Connecting Water Resilience and Climate Resilience Policy Discourses: advancing advocacy practice and development theories

In this era of uncertainty in which the understanding of climate change has shifted from a 'future risk' to a 'current issue', resilience has become a leading concept for policymaking, promoted by governments, NGOs and academics around the world for addressing climatic instabilities. Resilience is a way of explaining and analysing abilities to recover from external shocks and disturbances and is used in environmental contexts to describe building readiness for specific risks while learning from experience (McGreavy 2016; Adger 2000; Moser 2017). In my thesis, I developed a theoretical and methodological framework to study contestation of resilience policies. In my framework, resilience is not only a subject of study but also an analytic tool for mapping discursive changes over time and revealing what caused that change. Central to this thinking is an understanding that resilience is a process and not a state. Through this process of resilience, social-environmental systems resist, adjust and transform in response to threats, via learning and communication (Matyas and Pelling 2014). Current critical resilience scholarship in development studies has begun addressing its political elements by not only studying resilience 'from/to what', but also 'by/for whom?' (Cretney 2014). I incorporate these questions into communication studies by asking how processes of resilience are mediated.
My research so far has innovatively applied this resilience framework to investigate the debate in Israel about water policies, through its media representation in newspapers and government publicity campaigns. The climate crisis is inextricably linked to water as it increases variability in the water cycle, induces extreme weather (floods and droughts), and affects water quality and biodiversity. Coupled with increasing water demand and energy-intensive water operations (e.g. pumping and treatment) (UN-Water 2019), sustaining a resilient, reliable and efficient water supply in times of climatic change is a significant challenge affecting citizens, communities, businesses and governments. By using the resilience perspective to analyse contesting discourses over hydropolicies, my PhD thesis demonstrated how this perspective contributes to our understanding of climate risks and water management.

The aim of my fellowship is to deepen my engagement with and dissemination of knowledge among water sector actors and development studies/political ecology scholarship, in the form of publications, conference presentations, and organising activities. One of my publications will present the theoretical framework of resilience developed in my thesis in order to enable its implementation in other case studies from developing countries. In collaboration with Waterwise, I will organise a stakeholder workshop for water sector policymakers, water companies, and UK-based international development charities, to explore challenges and trends in water advocacy initiatives, and the potential impact of 'climate/water resilience' discourses on their work. With the support of Reading's Global Development Research Division and the IDS Resource Politics and Environmental Change Cluster, I will organise an international online symposium on climate resilience. The symposium will bring together scholars and practitioners to develop partnerships for sharing knowledge and to identify theoretical gaps and challenges for development practice. Finally, after advancing my publication portfolio, establishing relationships for sharing and coproduction of knowledge, and identifying theoretical gaps and challenges for civil society, I will apply for further funding during this fellowship. The impact activities and outputs produced during this fellowship, including obtaining a monograph contract, will establish me as a leading interdisciplinary social science researcher into the individual, cultural and political dimensions and interactions around climate resilience and water management.