Michele-Lee

Moore

PhD

Director of Transdisciplinary Education

michelelee.moore@su.se

Phone

@micheleleemoore, @WIGGLab

RSS-link

Profile summary

  • Transformations to sustainability and justice
  • Transformative capacity
  • Social innovation
  • Global and local water governance
  • SES Resilience practice

Michele-Lee Moore is the Director of Transdisciplinary Education and her research focus is on social innovations and transformations, with a focus on water governance

Moore’s research seeks to build and mobilize knowledge about social innovations - ones that allow us to transform and develop towards positive and just futures that support social-ecological-cultural resilience. Primarily, she has focused on topics of transformative agency, social-ecological systems resilience, and social and governance innovations that are better able to grapple with complex system dynamics in local and transnational water governance.

As Director of Transdisciplinary Education, Moore also advances scientific understandings of how to design, facilitate, and co-create processes and learning spaces that support transformation.

Her work on transformative agency and capacity explores the role of networks, reflexivity, emergence, and most recently, imagination in supporting transformation and governance innovation. Moore’s work centres multiple ways of knowing, relationships (human-human, and human-nonhuman), and healing the past to support alternative futures.

Moore also has extensive leadership experience in inter- and transdisciplinary programmes. For example, Moore was the Deputy and then Director of SRC’s Guidance for Resilience in the Anthropocene: Investments for Development (GRAID) programme (2016-2020), currently leads the Water, Innovation, and Global Governance Lab (WIGGLab) based at the Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria Canada (2012-current), co-led the Rockefeller Global Fellowship on Social Innovation (2013-2016), and co-led a national water governance capacity strengthening programme in Canada (2014).

Through her love for both teaching students and supporting practitioners’ working on real-time complex issues, Moore has happily been experimenting with different mediums for communicating, co-creating, and applying science, through presentations, produced videos, podcasts, magazine articles, scientific publications, social innovation labs, facilitated learning processes, and more. Moore also currently serves as a Subject Editor for Ecology & Society and as Editor for Sustainability Science.

Moore has studied across different disciplines for each degree, including Ecology (BScHons, The University of Western Ontario), Geography (MSc, University of Victoria), and Global Governance (PhD, Wilfrid Laurier University, Balsillie School of International Affairs). Moore has spent time conducting field work on remote glaciers in northwest Canada, on shrimp aquaculture ponds in Thailand, and on watershed governance and networks in different watersheds around the world.

Moore also engages in the following roles:
• Research Associate & Strategic Faculty Advisor – POLIS Project on Water Sustainability, University of Victoria, Canada

• Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada

• Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo, Canada

Publications by Moore, Michelle-Lee

An Earth system law perspective on governing social-hydrological systems in the Anthropocene

Journal / article | 2021

Ahlström, H., Hileman, J., Wang-Erlandsson, L., García, M., Moore, M., Jonas, K., Pranindita, A., Kuiper, J., Fetzer, I., Jaramillo, F., Svedin, U.. 2021. An Earth system law perspective on governing social-hydrological systems in the Anthropocene. Earth System Governance. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2021.100120

The global hydrological cycle is characterized by complex interdependencies and self-regulating feedbacks that keep water in an ever-evolving state of flux at local, regional, and global levels. Increasingly, the scale of human impacts in the Anthropocene is altering the dynamics of this cycle, which presents additional challenges for water governance. “Earth system law” provides an important approach for addressing gaps in go...

Capacities for Watershed Resilience: Persistence, Adaptation, and Transformation

Book chapter | 2021

Baird J., Quinlan A., Plummer R., Moore ML., Krievins K. 2021. Capacities for Watershed Resilience: Persistence, Adaptation, and Transformation. In: Baird J., Plummer R. (eds) Water Resilience. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48110-0_7

Water management and governance at the watershed scale is complex, with attention needed to the realities of fit with institutional arrangements and consideration of the dynamic and uncertain nature of social-ecological systems. The concept of social-ecological resilience and its application to water resources – ‘water resilience’ hereafter – offers a framework by which to approach these critical considerations. Water resilien...

Whose Border? Contested Geographies and Columbia River Treaty Modernization

Journal / article | 2020

Baltutis, W.J. and Moore, M.L., 2020. Whose Border? Contested Geographies and Columbia River Treaty Modernization. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 35(4), pp.581-601.

This paper explores the links between contemporary bordering processes, Indigenous nations traditional territories, and transboundary water governance processes, using the case of the Columbia River Treaty (CRT) modernization process. We posit the Columbia River is shared not just by two nations, but also by multiple Indigenous nations with various inter-nation borders. To-date, the implications of this in practice do not appe...

Transformative spaces in the making: key lessons from nine cases in the Global South

Journal / article | 2019

Pereira, L., N. Frantzeskaki, A. Hebinck, L. Charli, J. Scott, M. Dyer, H. Eakin, et.al. 2019. Transformative spaces in the making: key lessons from nine cases in the Global South. Sustainability Science:1–18.

Creating a just and sustainable planet will require not only small changes, but also systemic transformations in how humans relate to the planet and to each other, i.e., social–ecological transformations. We suggest there is a need for collaborative environments where experimentation with new configurations of social–ecological systems can occur, and we refer to these as transformative spaces. In this paper, we seek a better ...