Deepa Joshi

Coventry University | CU · Centre for Water, Agroecology and Resilience (CAWR)

The Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach is said to have radically revolutionized a poorly performing sanitation sector. The claims of CLTS programmes successfully stopping practices of open defecation have only recently begun to be critically reviewed: scholars and practitioners are questioning the sustainability and scrutinizing the par...

Hydropower has lately been advocated by a multi-scalar public–private policy nexus for marrying objectives of green growth and climate mitigation. Such discursive constructions are reminiscent of a consensual development politics, which contradicts and overlooks long-standing socio-environmental controversies surrounding large dams. Here we argue t...

Almost two decades ago, feminist researcher MariaMies asked, “What would an economy look like in which nature mattered, in which women mattered, in which children mattered, in which people mattered, [an economy] which would not be based on colonizing and exploiting others?” These are precisely the issues of concern today. Contemporary globalization...

The narrative of environmental justice is powerfully and passionately advocated by researchers, practitioners and activists across scale and space. Yet, because these struggles are multifaceted and pluralistic, rooted in complex, evolving “socio-material-political interminglings” the concept is difficult to grasp, and even harder to realise. Recent...

The culturally and ecologically diverse region of the Eastern Himalayas is the target of ambitious hydropower development plans. Policy discourses at national and international levels position this development as synergistically positive: it combines the production of clean energy to fuel economic growth at regional and national levels with initiat...

This paper discusses the recent attention of the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector to resolving the menstrual hygiene crisis for young girls in developing countries. Menstrual hygiene management (MHM) interventions, including the use of sanitary pads, education and awareness, and where possible separate, sanitary toilets, are identified...

The culturally and ecologically diverse region of the Eastern Himalayas is the target of ambitious hydropower development plans. Policy discourses at national and international levels position this development as synergistically positive: it combines the production of clean energy to fuel economic growth at regional and national levels with initiat...

This article explores the motivations of a diverse group of women in the Himalayan region of Darjeeling district in India to engage (or not) in politics, and discusses how women, like men, are vulnerable to power and politics. In Darjeeling, class, ethnicity, and other divides are accentuated by unresolved, decades-long identity-based political con...

Introduced over a decade ago and considered largely successful by irrigation professionals, Irrigation Management Transfer and Participatory Irrigation Management (IMT/PIM) policies were recently reviewed and seen to have resulted in more cases of “failure” than “success”. Primary research on two IMT/PIM projects in Nepal, which were among the few...

Introduced over a decade ago and considered largely successful by irrigation professionals, Irrigation Management Transfer and Participatory Irrigation Management (IMT/PIM) policies were recently reviewed and seen to have resulted in more cases of “failure” than “success”. Primary research on two IMT/PIM projects in Nepal, which were among the few...

“Don’t teach us what is sanitation and hygiene.” This quote from Maqbul, a middle-aged male resident in Modher Bosti, a slum in Dhaka city, summed up the frustration of many people living in urban poverty to ongoing sanitation and hygiene programmes. In the light of their experiences, such programmes provide “inappropriate sanitation”, or demand pe...

In many of India's cities, domestic dry latrines are emptied daily, a task that has been forced traditionally on a group considered so lowly that they were placed outside the Hindu caste order. In spite of the fact that their 'out caste' position and work combine to reinforce their social ostracism, a latent fear persists, especially amongst their...

Pavement dwellers are often invisible to government, development partners and researchers, even though they comprise 2 per cent of the urban population and their entire lives are on full display to passers-by every day. Shelter and security, convenience and privacy are considered essential for all, yet even these are lacking for the poorest of the...

Analysing social relations in contemporary India, Dube (1996) identified that the caste system prevails, its boundaries and hierarchies articulated by gender. The structure on which this social system is based was defined in Vedic philosophical texts about four thousand yeasrs ago and re-interpreted and made more rigid over the following two millen...