Leila Harris

Dr. Leila Harris is an Associate Professor at IRES Institute on Resources Environment and Sustainability and in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC's Program on Water Governance. Dr. Harris’s work examines social, cultural and political-economic and institutional dimensions of environmental and resource issues, especially in developing contexts. Her current research focuses on the intersection of environmental issues and inequality / social difference (especially gender and ethnicity), water governance shifts (e.g. marketization, participatory governance, and devolution), in addition to a range of water governance challenges important for the Canadian context (e.g. First Nations water governance in British Columbia, challenges facing small water systems, use of metagenomics for water quality testing, and transformations in support of more sustainable and equitable water governance). Current projects include a SSHRC funded project on everyday access and governance of water in underserved areas of Cape Town, South Africa and Accra, Ghana. The project emphasizes on issues of socio-political difference and inequality, narrative and meanings associated with differentiated water access and governance, as well as shifting state-society relations mediated through variable access in underserved areas. Dr. Harris is also principal investigator for the SSHRC funded International WaTERS Research and Training Network focused on water governance, equity and resilience in the global South.

December 2016