Awardees: John Briscoe (SEAS), Jody Freeman (HLS), Richard Lazarus (HLS)

Summary: Awardees plan to involve students in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project on water policy in an effort to use experiential and team-based learning to teach students vital professional skills.

The Water Security Initiative and the Environmental Law Program worked jointly together on the Water Federalism Project which involved thirty students from SEAS, HLS, GSD, SPH, HKS, FAS, and the College. The focus of the project was understanding how large rivers were developed and managed, and to formulate ideas to address the present generation of challenges in the basin. Students spent one year on the project, including three weeks in the field in January 2013.

The core goals of the project were to train a new generation of “specialized integrators” and to expose theoretical ideas to the realities of management on the ground. The project included a highly successful conference in which the students presented to and were given feedback from eminent practitioners from each of the basins.

Finally, upon invitation from the leading journal on Water Policy to develop a special issue, students developed a set of case studies of their basins.