Founding Affiliates

Patricia Wouters is the founding Director of the International Water Law Academy at the China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies (CIBOS) of Wuhan University. Professor Wouters has 30 years' experience in the field of public international law, specialising in transboundary water cooperation.

The establishment of the Water Academy at Wuhan builds on Professor Wouters' past engagements with CIBOS and follows on from her appointment  as  Professor at Xiamen Law School, where she established the China International Water Law research group. Prior to this, Professor Wouters was founding director of the Dundee UNESCO Centre for Water Law and Policy (IHP-HELP Centre for Water Law and Policy under the auspices of UNESCO), which grew out of the International Water Law Research Institute established by Professor Wouters in 1997 at the University of Dundee, Scotland.

Professor Wouters has a significant body of research, teaching and activities in the field of international water law, and related general issues of public international law. A recent selection of relevant publications includes:

'Reframing the transboundary water discourse: contextualized international law in practice' (2020) 29 Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law 3 (with Sergei Vinogradov).

P Wouters, H Chen and JE Nickum, Transboundary Water Cooperation Principles, Practice and Prospects for China and its Neighbours (Routledge 2018).

'Dynamic cooperation'—The Evolution of Transboundary Water Cooperation, in Water and The Law: Towards Sustainability (Edward Elgar Pub., Michael Kidd et al. eds. 2014)

Patricia Wouters & A. Dan Tarlock, The Third Wave of Normativity in International Water Law, 23 J. Water L. 51 (2013)

'International Law of Watercourses: New Dimensions' in Collected Courses of the Xiamen Academy of International Law Volume 3 (Martinus Nijhoff 2011) 347.

Bionote

Professor Wouters began her graduate studies at UC Berkeley, following close to 10 years in private practice as a lawyer in Alberta, Canada (BA; LLB, University of Ottawa, Canada). Following an LLM (in comparative constitutional law, UC Berkeley, California, USA), with the award of a scholarship, she undertook graduate studies at the Graduate institute of International Studies (IUHEI) and University of Geneva, Switzerland (DES; PhD - Dissertation: 'Rivers of the World: Fundamental Principles of the Law of International Watercourses'). During these studies she was invited as Guest Researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative and Public International Law (Heidelberg, Germany). In 1997, she began her academic career at the University of Dundee, Scotland. It was there that she began establishing graduate programmes and research work focusing on international water law. The Dundee UNESCO Centre has hosted the largest number of international water law symposia and produced a considerable number of graduate students with specialisations in international water law.

Professor Wouters has served on a number of international advisory boards and expert bodies (UNU-INWEH; GWP TEC, as examples), including work for the United Nations, World Bank and various national governments. She has consulted directly on transboundary waters around the world, working with national governments and river basin organisations and regional bodies across Asia (the Mekong and others); across Africa (the Nile, Zambezi, Limpopo and others) and North America (the Mackenzie). Her research includes serving as founding editor of two separate book series on international water law, and guest editor on several collected works; her research is ongoing in this field. Professor Wouters has supervised (and continues to supervise) a large cohort of graduate students and works to mentor young scholars in this field.

Under Professor Wouters' direction, the International Water Law Academy is being established as an international centre of excellence that facilitates research in all fields of international law that contribute to improved transboundary water governance. The Academy will serve as a platform for all those interested in contributing to enhanced international cooperation, with a focus on graduate learning, world-class scholarship and executive training.