My main research interests revolve around the themes of water commons, water collectives and co-governance arrangements. I approach these from an interdisciplinary perspective. I am greatly inspired by -and have been contributiong to- notions of political ecology and related concerns for socio-environmental justice. My interdisciplinary research has focused mainly on water policies, governmentalites, irrigation, community based natural resource management, grassroots movements and livelihoods in the rural worlds of Ecuador, Mexico, Spain and more recently the Netherlands.

Currently I am coordinating the NWO funded project "Upscaling private and collective water storage in the Netherlands", and am part of the riverhood/river commons project. 

I currently (co) supervise the PhD trajectories of: 

- Britt Basel on community based managed aquifer recharge in Oaxaca, Mexico.

- Carlota Silva Houart on water justice, multispecies justice and Rights of Nature as applied to rivers in The Netherlands and Ecuador.

- Catalina Rey Hernandez on designs and counterdesigns in river restauration and defence initatives in The Netherlands and Ecuador. 

- Lars de Graaff on the socio-hydrology of farmer based water storage in the Netherlands.

- Mohamed Tawfik on the politics of wastewater re-use in Egypt and Jordan.

- Rossana Manosalvas on the contested nature of 'nature & water' in the Ecuadorian Highlands. 

and the post-doc trajectory of:

- Roos de Adelhart Toorop on developing productive science-policy-stakeholder interactions for upscaling private and collective water storage in the Netherlands. 

I warmly welcome students interested on working in these areas of research. Just send me an e-mail (jaime.hoogesteger@wur.nl).

Below a video on my research on agro-export, groundwater governance and rural livelihoods in the state of Guanajuato, Central Mexico.

Re-patterning water control: Vegetable agro-export chains, water rights and rural livelihoods in the Bajío, Mexico (2015-2019)  This researcha aims to better understand how in a context of a deepening neoliberalization, vegetable agro-export chains and related processes of global production and trade are shaping water governance processes and geographies of uneven development through a transformation of local water use realities. This research will be carried out in the Bajío region of Guanajuato, central Mexico. Funded NWO-WOTRO. Project leader J. Hoogesteger. 

Drip Irrigation Realities in Perspective (2014-2015). As a Post-Doc in the project I focus on understanding a) how drip irrigation is spread by different actors, and b) how this technology shapes and is shaped by  water use practices and governance through discourses and the agency of the tubes and pipes that make drip systems. Funded by NWO. Project leader M.Z. Zwarteveen.

Struggling for water security: Social mobilization for the defence of water rights in Peru and Ecuador (2008-2013). This research project focused on better understanding how water users organization, their federations and networks have developed as a means for peasant and indigenous communities to influence water governance and its outcomes. As one of the four PhD researchers of this project, I focused my research on the irrigators of the Ecuadorian Highlands and coordinated the joint PhD activities of this project. In this research I studied the histories and relations of institutional reforms, scale, democracy, social capital, water rights and water justice. Funded by NWO-WOTRO. Project leader R. Boelens.

Strenghtening Participatory Grounwater Management (2006-2007). This research focused on strenghtening the skills and capacities of two selected Groundwater Management Commitees (COTAS) in the state of Guanajuato Mexico. Project partners MetaMeta, WaterWatch and CEAG. Funded by Partners for Water.

I welcome students interested in doing research and/or an internship in any of these themes.