#34 Oliver Brandes – Water Management and Collaboration

The conversation today is with Oliver Brandes on collaboration and modern water management. Oliver is an economist and lawyer by training and what he would call a trans-disciplinarian by design. He serves as Co-Director of the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance, based at the University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies (CFGS), where he leads the award-winning POLIS Water Sustainability Project. He focuses on water sustainability, sound resource management, public policy development, and ecologically based legal and institutional reform.

In our conversation, we talk about the role of collaboration in managing water, concepts of collaborative consent, and the importance of good leadership. Please enjoy our conversation.

Some links to some of the things we discuss during this episode: 

• Oliver Brandes
• Polis Project on Ecological Governance, University of Victoria
• Cowichan Watershed Board
• Nicola Watershed Pilot Memorandum of Understanding
• Book: Denying the Source: The Crisis of First Nations Water Rights by Merrell-Ann S. Phare
• Book: Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource by Marq de Villiers

Your host for the Cool Collaborations podcast is Scott Millar. Scott is the principle of Collaboration Dynamics, where he often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together.