Poverty stands prominently at the intersection of water scarcity, smallholder food production, and health in the world’s least developed regions. This project will measure the effects of poverty along the water-food-health nexus among rural households in Kenya, specifically, how differential access to domestic and productive water supplies, along with food security, and HIV and TB disease burden relate to changes in poverty over time among adults living in rural Kenyan households. Goals include measuring interactions between household productive and domestic water use, nutritional outcomes, infectious diseases, and poverty; and identifying  local interventions and policy responses that are likely to have positive spillover effects in any of these domains.

Since Thailand’s coup of September 2006, which forced the controversial government of billionaire businessman Thaksin Shinawatra out of office, pro- and anti-Thaksin forces have waged an intense battle for control of the government. Rural people in Thailand have played an important role in this struggle, but the nature of their politics is poorly understood. On the one hand there are breathless accounts of agrarian class struggle, while on the other hand rural protest is dismissed as the product of elite manipulation and financial inducement. These paradigms are unhelpful because they ignored the emergence of a new political relationship between the state and the rural population. Sustained economic growth since the 1960s had lifted rural households to levels of income and consumption previously unimagined. They are no longer mainly challenged by food insecurity but by the need to diversify economically and improve productivity. The state plays a key role in addressing these challenges through an array of subsidy, welfare, and community development schemes. Modern peasant politics in Thailand are motivated not by an antagonistic relationship with the state but by a desire to draw the state into mutually beneficial transactions. The classic frameworks for explaining peasant political behavior, based on rebellion or resistance, are impediments to understanding this new style of political behavior. Prof. Walker will propose instead an alternative model of rural “political society” based on the relationship between a persistent peasantry and a subsidizing state.  Copies of Thailand's Political Peasants will be available for signing and sale by the author following his talk.

Andrew Walker is an anthropologist who has worked in northern Thailand since the early 1990s. His latest book is Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (2012). His many earlier publications include “Royal Succession and the Evolution of Thai Democracy,” in Montesano et al., eds, Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand (2011); Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Mainland Southeast Asia (edited, 2009); Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand (co-authored, 2008); and The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma (1999). He also co-founded and co-convenes New Mandala, a widely read and highly regarded blog that offers fresh perspectives, both analytic and anecdotal, on mainland Southeast Asia.

Effective water management is one key element of agricultural innovation and growth. This talk: outlines evolving and changing good global practices with respect to water management and agriculture; examines developments in both water and agriculture in Africa; and suggests avenues which might be explored in improving water management and increasing agricultural productivity in Africa.

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 is the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Engineering and Environmental Health at Harvard University where he directs the Harvard Water Security Initiative. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on water management and development. In 2010 he was nominated for the Joseph R. Levenson Prize for exceptional teaching of Harvard undergraduates.

Briscoe's career has focused on the issues of water, other natural resources and economic development. He has worked as an engineer in the government water agencies of South Africa and Mozambique; as an epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Center in Bangladesh; and as a professor of water resources at the University of North Carolina. In his 20-year career at the World Bank, he held high-level technical positions, including Country Director for Brazil (the World Bank’s biggest borrower). Mr. Briscoe's role in shaping the governance and strategy of the World Bank is the subject of a chapter in the definitive recent history of the Bank, Sebastian Mallaby's The World's Banker (Penguin, 2006).

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 is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Policy in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is also an affiliate of Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), where she was previously a postdoctoral researcher. Jennifer is a physicist by training whose research focuses on simultaneously achieving global food security and mitigating climate change. She designs, implements, and evaluates technologies for poverty alleviation and agricultural adaptation, and she studies the links between energy poverty and food and nutrition security, the mechanisms by which energy services can help alleviate poverty, and the environmental impacts of food production and consumption. Much of Jennifer's current research focuses on the developing world.