Sharon has over 30 years’ experience working on and leading collaborative research projects on freshwater aquatic systems and their protection through integrated approaches and collaborative governance in southern Africa. She holds a PHD from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and went on to work for the University of Witwatersrand and later as a researcher and rural development specialist and then director of an NGO (the Association for Water and Rural Development (AWARD)). She has a wide range of interests within the field of sustainability, climate change adaptation and development particularly in transboundary catchments of southern Africa. She specializes in systemic social learning approaches principally within the field of Integrated Water Resources Management, water resources protection, co-management and the links to livelihoods, particularly of marginalized communities. She has a long experience of participatory approaches, collaborative governance and approaches to integrating social and biophysical systems.
She has worked in Brazil with dam-affected communities in the Amazon and similarly in South-East Asia. In southern Africa her interests in praxis have led to a wide range of action-research that attempts to support practice. She works across a number of scales from transboundary water-sharing agreements, national strategies for water resources management to local-level natural resources management approaches, particularly amongst the poor and vulnerable. She has led and participated in a number of international initiatives and has headed a multi-project, transboundary programme designed to build resilience to climate change through improved natural resources governance in the Limpopo Basin in southern Africa. In addition to collaborative projects on gaming and co-management, she has led a) the development of guidelines for Catchment Management Strategies in South Africa, b) exploring factors that enable implementation and c) has developed a participatory method for examining water-related ecosystem services. She has contributed to exploring and sharing complexity thinking, approaches to systems thinking and practice as well as complexity-sensitive M&E and inclusive approaches for understanding climate change. Recent work has also involved the deployment of nature-based solutions and ecological infrastructure and on linking water resources protection and human health under climate change. Her work currently has a strong focus on implementation of water resources protection- particularly on capacity and skills development in the water sector for water resources protection – as well as appropriate collaborative governance and participatory monitoring and compliance approaches (citizen science).
Formal Education:
PhD (University of Cape Town)
Research Gate: Sharon Pollard
Email: sharon@frcsa.org.za
