Lyla Mehta

Lyla Mehta is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Susex and has also been a visiting fellow at the Department of International Environment and Development (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Science. She is a sociologist and her work has focussed on the gendered dimensions of forced displacement and resistance, rights and forced migration and the politics of water. Since 1991, she has conducted research on displacement and resistance in India’s Narmada Valley. She has engaged in advisory work on issues concerning displacement, gender, dams and development with various UN agencies and the World Commission on Dams and has also been active in advocacy and activist work on these issues with NGOs and social movements in Europe and India. She has recently co-convened a programme of research on the rights of forced migrants and their interface with policy frameworks for the Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty at Sussex University. She has authored The Politics and Poetics of Water: Naturalising Scarcity in Western India (Orient Longman, 2005), edited The Limits to Scarcity (Earthscan) and co-edited Forced Displacement: Why Rights Matter (Palgrave).