We address water and development challenges.
Approximately 400 million people (c.2015) live in cities relying on water imports from rural areas (Garrick et al., 2019)
Cities and agriculture are
fighting over water.
2 billion people still do not use safely managed drinking water. (WHO, World Bank Group, UNICEF, 2022).
Plumbing poverty affects the
poor and vulnerable across
cities, slums, and rural areas.
Over half of the irrigation water used to grow the world’s food comes from groundwater (Jasechko and Perrone, 2021)
Breadbaskets and ecosystems
are at risk.
These issues are linked by a common thread: large-scale collective action problems that cut across multiple sectors, supply chains, and political borders. By focusing on collective action, we look at patterns of human cooperation and conflict over water and the policies and incentives that shape them. This allows us to examine economic and governance responses to these challenges.