My name is Maja Dahl Jeppesen and I am a new PhD student at Aarhus university. I come from a suburb called Hundige and have lived in Copenhagen for the past 9 years. I am therefore very excited to venture out from Sjælland and explore what Aarhus and Aarhus University have to offer.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from University of Copenhagen and have from the same school graduated with a master’s degree in Global Development. My academic interests especially lie in natural resource management, state-building, development, and sustainability.

I have found a way to include them all in my PhD project, where I will explore how the involvement of private actors in water provision in Nairobi, Kenya, affect the public authority of water governance actors (private, state, and informal actors). It is becoming an increasingly greater challenge to manage water effectively and distribute it equally in big cities in the global south, and many governments turn to privatization or public-private partnerships to address these issues. I would like to examine the repercussions private sector involvement have on public authority and whether people’s relationship to the state changes when a private company takes the role of delivering water, something that has traditionally been in the hands of the government. I will moreover look at whether the water provision company gain any authority that goes beyond the role they have on paper.

I am looking very much forward to meeting my new colleagues and becoming a part of Afdeling for Antropologi!