KITLV is pleased to announce that the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences/KNAW has appointed Dr Diana Suhardiman as the new director of the KITLV as of 1 January 2022. Dr Suhardiman succeeds Professor Gert Oostindie who retired in December 2021.

Diana Suhardiman (47) is an expert on land and water governance and Research Group Leader at the International Water Management Institute. She graduated from Wageningen University with a Master’s Degree in Land and Water Management and a PhD in Social Sciences. Her PhD research focused on the role of government bureaucracies in shaping water policy formulation and implementation in Indonesia. She has spent the past fifteen years working in Southeast Asia, where she worked as Research Group Leader Governance and Inclusion at the International Water Management Institute in Laos. Dr Suhardiman studies regional, national and international policies at the intersection of land, water, environment and energy, in particular water governance, in Southeast Asia. Suhardiman has published various books and numerous articles on this topic.

She investigates the challenges faced by groups in the Global South, including the poor and those most marginalised for reasons of gender and ethnicity. She uses a wide range of approaches, including ethnography and political anthropology. Diana Suhardiman’s wide-ranging expertise will make a major contribution to KITLV’s research themes and help to broaden the institute, which has established Governance of Climate Change Adaptation as a new research theme. She will also be sharing her large and important international network.

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Photo KITLV building by David Eppstein (Wikimedia Commons): KITLV and Buginese poem.