Water politics: GCU conference starts Jan 9

Seventeen academics from eight countries, apart from Pakistani experts, will participate in the two-day conference.

LAHORE:

Foreign and local experts have started arriving in the city for a conference on water politics being organised by the Government College University’s Political Science Department.

Seventeen academics from eight countries, apart from Pakistani experts, will participate in the two-day ‘Politics of Water Resource Governance in the Indus Basin’ conference starting on January 9. The United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health is assisting in organising the conference.

Dr Khalid Manzoor Butt, the head of the GCU Political Science Department, said the conference would produce a mass of research in the discipline and encourage local academics to formulate indigenous responses to the challenges posed by water scarcity.

Vice Chancellor Prof Khaleequr Rahman said the conference was important as water scarcity was becoming a more significant consideration in the larger political agenda. He said water was inextricably linked to food and energy security as well as the environmental and social effects of climate change, with their related political challenges.

David Gilmartin from North Carolina State University, USA; Dan Haines from the University of London; Douglas Hill from the University of Otago, New Zealand; Lydia Powell from the Observers Research Foundation, India; Giovanna Gioli and Jurgen Scheffran from the University of Hamburg, Germany; Awais Piracha from the University of Western Sydney, Australia; Professor Ganesh P Shivakoti from the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand; Yi Chen E Yang from the University of Massachusetts, USA; Claudia Ringler from the International Food Policy Institute, USA; and David J Devlaeminck from McMaster University, Canada, are among the foreign academics attending the conference.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2013.