is managed sustainably, equitably, and cooperatively.

Alberto Garrido is Spanish Professor of Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics and Vice-Rector of Quality and Efficiency at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). Has a Bachelor Degree and MSc in Agricultural Engineering; a Masters in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis (1992) and a Doctoral Degree in Agricultural Economics from the UPM (1995). Has supervised 17 Doctoral Dissertations, published 195 references, of which 70 are academic articles and 15 books. Has 25 years of experience in leading research projects and grants. His research focuses on agricultural risks and insurance, natural resource economics and policy and water policy. Has consulted for the main international organisations (FAO, BID, The World Bank, IFAD), several national governments of Europe, Asia and America, and numerous private companies and foundations. He has coordinated 55 research projects, 8 of which with international consortia. Since 1996, he is a member of the Advisory Board of the Rosenberg Forum of International Policy.

Jac van der Gun is a Dutch groundwater hydrologist and water resources specialist (MSc, Wageningen University). He has been employed successively by a Dutch water supply company (WMG, Velp), UN-OTC (New York) and the R&D organisation TNO (Delft/Utrecht). His professional career spans almost half a century and has focused on (1) water resources exploration and assessment (including significant fieldwork); (2) hydrogeological mapping; (3) water resources planning and manage¬ment; and (4) training, capacity building and institutional development. He has been involved actively in the Groundwater Reconnaissance of The Netherlands (entrusted with the overall responsibility for this programme). His long-term assignments abroad include positions as a resident hydrologist in Bolivia and as a resident water resources assessment project manager in Yemen and Paraguay. In addition, he carried out numerous short missions in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe for various international and national organisations, providing scientific-technical input, supervising projects, and formulating or evaluating projects and programmes. He has also lectured at UNESCO-IHE on groundwater for more than thirty years. In 2003 he became the founding director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (IGRAC) and since then he is mainly active in groundwater-related projects of international organisations (e.g. the Groundwater Governance Project).