Alejandro Morán, best TFG award from the Aquae Foundation

Nora Fernandez Fernandez 

The student Alejandro Morán (Bizkaia, 2000) has received the award for best Final Degree Project in the call for awards of the Aquae Chair 2022 on the economy of water.  

His work deals with the issue of water governance in the Aral Sea basin, anchored in a controversial quota compensation system between upstream hydroelectric power generation and downstream agricultural irrigation. The project reviews the current incompatibilities governing basin hydrodiplomacy and, ultimately, regional security dynamics among the five Central Asian countries. 

Already graduated in International Relations in English, Alejandro Morán applied for these awards because he "followed the activity of the Aquae Foundation very closely." "I am very interested in the work they do in water sustainability and especially in proposals to analyze how climate change will affect resource management," says Morán. The work has been directed by the Vice Dean for Research and International Relations, Vicente Garrido Rebolledo, who is also a professor of Public International Law and International Relations. 

Although before presenting you doubts arose because his TFG "was not as technical or as quantitative as other calls, yes, later I saw that there was a category of water governance and my theme was to see what the policies of the basin were like from the perspective of the social sciences”, points out the student. “Thanks to this, I have realized that social sciences and political sciences have a place and a lot to say in resource management,” he adds. 

Undoubtedly, receiving this award has been for Morán “an incentive and motivation to continue training in the area of ​​research and develop new projects in the future. In addition, I think that one of the great conclusions that I take after finishing the TFG is that nowadays all the challenges are interconnected and it is necessary to have a very comprehensive vision of the facts. That is why when we talk about hydrodiplomacy we are not only talking about water, but we are talking about how all this influences fishing, agriculture, employment, energy…even regional migration patterns”. 

After carrying out his curricular internships at the Ministry of the Interior dealing with the different areas of judicial, criminal and police cooperation at the European level, Morán was an Erasmus internship fellowship last year at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna.  

Right now he is in Rome, specializing in international and European law, but according to what he tells us, he is going to Montenegro next month on an electoral mission for this year's presidential elections as an international observer. “It is a new challenge and I really want to debut as an electoral observer. In the medium term I am quite optimistic and I would like to work on what I have studied, but I do not rule out continuing my training through a doctoral scholarship or who knows if I will dedicate myself to teaching at the university in the future”, says Morán.