Sharlene L. Gomes

HS Hydrological Sciences

The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Sharlene L. Gomes for the poster/PICO entitled:

A Transdisciplinary Community-based Approach to Explore Institutional Change in Khulna’s Peri-urban Drinking Water Services (Gomes S.L.; Hermans L.M)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Sharlene Gomes is a PhD candidate from the Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management at the University of Delft, in the Netherlands. Her research on groundwater problems in the peri-urban Ganges Delta, sheds light on the institutional context of groundwater management and helps support peri-urban communities in addressing them. As part of this research, Sharlene has designed a transdisciplinary community-based approach for strategic exploration of drinking water problems by peri-urban communities in Khulna, Bangladesh. This work was presented at EGU 2018 in the session on Transdisciplinary Water Research (HS5.1.). It covers the design, implementation, and evaluation of a game-based workshop conducted with peri-urban communities near Khulna. Through role-play, participants experienced how institutions structure behaviour and decision outcomes. They explored the existing drinking water situation, a future scenario following urban expansion, and cooperative strategies to improve groundwater monitoring. Participants also experienced the challenges of negotiating solutions through this game. This work demonstrates how transdisciplinary research that combines institutional economics, game theory, serious games, and evaluation sciences can help strengthen communities’ problem solving capacity in the global south.