Marie Curie Individual Fellowship

JustWATER is the research project signed by Dr Francesca Greco for which the University of Bergamo has signed the Grant Agreement relating to a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships action. Resulting in the top 6% of the proposals submitted in 2022, JustWATER obtained funding of 188,590 Euros, including research support regarding training, technical instrumentation and support staff. Lasting 24 months, the research is aimed at two types of targets. At a national level it will provide useful elements to Italian policy-makers, while at an international level it will produce replicability of the model produced to the advantage of various countries that are preparing to formulate their own water policies by including the agro-food export component in their water strategies, according to the Water-Energy-Food-Environment (WEFE) model.

Under the supervision of prof. Filippo Menga, professor of the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, already winner of the same funding in 2015 with a project at the University of Manchester, the project benefited from dual support from the University: firstly through an orientation service and subsequently throuigh a scientific personalized consultancy for the drafting of the project proposal.

Dr Francesca Greco is an international water and food policy expert with more than twenty years of experience in transboundary aquifers, gender and water, water footprint and virtual water, water governance. She will be moving from Cyprus, where she worked on the project "Water is one: promoting water cooperation and awareness of water issues in Cyprus for both communities on the island".

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JustWATER will produce decision-making tools for Italian policy-makers, who will be able to evaluate at a country-system level where our agri-food exports come from (virtual water exports) which insist on vulnerable aquifers and river basins considered at risk, through GIS maps available online and a series of communication initiatives, including a final workshop that will involve water policy makers and stakeholders in Italy.

The project will also provide a component for direct use by citizens who will be able to geo-locate through a website where Italian agri-food products that are not water- sustainable are being traded through the visualisation of their international trajectories in the food trade system. The project will provide a census of all water experts in Italy, investigating gender trajectories in this sector and reporting their opinions regarding the difficult Italian scenario, compressed between drought, floods, climate crisis and the slow and difficult birth of a national water policy which seems still fragmented in terms of political structures at the country- level.

What are MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships? The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships (PF) actions are European funding limited in time that allow to carry out advanced research in different disciplines for individuals who are selected through an evaluation process that lasts approximately 6 months, carried out at European level, involving multiple international examiners.

In 2022 the winners of the funding, considered excellent in their field of research, went through a selection process out of a total of 7,044 applications, where the success rate was only 17%. The actions supports the research training and career development of researchers who already hold a PhD, in collaboration with a supervisor and through the principle of international mobility.

Stakeholder Engagement Map

JustWater is completely mainstreamed for gender, covering alongside diversity and minority issues, such as migrant issues and human rights of migrant workers. The project provides an analysis of the gender dimension of the Italian water community alongside sex-disaggregated data on farm ownership and the agricultural workforce. While global virtual water datasets are gender-blind – as they exclusively refer to water embedded in crop production without discussing social aspects – this research will address the social dimension in a gendered way, given the significant gender imbalances in land ownership and water management roles (WWDR 2018). This is an absolute novelty in the virtual water literature. The research covers minority issues, migrant issues, human rights of migrant workers and the lack of decent work conditions20 within the analysis of the socio-economic aspects (WP5).

Methodological Flowchart

The gender dimension of this project is extremely innovative and transformative, especially as the final workshop would be the first sex-disaggregated workshop ever performed within the Italian water community. This action will provide sex-disaggregated data on water-decision making and water managers in Italy. The workshop will expose the Italian water community, which has historically been male-dominated, to the results of JustWater through a gender-transformative technique.

This gender-transformative activity addresses the issue of unconscious bias and systemic structural barriers faced by women in the sector of water expertise in Italy. The workshop will therefore expose Italy's water decision-makers not only to the results of this research but also to their own gender-role imbalance. This is coherent with the use of sex-disaggregated indicators recommended by the United Nations regarding SDG5 (gender equality) and SDG6 (water) and the European Commission’s Gender Equality Strategy for 2020-2025 and in line with the Gender Equality in Research and Innovation.

Objectives

Theoretical goals: JustWATER will draw upon insights from Human Geography, Political Economy and Political Ecology. Introducing the sub-national scale of analysis constitutes a substantial theoretical innovation in the virtual water literature, which has so far concentrated on the global and national scale.

Practical goals: JustWATER will provide policy-oriented tools and end-users data to serve citizen science and open science practices, allowing not only interoperability of research outputs, but also replicability in other countries.

Overall goals: to construct a theoretical and analytical framework, create a set of information and policy tools and to involve the Italian water community of experts.

References

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