IGS: Current and Recent Graduate Research
Alvar Closas
Burning water: institutions, technology, statecraft and the production of scarcity in the Las Tablas de Daimiel Wetland, Spain
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Academic Profile
Alvar holds a first class BA in Political Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona where he graduated in 2006. After spending one year living in Syria and the West Bank both studying arabic and working for two NGOs on water and development projects he went back to Barcelona to work for a Private Water Utility. Still interested in pursuing his academic and personal interests, he came to Oxford to read for the MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management at the School of Geography. Graduating in 2009 with a dissertation on Drought management policies in Barcelona, Spain (awarded with a distinction) he joined the DPhil programme in 2009.
Awards
- 2010 - St Hilda's Muriel Wise Travel Fund
- 2010-2011 - Jenkins Memorial Scholarship
- 2009-2010 - Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Postgraduate Scholarship
- 2008-2009 - Santander-Abbey Scholarship
Current Research
Alvar's doctoral research explores the nexus between land and water management institutions in the Las Tablas de Daimiel Wetland in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. It aims to examine the resilience of historical social institutions for land and water management as proxy drivers of water ecosystem degradation and draw policy guidelines to sustain sound conservation practices for the future. In this research dryness appears as a socio-politically manufactured component of a hegemonic landscape and becomes reproduced over time through these two sets of institutions.
Despite successive shifting political regimes occurring in Spain at key historical moments, land and water management policies have remained mostly the same for over a hundred years. The purpose of this research is to understand the imbricate institutional and political relationships between land and water and their connectivity with statecraft practices at the local, regional and state level and explain the reasons for this resilient policy behaviour.