Fueled by a $4.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Integrated Graduate Education, Research and Traineeship (IGERT), Tufts will soon pioneer a Water Diplomacy doctoral program. This innovative field will fuse diplomatic and scientific approaches to water scarcity for the 21st century and beyond.
Water issues span transnational physical, jurisdictional, geographic, and political boundaries, and typically bring diverse and complex stakeholders’ into acutely competing demands. As the first interdisciplinary doctoral program devoted to water diplomacy, the program reflects its founders’ belief that neither diplomacy nor science alone is sufficient to resolve water-related conflicts on a global scale.
“Water diplomacy is distinctly Tufts,” declares Professor Shafiqul Islam, the principal investigator behind the IGERT grant. “We have created a new angle, which is distinctively unique and for which we want Tufts to be known.” Islam hopes the program will “create different ways of thinking about natural resources when they are constrained as we have a limited amount of water resources but are expanding their usage.”
The program’s founders attribute many water problems to competition amongst natural, societal, and political variables; this analytic framework demands interdisciplinary collaboration. Fittingly, Islam’s team includes 17 faculty members drawn from Tufts School of Engineering, School of Arts and Sciences, The Fletcher School, as well as an advisory board representing such domestic and international institutions as Harvard University and the Indian Institute of Management.
The IGERT traineeship award includes a full-tuition scholarship, an annual stipend of $30,000, and a semester-long paid internship with national and international partners. The first class of 25 students will be admitted to a PhD granting department or school of their choice, either in Tufts School of Engineering, School of Arts and Sciences, or The Fletcher School, or in the existing graduate program in Water: Systems, Science, and Society.
With such substantial cross-school coordination, a tremendous resource synergy will nurture Tufts’ community of water scholars, diplomats, scientists, and engineers and pool their collective expertise.
“This program closes that critical gap between negotiating stakeholder interests and implementing feasible scientific or engineering solutions,” says William Moomaw, Professor of International Environmental Policy and Director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at The Fletcher School.
Based on Islam’s vision of “preparing students to address real-world water issues before they are handed a diploma,” the program will combine classroom work with significant practical experience. In partnership with 14 national and international organizations, the program will deploy IGERT students on fieldwork missions aimed at promoting interactive dialogue with stakeholders and helping to resolve emerging water conflicts.
Initial programming will focus on water issues in the United States and South Asia. Islam explains that these regions represent a “wide range of historical and emerging water programs” that will allow IGERT students to examine both the “origin and nature of water disputes as well as their resolution in the context of both a developed and a developing country.”
Anna Schulz, a current Fletcher doctoral candidate studying water scarcity issues, sees the program as "a way to catalyze interdisciplinary learning in the field of transboundary water and bring much needed resources together to promote knowledge development in this critical field."
Five years down the road, after the first IGERT class has graduated, Islam hopes that the program will generate a “global network of water professionals who create actionable knowledge through negotiated solutions and adaptive management.”
With such diverse faculty involvement—including Fletcher professors Moomaw, Jenny Aker, Eileen Babbitt, Kelly Sims Gallager, and Joel Trachtman—cutting-edge resources, and the best students drawn from social, political, and scientific realms, the Water Diplomacy program is primed to generate a bright global network indeed.
A complete list of program faculty, as well as more details of the program’s curriculum and structure, can be found at http://sites.tufts.edu/waterdiplomacy/.