Oliver M Brandes serves as Co-Director of the University of Victoria’s POLIS Project on Ecological Governance and leads the Water Sustainability Project where his work focuses on water sustainability, sound resource management, public policy development and ecologically based legal and institutional reform. Oliver is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in both Law and in Public Administration. He is a founding member of the Forum for Leadership on Water (FLOW) and the BC Convening for Action Vancouver Island (CAVI) Leadership Team and has affiliations at a number of Canadian Universities as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Waterloo, a Research Associate at the Centre for Global Studies and at Brock University’s Environmental Sustainability Research Centre and a Faculty Associate at the University of Manitoba’s Global Political Economy Program.

In 2012 he co-developed and co-taught BC’s first Water Law course at the University of Victoria’s Law school. He formally serves the BC Ministry of Environment advising on Water Act Modernization and is a technical advisor to the Council of the Federation on water and serves on many boards and committees that provide strategic water policy advice to all levels of government, as well as numerous national and regional non-government and funding organizations – including as Co-Chair of the WWF Canada’s Freshwater Program. In 2017 Oliver was appointed to lead an independent expert review on source drinking water protection in B.C., which resulted in regulatory change and informed the Auditor General of British Columbia’s work on drinking water.

He has over 100 academic and professional publications and in 2009, helped lead the writing of Making the Most of the Water We Have: The Soft Path Approach to Water Management which brought together the results of the first-ever international comprehensive water soft path study.