Rinan Shah, Vilina Engheepi, and Trevor Birkenholtz are recipients of the HWISE Collaborative Accelerator Award (CAA), a funding opportunity to bring small teams of researchers (2-3 members) together to accelerate new theoretical, methodological, analytical, outreach, and educational collaborations related to household water insecurity HWISE.
The CAA supported writing workshop on “Deconstructing Water Insecurity in Himalayan Mountain Towns and Cities”. The Himalayan Writing discussion workshop was held on 21st January at Gangtok, a small mountain city in the NorthEast region of India. The HWISE CAA fund enabled bringing together nine like minded young professionals/ scholars/ researchers working on water from the Eastern Himalayan Region (EHR) to discuss their respective work and shared experiences from the field. The range of work dissected water security as a concept and added new perspectives to it. Beginning with looking at extractivism, policy interventions, water vendors, water accounting, urban water security indices, and diversity of water supply systems. Water (in) was also studied and discussed under the framework of adaptive landscape, environmental flows and water-energy security. “Through this workshop, we were able to begin the creation of a nurturing space to exchange feedback on writing, learning/unlearning from our field experiences and share our lived experiences of water woes in the mountains. With the collaborative effort of all the participants, we are now working towards publishing a paper or a popular article.”