OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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Providing these concentrated offerings collectively and onsite, we hope to promote an atmosphere of commonality and community to help build towards a sustainable, equitable, and peaceful future.
This program is designed for:
All sessions will be held on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, Oregon, with supplemental online coursework.
• WRP 521 - Water Conflict Management & Transformation taught by Lynette de Silva and Aaron Wolf
“Water Conflict Management” offers an opportunity for water resources professionals and graduate students to learn about current and leading-edge ways to work effectively in contentious water situations. It explores conflict tolerance, prevention, management, and transformation through collaborative structures as well as through models of negotiation and dialogue. This week-long session emphasizes experiential learning. We offer a place to learn and practice new skills that are applicable from the individual level to the societal level and across a range of real-life situations. Additionally, the workshop helps students understand just how creative, messy and inelegant workable solutions are likely to be.
• WRP 599 - Water Policy & Governance taught by MelissaMcCracken
Every day, multiple times a day, you interact with freshwater. Yet, how often do you think about the policies and governance in place that bring clean, fresh water to your tap? For most of us, particularly those in the United States and other industrialized countries, we seldom think about it – it is almost a resource we can take for granted, knowing it will be there when we turn the tap. However, for much of the world, this is not the case.
This summer course will have you diving into the policies and governance practices that ensure water is in the tap, as well as those that may limit the access and availability of water. We will look at the broad topic of water policy and governance, considering both practices within the United States and internationally. This course is designed for participants interested in learning more about freshwater with some experience with environmental and natural resources management and governance. It covers core concepts of water policy, including discussing the challenging question of what water is, as well as historical policy origins, water allocation and quality, privatization and commodification, and how policy and governance of water are shaped and shape policy within other sectors, such as agriculture, municipal uses, and environmental protection.
• WRP 599 - International Environmental and Water Law taught by Susanne Schmeier
This summer course on international environmental and water law focuses on global and regional legal arrangements for sustainably governing shared natural resources and the environment, with a particular emphasis on water resources. It introduces key concepts of international law and their applicability to natural resources and the environment, retraces the development of these concepts and related legal instruments over time, and provides an overview of relevant global regimes, and regional treaties and institutions that govern regional environmental concerns, with a particular focus on basin treaties and basin institutions. It also investigates the links between environmental and water law and other fields of law. The course is designed for participants with no legal background, but working in fields of environmental and natural resources management and policy-making, e.g. in national governments, international organizations, NGOs or the private sector, who want to bolster their understand of international legal arrangements relevant to their work.
• WRP 544 - Field skills needed to understand water resources in practice taught by John Matthews
Students will work through series of case studies in resource management to identify strategies and approaches that promote or prevent resilience in resource management. Students participate in discussions and hands-on activities in addition to the lectures and will prepare daily reflections, a final reflection and a final essay due one week after the end of the classroom sessions. This course will use a lecture and discussion format, and draw from the international expertise of the instructor and guest lecturers.
Lynette de Silva directs the Program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation at Oregon State University (OSU), which includes: the graduate/professional certificate program; the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, an information technology/outreach program; and the University Partnership for Transboundary Waters, a collaborative research program. This involves contributing to issues of topical scientific and societal importance; adding to state, national, and international visibility; consolidating programmatic cores and teaching missions; and recruiting graduate students and evaluating student applications.
de Silva teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in water resources management, and water conflict management. Her principal areas of interest include water conflict management, integrated watershed management, and the study of transboundary waters. Ms. de Silva’s research interests include gender issues in transboundary freshwater dispute resolution, particularly as it relates to the role of women.
Melissa McCracken was in the 2017 cohort of the GCCUT program. She completed the GCCUT program in 2018 and graduated from OSU with a Ph.D. in Geography in 2019. She is currently an Assistant Professor of International Environmental Policy at Tufts University
Aaron T. Wolf, PhD is a professor of geography at Oregon State University, USA, with an appointment as professor of water diplomacy at IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands. He has acted as consultant to the US Government, the World Bank, and several international governments and development partners on various aspects of water resources and conflict management. A trained mediator/ facilitator, he directs the Program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation, through which he has offered workshops, facilitations, and mediation in basins throughout the world.
Dr. John Matthews is a resilience scientist and adaptation practitioner who has been working at the interface of water and climate globally since 2007. John co-founded the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA) in 2010 with the World Bank, where he is the Executive Director. His work explores how we define and accelerate the uptake of our emerging set of best practices for water-centric climate resilience. He has led the development of new climate risk methodologies that have been used in dozens of countries, prepared green bond criteria that have certified more than 15 billion USD in water resilience investments over six continents, and advised well over 100 countries on their national climate commitments.
Dr. Susanne Schmeier is an Associate Professor of Water Law and Diplomacy at IHE Delft – Institute for Water Education, The Netherlands. Her work focuses on legal and institutional arrangements for preventing water disputes and fostering cooperation and on the linkages between water and other fields of law and governance. She is also a courtesy faculty member in the Water Resources Policy and Management Program at Oregon State University and an affiliate at the International Water Law Academy, Wuhan, China. Prior to joining IHE Delft, she worked for the German government, coordinating Germany’s development cooperation support to transboundary water management, for the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the World Bank, among others. She is also a moderator and facilitator of international conferences and negotiations and has been involved in negotiation and dispute-resolution processes in various basins around the world.
Choose one or two sessions and either as a non-credit workshop or for up to six university graduate credits.
On Campus, Corvallis Oregon
How to register
Visiting students during summer will need to apply for “non-degree” status before registering. (Note: this does not apply to degree-seeking students already admitted to OSU, or to visiting students who previously applied for non-degree status and took an OSU class within the past year.) To apply for "non-degree" status visit Non-Degree Student Admission Information(Link is external). Within three to seven business days of online application submission, you should receive an email from the OSU Office of Admissions with confirmation, an OSU Student Identification Number and helpful registration information.
To register for the Course: WRP 521 - Water Conflict Management and Transformation, visit the Registration Instructions(Link is external). To access the web registration system, go to MyOSU(Link is external) and login using your ONID user name and password. Need help registering contact: OSU Registrar's Office(Link is external).
Participants interested in taking these courses for the University credit-option, reach out to the WRGP department with any questions.
Non-US or non-credit seeking participants, reach out to Rachael Weber at [email protected] with PACE with any questions regarding non-credit workshop options.
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