Professor Lyla Mehta is a Professorial Fellow at IDS and a Professor (20%) at Noragric, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.  She is passionate about social, gender and environmental justice and human rights (especially around water/ sanitation/ climate).  She is currently Head of Department of the Climate, Environment and Sustainability Department and co-lead of the Postgraduate Researcher Programme

Lyla trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a PhD in Development Studies (University of Sussex). Her work focuses on water and sanitation, climate change, transformation, human rights, gender,  resource grabbing and the politics of sustainability, scarcity and uncertainty. She has extensive field research in India but also other parts of South Asia, southern and eastern Africa.

Lyla has engaged in advisory work with various UN agencies and has also been active in advocacy and activist work on gender, environment and development issues with NGOs and social movements in Europe and India. She is and has been Principal Investigator of several multi-country consortia, including Tapestry and Towards Brown Gold.

She was Team leader of the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) report on Water for Food Security and Nutrition  (2014–2015) and lead author of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessment on Transformative Change . She is currently on the board of the journal Water Alternatives and is founding co-editor of the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Lyla has led the MA in Gender and Development and was Head of Graduate Programmes. She currently convenes the Ideas in Development module.  She has supervised over 17 postgraduate researchers, and is open to PhD supervision.