Vishal Narain is Professor Public Policy and Governance at the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, India. He holds a PhD from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His academic interests are the interdisciplinary analysis of public policy processes and institutions, water governance, vulnerability and adaptation to environmental change, as well as peri-urban issues. He is the author of Public Policy: a view from the South (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Institutions, technology and water control: water users associations and irrigation management reform in two large-scale systems in India (Orient Longman, 2003), for which he received the S.R. Sen Prize for the Best Book on agricultural economics and rural development conferred by the Indian Society for Agricultural Economics. He has been a consultant to several organizations such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Bangkok; International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Colombo; the Asia Foundation, New Delhi, India; and SaciWATERs, Hyderabad, India.
Dik Roth is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Sociology of Development and Change group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. He holds an MSc from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in Social Sciences from Wageningen University. His scientific interests include the anthropology of law and legal pluralism, policy processes, critical development studies, the management and governance of natural resources, resource-related conflicts, and flood risk management policies. His work includes research programmes and activities in Indonesia, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and the Netherlands. He has widely published on various topics in international peer-reviewed scientific journals. He co-edited Liquid Relations. Contested water rights and legal complexity (Rutgers University Press, 2005) and Controlling the water. Matching technology and institutions in irrigation management in India and Nepal (Oxford University Press, 2013).