Daniel Connell

Dr Daniel Connell works on governance issues relating to trans-boundary rivers in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He has written extensively about Australia’s Murray Darling Basin, most recently in Basin Futures a book co-edited with Quentin Grafton and published by ANU E Press. Since publishing Water Politics in the Murray-Darling Basin in 2007 he has been conducting a comparative study of the governance arrangements for rivers in multi-layered governance systems focusing in particular on Australia, South Africa, United States, Mexico, European Union (Spain), India, China and Brazil. Themes include water reform, environmental justice, public participation, cultural change, institutional design, the distribution of costs and benefits across borders, water markets and risk created by the interaction of different levels of government. His current projects include a book (co-edited with Dustin Garrick and Jamie Pittock) Federal Rivers: institutional responses to water risks in multi-layered political systems, based on a workshop conducted at Oxford University in April 2012 to be published by Edward Elgar in 2013.

Daniel also teaches courses dealing with environmental policy and communications, coordinates the masters degree research stream in the Environment and Development program in the Crawford School and is the Director International Education in the team associated with the ANU’s UNESCO Water Chair in Economics and Trans-boundary Governance. The ANU-UNESCO water chair is active in southern Africa and south-east Asia promoting collaborative research projects and education programs. An example of the latter is the ALA Fellowship Mekong Alliance program. Funded by AusAID it brought twenty staff from four universities, the Beijing Forestry University, the Vietnam Forestry University, the Royal University of Phnom Penh and the National Economic Research Institute of Laos to the ANU for a sixteen week workshop in 2011 to study the potential impacts of climate change in the Mekong region.