Dr Wikke Novalia is an interdisciplinary social scientist working in the fields of environmental governance and institutional change. She also had professional engineering and research experience in the water industry across Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, the Netherlands and Australia.

Dr Novalia's research investigates the interplay of environment, technology and society in the context of improving processes of urban & infrastructure planning, governance, and community participation for realising sustainable development outcomes. Her works include case studies of change processes, transformative agency, incumbency, deinstitutionalisation, and crisis across Indonesian and Australian cities. She blends theories from multiple fields to unpack the role of agency and institutions in driving or hindering transformative adaptation, needed to tackle urgent and complex societal challenges. 

She has been involved in interdisciplinary partnerships between Indonesia and Australia in delivering a large urban water research program in Jakarta and Bogor and in developing an action research program in Citarum catchment. She is the chief investigator of a new research, funded by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, aiming to enhance local capacity for leapfrogging Citarum communities towards better environmental and health outcomes. She is also a co-investigator in a research on legal pathways to support indigenous rights in water governance and another industry-funded research to explore collaborative partnership models for enhancing Water-Energy-Food Nexus.