GECHS

Lyla Mehta is a sociologist working on water and sanitation; gender and forced displacement, rights, access to natural resources and power/knowledge interfaces in policy debates addressed through the case of water. She has extensive research and field experience in rural India and South Africa, and has done consultancy work for the UN system, and the World Commission on Dams and DFID. She is a Research Fellow with the Institute of Development Studies, University fo Sussex, KNOTS. She is also a professor II at Noragric, Norway, and a co-convenor of the MA in Gender and Development. From 2006 she is a domain leader in the STEPS project (Social, technical and ecological pathways to sustainability), in the water and sanitation domain. From 2006 to 2008 she has led the project “The potential of community-led total sanitation”, a three country DFID-funded project.

Selected Publications

Mehta, L. 2009 (Forthcoming) The Limits to Scarcity, Earthscan

Mehta, L. (Ed.) 2009. Displaced by Development. Confronting Marginalisation and Gender Injustice, New Delhi: Sage

Mehta, L. and Grabska, K. (eds.) 2008. Problematising Rights and Policies for Forced Migration. Whose needs are right? Palgrave Macmillan

Mehta, L. 2008. Over the Rainbow. The politics of researching citizenship and marginality, Action Research, 6.2: 233-253

Mehta, L. 2007. Whose scarcity? Whose property? The case of water in western India, Land Policy 24: 654-663

Mehta, L. 2005. The Politics and Poetics of Water. Naturalising Scarcity in Western India, New Delhi: Orient Longman

Mehta, L. and B. L. Madsen 2005. “The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and poor people’s right to water.” Natural Resources Forum 29(2): 154-164.

Mehta, L. 2003. Struggles around ‘Publicness’ and the Right to Access: Perspectives from the Water Domain’, in Inge Kaul et al. (eds): Global Public Goods: Making Globalisation Work for All (edited by Inge Kaul et al), New York: Oxford University Press