Joshi, Deepa

Joshi, Deepa

Senior Research Fellow

Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK

Academic background

Deepa Joshi is a feminist political ecologist whose work analyses shifts in environmental policies and how these restructure contextually complex intersections of gender, poverty, class, ethnicity and identity. She has worked primarily in South Asia as well as in South East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America focusing on the incongruence of water supply/ sanitation, irrigation and water-energy policies with complex ground realities. Her published findings present ethnographic analyses of how the complexity of inequity is reiterated across institutions in the rules and processes of policy-making; in policies per se and in implementing institutions at scale. Deepa's interests lie in translating policy research outcomes and experience into gender and environment academic courses and local research and activist capacity initiatives. She has been leading these activities on several bilateral projects in South and South East Asia and Africa and she currently coordinates two longitudinal projects on the themes of environmental justice and climate change in the Eastern Himalayas and in the Eastern Gangetic Plains (India, Bangladesh and Nepal).

Area of Expertise

  • Environmental justice
  • Feminist political ecology
  • Ethnicity, identity and democracy in relation to environmental governance
  • Neo-liberalization of food, water and energy
  • Water policy and institutional analysis: education and research capacity building

Research Interests

Exploring how water policies, institutions and strategies relate to ground realities of inequity, uncertainty and risks.

Vision Statement

Water’s fluidity defies the administrative and sectoral boundaries through which attempts are made to manage and govern it. Water is also more than the narrow developmental focus of its narrow “use” functions: people-water, nature-water interrelations are culturally-bound, socially and politically defined, shaped by history and continually reshaped by a spectrum of drivers at scale. I aim to integrate feminist perspectives, i.e. “the viewpoints from below” in political ecology analyses in an attempt to develop new ways of seeing, understanding and addressing water. This requires simultaneously assessing sectors, approaches, spaces and experiences in assessing how water is constructed politically, economically and socially as well as how space and identity are diversely co-constructed to claim “waters”.