Dustin Garrick

About Me

Dr Dustin E. Garrick is an associate professor of environmental management at the University of Oxford, with a joint appointment at the School of Geography and the Environment and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. He is also a research fellow at Green Templeton College. Dr Garrick has expertise in environmental governance with a focus on property rights, institutions and markets.  He has twenty years of experience in environmental management with a focus on markets and governance innovations to address resource scarcity and sustainability challenges.  In this work, he is interested in the evolution of conflict and cooperation over water and other shared natural resources in the context of climate change, biodiversity loss and rapid urbanisation. His approach is multi-disciplinary, spanning public policy, geography and institutional economics, and anchored in field-based and comparative research across a network of observatories which track long-term changes in natural resource conflicts and institutional responses.  This work seeks to advance collective action theory and contribute to our understanding of common pool resource governance.   His current research examines the impact of urbanisation on water conflict and cooperation with an emphasis on competition between cities and agriculture for water.  He is also examining the evolution and impact of market-based approaches to govern the commons, with a particular interest in the role of informal water markets and their political economy.

He has extensive expertise at the interface of science, policy and enterprise, serving as an invited speaker at leading universities and expert advisor for the World Bank, OECD, corporations, governments and non-profits. In 2018, the American Association for the Advancement of Science selected Dr. Garrick as a Leshner Fellow of Public Engagement. He also co-founded a global initiative on water markets with the World Bank Water Practice and has served on many international committees, including the Global Water Partnership/OECD task force on Water Security and Sustainable Growth, the Valuing Water Initiative for the UN/World Bank High Level Panel on Water and the Technical Committee of the Global Water Partnership.  He has been a Fulbright Scholar (2010-11) in Australia and was the 2018 recipient of the Sustainable Water Management Prize from the Botin Foundation in Spain.
 

Policy

World Bank Report: Informal Water Markets in an Urbanising World: Some Unanswered Questions (2019)

World Bank Report: Dividing the Water, Sharing the Benefits (2019)

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UN/World Bank High Level Panel on Water: Advisory panel for Valuing Water Initiative (2017)

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Securing Water, Sustaining Growth: Report of the OECD/GWP Task Force on Water Security and Sustainable Growth (2015)

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US Department of the Interior: Partners in Conservation Award (2009)

Awards & Membership 

Merit Award, Awards for Excellence Scheme - University of Oxford

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Philomathia Award - Philomathia Foundation

United Nations, Expert Group on Transboundary Water Allocation

Technical Committee Member - Global Water Partnership 

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Leshner Fellow for Public Engagement - American Association for the Advancement of Science

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Sustainable Water Management Prize - Fundación Botín

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Advisory panel for Valuing Water Initiative - UN/World Bank High Level Panel on Water

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Water Security and Sustainable Growth task force - OECD/Global Water Partnership

Fulbright Fellowship and U.S. Alumni Award - Australian American Fulbright Association,

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The William R. Boggess Award for Best Paper - Journal of American Water Resources Association

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Media

“Rivers and geopolitics”, BBC3 Radio, 14 May 2019
 

“Why the thinking and planning around drought is often wrong”, Open Canada, 21 April 2016

“How could the California drought impact Canada?”, Canadian Television News (CTV), 19 June 2016

“A surprising lesson from Australia’s drought: politics matter.” Water Deeply, 3 Sept 2015

“What the California drought means for Canadians”, The Globe and Mail, 4 July 2015