Professor Lyla Mehta is a Professorial Fellow at IDS and a Visiting Professor at Noragric, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a PhD in Development Studies (University of Sussex).

Her work focuses on the water and sanitation, climate change, transformation, rights, 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 projects, 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 and Food Security (2014–2015) and was water and sanitation convenor of the STEPS Centre. She is currently lead author of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessment on transformative change, on the board of the journal Water Alternatives and is co-editor of the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.