Dr Inga Jacobs
Executive  Manager : Business Development , Marketing and Communication

Dr Inga Jacobs is a political scientist by training and specialises in regional and international water governance in Africa, looking at cooperative governance in shared river basins in the Southern African and East African regions. This involves investigating shared river basins (such as the Nile, Orange-Senqu, Zambezi rivers), and the degree to which cooperative management strategies can be improved, institutional development strengthened and sustained, and understanding what shapes actor behaviour. By researching these areas, she hopes to incentivize social science perspectives in the water sector. Specifically, Inga investigates the principled content of transboundary cooperation (the politics of ‘soft law’), sustainable knowledge transfer in the water sector, the role of power in transboundary water governance, socio-cultural codes of conduct and their impact on the environment, inter-general learning and capacity building. She is also exploring cross-cutting areas such as the science-policy interface, the water-energy security nexus and the impact of climate change on environmental institutions. She is actively involved in the Young Water Professionals network, currently serving as YWP’s Global President 2010-2012 and on the International Water Association’s Board of Directors. She also co-founded the Forum for Young Scholars in Transboundary Water Governance, a WRC-funded collaborative and transdisciplinary exchange initiative for scholars interested in this field, and one which encourages the recognition and mutual respect of multiple perspectives. Inga completed her PhD degree in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland in 2010.

 email : ingaj@wrc.org.za