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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight

Kalyani Raghunathan

Kalyani Raghunathan is Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, based in New Delhi, India. Her research lies at the intersection of agriculture, gender, social protection, and public health and nutrition, with a specific focus on South Asia and Africa. 

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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experts

Natural Resources and Resilience

Ruth Meinzen-Dick

Senior Research Fellow

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Bio

Ruth Meinzen-Dick is a Senior Research Fellow in the Natural Resources and Resilience Unit. She has extensive transdisciplinary research experience in using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Her work focuses on two broad (and sometimes interrelated) areas: how institutions affect how people manage natural resources, and the role of gender in development processes. This has led her to study land and water policy, property rights, collective action and other governance arrangements, games for experiential learning, and the impact of development interventions, drawing on fieldwork in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

Ruth is a co-creator of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and recipient of the Elinor Ostrom Collective Governance of the Commons 2019 Senior Scholar Award. She holds a PhD in development sociology from Cornell University.

Languages: English, Tamil

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Publications

Resource thumbnail

Brief

Scaling up experiential learning for water management

2024Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Falk, Thomas; Sanil, Richu; ElDidi, Hagar; Zhang, Wei; Kosec, Katrina; Melesse, Mequanint B.; Duche, Vishwambhar
Details

Scaling up experiential learning for water management

Unsustainable water management is associated with reduced agricultural production and poverty, reduced ecosystem services and resilience, and insufficient and unreliable domestic water access. As a common pool resource with high subtractability and low excludability, water is easily depleted if no effective coordination exists among users to ensure provision and regulate withdrawals. This creates one of the greatest challenges for people living in semi-arid and arid environments. The majority of India’s population is estimated to face physical water scarcity for at least part of the year, with 600 million people living in areas of high to extreme water stress. As water management is highly complex, with many users sharing the same resource but often unknown to each other, stopping overuse is difficult, especially when it is more profitable to irrigate water-consumptive crops than water-conserving crops. Farmers, policymakers, donors, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in India have all articulated the need for more effective tools to improve water management and governance. Coordination and effective management of water resources are crucial to sustain agricultural productivity, but so far progress has been disappointing. Technical tools such as crop water budgeting can play an important role in enabling communities to manage their water resources, but unless communities have the knowledge and motivation to use these tools, their application and impacts are limited. To date, attention to the question of how knowledge about collectively available water is translated into effective management through collective action, norms and rules has been insufficient. Blueprint rules introduced in a top-down manner have not changed water users’ behavior. However, there is strong evidence that effective community rules and their enforcement can motivate such behavior. The better these rules fit the social-ecological context and internalized norms, the more effective they will be. Participatory development approaches have addressed these challenges. The key question is how to promote such coordination, rules, and behavior in a participatory way without external imposition and in a low-cost manner that allows largescale implementation.

Year published

2024

Authors

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Falk, Thomas; Sanil, Richu; ElDidi, Hagar; Zhang, Wei; Kosec, Katrina; Melesse, Mequanint B.; Duche, Vishwambhar

Citation

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Falk, Thomas; Sanil, Richu; ElDidi, Hagar; Zhang, Wei; Kosec, Katrina; et al. 2024. Scaling up experiential learning for water management. Scaling Up Experiential Learning Tools Project Note 2. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Agricultural Production; Sustainability; Water Governance; Water Management

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

NEXUS Gains

Record type

Brief

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Brief

Enhancing experiential learning through community debriefs: A reflection from facilitators of experiential games

2024Melesse, Mequanint B.; Duche, Vishwambhar; Sanil, Richu; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Falk, Thomas
Details

Enhancing experiential learning through community debriefs: A reflection from facilitators of experiential games

Community debriefing is a structured process that facilitates the sharing of experience and insights about implemented interventions among community members. It enables participants to connect lessons learned in an activity, experience, or program to the outside world and to discuss the relevance of an activity to the challenges faced by the community. Thus, social learning is reinforced when debriefing sessions are conducted at the community level. Here, we are interested in debriefings conducted after playing experiential learning games as a learning space beyond the game itself.

Year published

2024

Authors

Melesse, Mequanint B.; Duche, Vishwambhar; Sanil, Richu; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Falk, Thomas

Citation

Melesse, Mequanint B.; Duche, Vishwambhar; Sanil, Richu; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; and Falk, Thomas. 2024. Enhancing experiential learning through community debriefs: A reflection from facilitators of experiential games. Scaling Up Experiential Learning Tools Project Note 1. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Social Learning; Experiential Learning; Water Governance

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Brief

Resource thumbnail

Opinion Piece

Crafting combinations to govern groundwater: Knowledge, motivation, and agency

2024Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Bruns, Bryan
Details

Crafting combinations to govern groundwater: Knowledge, motivation, and agency

Groundwater is a vital common pool resource for water supply, irrigation, and ecosystems, but can be difficult to govern due to invisibility, conflicting interests, and limitations of available institutions. While there are many policy and technical instruments (tools) available, efforts to apply them are often ineffective. This special issue of the International Journal of the Commons presents a set of papers with insights into policy instruments and other methods for groundwater governance. The relevance and effectiveness of tools and combinations of tools (toolboxes) in addressing problems that emerge from groundwater use is related to how they fit with diverse physical and social contexts. Drawing on research and applied experience, including that presented in this issue, we outline a conceptual framework for groundwater governance that emphasizes attention not just to knowledge, but also to motivations, and to agency for effective coordination among key actors. Articles in the special issue analyze groundwater governance in areas of Africa (east, south, and north), Central Asia, India, and the United States. The articles cover a range of scales from small groups playing experiential games to international agreements about transboundary aquifers. Several papers illustrate the crucial role of knowledge about groundwater, and the need for governance instruments and interventions to go beyond only changing knowledge. Three papers focus on groundwater games and their use to understand and change behavior, especially when combined with other tools that facilitate collective deliberation and action. Several papers illustrate how understanding of the ways people care about and practice care for groundwater illuminates examples and capabilities for groundwater governance.

Year published

2024

Authors

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Bruns, Bryan

Citation

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; and Bruns, Bryan. 2024. Crafting combinations to govern groundwater: Knowledge, motivation, and agency. International Journal of the Commons 18(1): 585–600. https://doi. org/10.5334/ijc.1473

Keywords

Governance; Groundwater Management; Ecosystems; Nexus Approaches

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi. org/10.5334/ijc.1473 Source record

Project

NEXUS Gains

Record type

Opinion Piece

Events

Building More Inclusive and Natural Resource-Secure Food Futures
IFPRI Policy Seminar

 | 

December 12, 2024, 10:30 – 12:00 pm

Building More Inclusive and Natural Resource-Secure Food Futures

Also streaming on Please type your questions into the chat box with name, affiliation, and country. The event video, presenter slides, and podcast will be available in the days following the event. Throughout her career, Ruth Meinzen-Dick has made pathbreaking contributions to natural resource management and gender equity, drawing from her deep engagement with communities […]

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

August 2 to 7, 2024

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists

The triennial International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE-2024), centred on the theme “Transformation Towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems” is scheduled from August 2-7, 2024, in New Delhi, India. The conference offers a distinctive platform, providing a golden opportunity for the agricultural academic institutions and researchers to convene in person, exchange knowledge, and actively contribute to the […]

Introducing the new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)
IFPRI Policy Seminar

 | 

February 22, 2024, 9:00 – 10:30 am

Introducing the new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

Virtual Event: February 22, 2024 at 9:00am-10:30am EST. This event will present the WEMNS metric, review the development of the tool, and discuss its use to advance women’s empowerment. A panel of stakeholders from government and national statistical offices and from multilateral organizations will discuss the potential of WEMNS for promoting and monitoring women’s empowerment as part of national statistical surveys.

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News

February 04, 2020 | In the News

How can data build a truer picture of the gender gap in food insecurity? (Devex)

Devex published an article on the challenges of an accurate picture of the differences in food security between men and women when using typical household survey methods. Research Fellow Jessica Heckert stated that “countrywide surveys offer the advantage of gathering data on a wider variety of topics, but because of that breadth in a single […]

November 19, 2019 | In the News

The latest report of the International Food Policy Research Institute shows that gender norms affect the overall performance of agriculture (Cvonet)

Cvonet (China) reported on the 2019 Annual Trends and Outlooks Report.  Senior Research Fellow and co-author of the Report, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, stated that without gender considerations and efforts to achieve gender equality, Malabo’s commitments might not be implemented.” 

November 12, 2019 | In the News

The 19th Annual ReSAKSS Conference Opens Monday In Lomé (Togo 24)

Togo 24 reported on the opening of the conference and the 2019 Annual trends and outlook report: Gender equality in rural Africa: From commitments to outcomes. (2019 ATOR). The Report presents an Africa-wide analysis on a topic of strategic importance to the CAADP agenda. The ATOR 2019 report examines the progress and results of research […]

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