Lyla Mehta is a Professor at the Institute of Development Studies, UK, and a Visiting Professor at Noragric, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She uses the case of water and sanitation to focus on the politics of scarcity, gender, human rights and access to resources, resource grabbing, and power and policy processes in rural, peri urban and urban contexts. Her work also focusses on climate change and uncertainty and forced displacement. She has extensive research and field experience in India and southern Africa and is currently leading a Belmont/ Norface/ EU/ ISC project on ‘Transformations as praxis’ in South Asia. Her most recent book is Water, Food Security, Nutrition and Social Justice (Routledge, 2020). She trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a Ph.D. in Development Studies (University of Sussex).