Korbel ranked 12th best place in the world to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
Korbel ranked 20th in the world for the best undergraduate degree in international studies.
Korbel ranked 12th best place in the world to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
Korbel ranked 20th in the world for the best undergraduate degree in international studies.
Assistant Professor
Linda Mendez-Barrientos is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. In this role, she leads the Environmental Justice & Policy Research lab (ejpr), which is dedicated to understanding how inequality and power asymmetries shape institutional change processes and environmental justice. She is also the co-founder of s2e-Science to Empower, an environmental justice initiative that leverages data and innovative research to facilitate environmental accountability and human rights protection, and increase the participation of diverse and historically excluded voices in the decisions that define new sustainable trajectories.
Dr. Mendez-Barrientos research lies at the intersection of institutional change, public policy implementation, environmental justice, and natural resource governance, with a focus on water policy and management. Her work has been published in top interdisciplinary journals including Scientific Reports, Society & Natural Resources, Ecology & Society, Environmental Policy & Planning, Environmental Policy & Governance, and Environment and Planning E: Nature & Space, as well as leading water journals, including Nature Water, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, Water Security, Water Policy, and the International Journal of Water Resources Development. She is also the recipient of a number of prestigious and competitive awards, including the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (2016-2021), NSF Integrative Graduate Education & Research Traineeship (2015-2017), and European Commission Agris Mundus Scholarship (2008-2010).
Dr. Mendez-Barrientos earned her Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California Davis, and holds a MSc. in Water Management from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and a MSc. on Tropical Agrarian Systems from Montpellier SupAgro in France. Before academia, Dr. Mendez-Barrientos served as an environmental policy analyst for several years with the Environmental Defense Fund.
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Sié Center
Scrivner Institute of Public Policy
Global Environmental Sustainability
Water Policy and Governance
Environmental Justice
Race, citizenship, and belonging in the pursuit of water and climate justice. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(3): 1614:1635. (with Amanda Fencl, Cassandra Workman, and Sameer Shah)
Beyond engagement: Enhancing equity in collaborative water governance. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water: e1687. (with Elizabeth Koebele and Andrea Gerlak)
Thousands of domestic and public supply wells face failure despite groundwater sustainability reform in California’s Central Valley. Scientific Reports 13(1), 14797. (with Darcy Bostic, Rich Pauloo, Kristin Dobbin, and Victoria MacClements)
INTS 4706 Sustainability of Socio-Ecological Systems
INTS 4656 Power, Institutions, and Justice in Environmental Sustainability
INTS 4674 Water Policy and Governance
PPOL 3701 Water Policy
Ph.D., Ecology, University of California Davis, 2021
M.S., Tropical Agrarian Systems, Montpellier SupAgro, 2010
M.S., International Land and Water Management, Wageningen University, 2010
B.S., Environmental Sciences and Development Economics, Pan-American School of Agriculture Zamorano, 2007
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