Water and Sanitation Infrastructure in Latin America

My work explores the variation in governance and sustainability of water and sanitation systems in Latin America. I first began to explore this topic working with Karl Linden on a NSF IRES grant in 2011-2014, through the University of Colorado Boulder. Our work pulled together students from CU-Boulder and the National University of the Peruvian Amazon (UNAP) to investigate factors that increase the use and resilience of drinking water and sanitation infrastructure. From this work, we have two working papers. The first is an effort to understand variation in use of rural water systems. The second is a policy evaluation of ecological sanitation in peri-urban contexts.

I have expanded my work on water and sanitation in Latin America through several new projects:

1. A study of the new law regulating rural water systems in Chile

2. A comparative project on rural water governance in the Dry Corridor of Central America

3. A project looking at several aspects of monitoring water use in rural Honduras, including through the use of household water meters

4. A project analyzing the shifting governance context for rural water services throughout Peru as a new central government policy aims to incentivize local government investment in rural water services

The effect of Civil Society and NGOs on citizen-Government relations

As part of my work in Iquitos, Peru, I investigated the impact of NGOs on the ways citizen think about and interact with governments. This work, originally developed for my dissertation, is published in Comparative Political Studies. I am expanding this work to look at government-NGO relationships in Peru and Bolivia, focusing on how variation in decentralization and regulation of NGOs shape interactions between local governments and NGOs.

Decentralization and Governance

Collectively, my work has explored challenges in service provision across contexts with different multilevel governance arrangements - from community-based management to central government-driven development projects. Most recently, I have begun collecting data on a relatively new initiative in Peru, the Programa de Incentivos, which incentivizes local governments to achieve goals established by the national government through a pay-for-results approach.

Energy Access in Somalia

As part of my work with the One Earth Future Foundation, I researched energy access and opportunities for renewable energy alternatives in Somalia. This work led to a request to participate in the UNIDO Small HydroPower Report 2019, in which I worked with One Earth Future Foundation scholars, Victor Owuor and Sierra Method to review Somalia in a multi-country study.