Interview with the John Briscoe, Winner of the 2014 Stockholm Water Prize

Summary

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The CGD Podcast: Interview with John Briscoe, Winner of the 2014 Stockholm Water Prize

Date: March 21, 2014
Host: Lawrence MacDonald (Center for Global Development)
Guest: John Briscoe (Visiting Fellow at CGD, Professor at Harvard University)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Lawrence MacDonald of the Center for Global Development interviews John Briscoe, a globally recognized authority on water and development, and recent winner of the 2014 Stockholm Water Prize. The conversation spans Briscoe’s unique career, his views on water management, reflections on field experiences in Bangladesh, Mozambique, and Brazil, and his perspectives on agricultural development and investment in Africa.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Significance of the Stockholm Water Prize

[00:57] – [02:17]

• Recognition of "thinking practitioners": Briscoe characterizes the award as honoring not just himself but a community of water experts who combine hands-on management with critical, reflective thinking.
  • "The way in which I choose to interpret it is that I consider myself to be a representative of a particular community... the thinking practitioners." – Briscoe [01:19]
• He distinguishes his approach from those who are only academics or bureaucrats, emphasizing the importance of practical experience in managing complex water systems.

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2. Briscoe’s Background and Motivations

[02:17] – [03:12]

• Personal connection to water scarcity: Briscoe reflects on growing up in South Africa, noting the formative impact of water scarcity.
  • "Water, I think, is very visceral for all of us, but particularly for those who have grown up in arid environments." – Briscoe [03:12]
• He invokes E.O. Wilson’s phrase: "godlike technologies, medieval institutions, and Paleolithic emotions", applying it to the challenges of water management [03:30].

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3. Water’s Role in Economic Development

[04:07] – [05:50]

• The "water platform" for growth: Briscoe discusses the idea that regions like New England, with stable water conditions, enabled the Industrial Revolution, leading to wealth that funded complex infrastructure in more challenging environments like the American West.
  • "Mother Nature had constructed what you could think of as the water platform for growth in New England.” – Briscoe [04:39]
• He draws a parallel to current developing countries needing support to build their water infrastructure.

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4. Critiquing Western Policy Perspectives

[06:22] – [08:37]

• Policy disconnect: Briscoe recounts his first blog post challenging Senator Leahy's anti-hydro stance, noting how those in developed regions often lack personal experience with insecurity in food, water, or energy.
  • "There’s a tremendous issue...of people who have never known what it is to be insecure...telling people who have to yet construct that security in their societies..." – Briscoe [07:23]
• Emphasizes that policy decisions about developing countries are too often made from distant, secure places like Washington or Northern Europe.

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5. Humbling Lessons from Bangladesh

[08:37] – [11:35]

• Field experience and changing views: Briscoe describes living in a Bangladeshi village and initially opposing an embankment project as destructive. Upon returning 22 years later, he found remarkable improvements in life expectancy and livelihoods, almost entirely attributed to the embankment.
  • "Are you stupid? It's the embankment." – Villager, relayed by Briscoe [10:47]
• This experience humbled Briscoe and revealed the transformative, sometimes underappreciated, value of infrastructure.

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6. Learning from the Ground Up

[11:35] – [12:14]

• Empathy for local realities: Briscoe emphasizes the importance of understanding development impacts from the perspective of those directly affected, not from academic or policy debates.

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7. Water and Agricultural Innovation in Brazil

[13:20] – [15:58]

• Brazil’s pragmatic approach: Briscoe recounts a pivotal conversation between President Lula and agricultural engineer Roberto Rodriguez, who convinced Lula that Brazil's future depended on knowledge-intensive, large-scale agriculture, not smallholder-focused models.
  • "With all due respect, you were elected as president of Brazil, but that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard..." – Roberto Rodriguez, relayed by Briscoe [16:21]
• Highlights how Brazil harnessed research and scale to become the world’s top soybean producer, outperforming the US and transforming previously unsuitable land.

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8. The Debate on Foreign Agricultural Investment in Africa

[18:16] – [22:08]

• Land grabs vs. productive investment: Briscoe argues that negative publicity about land acquisitions can deter needed agricultural investment, referencing economist Paul Collier’s story about a progressive investment in the DRC.
  • "...many of those very important and good endeavors which will provide essentially a springboard for broad development in Africa are being branded...as land grabs." – Briscoe [20:10]
• Balanced approach: Briscoe insists that investment shouldn’t displace local people, but rather employ and benefit them through increased productivity and new economic linkages.
  • "Should you come in and shove the people off the land? Absolutely not...These are all employment drivers that local people will and should be the beneficiaries of." – Briscoe [21:33]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We're living today with godlike technologies, medieval institutions, and Paleolithic emotions...and that's what water's about." – Briscoe quoting E.O. Wilson [03:30]
• "Are you stupid? It's the embankment." – Villager in Bangladesh, explaining transformative change [10:47]
• "With all due respect, you were elected as president of Brazil, but that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard..." – Roberto Rodriguez to President Lula (relayed by Briscoe) [16:21]
• "There is a tremendous issue in the development business of people who have never known what it is to be insecure in this variety of ways... then telling people ... how ... that should be done." – Briscoe [07:23]

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Introduction to John Briscoe and Stockholm Water Prize: [00:33] – [02:17]
• On water scarcity, emotion, and technology: [03:12] – [04:07]
• Water as a driver of the Industrial Revolution: [04:07] – [05:50]
• Disconnect between Western policymakers and developing world realities: [06:22] – [08:37]
• Bangladesh embankment story and personal transformation: [08:37] – [11:35]
• Brazil, President Lula, and agricultural policy: [13:20] – [16:21]
• Debate on foreign investment in African agriculture: [18:16] – [22:08]

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Tone & Style

Briscoe speaks plainly, drawing on direct experience and showing humility about changing one’s mind. He mixes anecdotes with analysis, retaining an emphasis on real-world outcomes over theoretical or ideological purity.

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Conclusion

John Briscoe’s reflections deliver a powerful message about the practical realities of development. His career illustrates the value of lived experience and humility, the benefits infrastructure can deliver when done thoughtfully, and the danger of hasty policy judgments unanchored from the experience of those on the ground. His stories from Africa, Asia, and South America echo the need for balancing innovation with local context, pragmatism, and empathy.

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Transcript

[A]

Sam.

[B]

Welcome to the Global Prosperity Wonk cast. I'm Lawrence MacDonald. I'm delighted to have with me in the studio today John Briscoe. He is a visiting fellow here at the center for Global Development, a professor of the practice of environmental engineering at Harvard University, where he's also affiliated with the School of Public Health, and one of the world's top experts on water and development. John, welcome to the show.

[A]

Thanks, Lawrence.

[B]

And I should say, congratulations. We're recording this today in part because you have been named the winner of the Stockholm Water Prize. What does that mean?

[A]

Well, the Stockholm Water Prize is the biggest prize that exists in the water community. What does it mean that I got it this year? I'm not sure I will find out why they gave it to me, but. But the way in which I choose to interpret it is that I consider myself to be a representative of a particular community in the water business. And that's the community of people who both practice and think. And this is, to my mind, these are the most important people in the water space. Not the people who simply write academic papers, not the people who clock in from nine to five, but those who manage this large and very complex resource, for example, in this country who manage the Mississippi river, which covers half of the area of the United States. How do they do this job? And there. There is a community that is really my community of contemporaries who are what I think of as the thinking practitioners. And I choose to interpret this award as I am one of many of those thinking practitioners, and I think it represents recognition for all of them.

[B]

I'm not surprised, then, that Nancy Birdsall, our president here at the center for Global Development, has been so keen to recruit you and have you affiliated with our center. Because among the things that we're particularly interested in here at center for Global Development is scholar practitioners, those people who have experience either in the policy or program sphere and also are really renowned as researchers. And your career clearly spans that. I was looking at the citation and at a new paper that you published, a recent paper in 2011 on water and agriculture in Africa. And in that paper you draw on a wide range of experiences. You've lived in village in Bangladesh, you were the World Bank's resident representative in Brazil. You yourself were born in South Africa. And in the paper, you talk about growing up in South Africa in a land of water scarcity, and how it seemed so important to you to try and solve those problems.

[A]

Yeah, well, water, I think, is a very visceral for all of us, but particularly for those who have grown up in arid environments. It's something that is, at one level, intellectual and practical, but at another level, I think it's deep in, sort of in our psyche is this issue around water. So I like. There's a very famous professor at Harvard, E.O. wilson, who I'm sure you know, who has a great saying about the sort of perfect storm of biotechnology today. But it applies sort of to water. And what Wilson says is we're living today with godlike technologies, medieval institutions, and Paleolithic emotions. And that's what water's about. It's about all of those different spheres of understanding, knowledge and intuition coming together.

[B]

One of the things that struck me in the paper was you talk about, of course, most places have very highly variable water. Sometimes you've got too much, sometimes you've got too little. Often it's in the wrong place. You talk about New England as being Goldilocks, not too much, not too little. And that that was the reason, one of the reasons that the Industrial Revolution took off in New England, in North America, as opposed to getting started elsewhere.

[A]

Yeah. So with anybody who specializes in a particular field, you have to be careful about them. Seeing the whole world through the spectacles of that. And there is definitely an issue of sort of water centricness with me and with all of my colleagues. That said, I think it is true that you see a New England. New England was very easy, as you say, relatively little variability. When the mills came, there was abundant water to generate hydropower for the mills. And it was easy to transport the water out. It was easy to provide the dilution that the mills needed. And so, in a sense, Mother Nature had constructed what you could think of as the water platform for growth in New England. Now, if you look at a later period in United States history and you go out west, of course, there was almost the opposite of highly variable floods, droughts and difficulties. And so in the west, you had to build an enormous amount of infrastructure, be it on the Columbia river or the Colorado river, to make Los Angeles, San Francisco or Seattle possible in a very different circumstance.

[B]

Is it oversimplifying to say that some of the wealth that was created with the Industrial Revolution in the Northeast then made possible for the country to tackle those more difficult, demanding problems in the West?

[A]

I think that's precisely what happened. It was precisely out of the creation of. Had you not had the creation of the wealth in the east, you could never have dealt with it. And this is in many ways, the issue that you have in many developing countries. Now. They need to develop their water infrastructure, their water institutions. But they have to have assistance in mobilizing the long term capital that in the United States came from the east to the west. And there they have to find some other source of mobilizing that capital.

[B]

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about your first blog post. It was sort of baptism by fire. Newly affiliated fellow takes a poke at a powerful senator who's been active supporter of the multilateral development institutions. Your post about Senator Leahy, senator from Vermont, who's on his website as you point out, boasts that Vermont has abundant clean hydro. And then in his directives towards the US involvement in multilateral institutions has said, thou shalt not do hydro.

[A]

Yeah. So it's not my job to actually poke at Senate delay. What I was trying to make was a broader point. And the broader point on this is one that people who live with a water platform for growth. If I look at my students at Harvard, for example, and I asked this week, I said, how many of you have ever not had enough food to eat? How many of you have ever not had energy 24 hours a day? And you know, somebody put up her hand and she said, well, I've not had energy. We once had a blackout for four hours. And I think that you have. There's a tremendous issue in the development business of people who have never known what it is to be insecure in this variety of ways then telling people who have to yet construct that security in their societies or on the way in which that should be done. So this has been, as you mentioned, I come from South Africa. I was part of actually building that infrastructure in South Africa. In my young days I've lived in Bangladesh. I worked in the government of Mozambique when I was a young engineer. And I worked in many of these countries for the World Bank. And this construction of the basis for a sound, resilient basis in which water shocks will not produce tremendously adverse economic outputs is a huge issue for developing countries and seldom understood in my view by people who live in Washington, who live in Northern Europe, who's the previous generation constructed that for them.

[B]

Tell me about your time in Bangladesh. When were you there? What were you doing?

[A]

Yeah, so I was in Bangladesh from 1976 to 1978. And it was a really very formative experience for me. Bangladesh became independent in 1971. I lived for those two years in a small village in the interior of Bangladesh that was a village on an island. As much of Bangladesh is, those villages didn't have Water supply. They didn't have electricity, they didn't have protection from floods. They didn't have water when there was a shortage.

[B]

You said it was in the interior, but on an island, that means it was in the delta? I guess.

[A]

So the whole country is a delta in a way. So it's what I mean by the inter. It was at that time, like seven or eight hours from Dhaka, from the capital city. But the life expectancy when I lived there of a woman was 46 years. I was a young socialist ecologist, like we all are at that age. And there was a very interesting project that was going to be built around that island by the Asian Development, funded by the Asian Development bank, that I strongly opposed when I was there in 1976 as a destructive infrastructure that would enrich the rich and make the poor even worse off.

[B]

What was the project going to do?

[A]

It was an embankment around the island that would mean that when the high waters came, everything there was underwater for three months of the year. It would mean they'd be protected from floods, and in the dry season you could pump water in. And I had the great privilege of going back to the same family I had lived with 22 years later, and life expectancy for women had gone from 46 years to 68 years. And I had. Just before going there, I was working at the World bank and had read one of the poverty assessments that the World bank produces on different countries. And in this particular case, the poverty assessment in the executive summary had the words ngo, community based, all of those sorts of words, I think something like 60 or 70 times. It had the word infrastructure once. And for me, the great issue was I went to the village and I said, so are you better off than you were 20 years ago? And everybody said, are you kidding? Can't you see? And then I said, what do you think this is due to? And they also said, are you stupid? It's the embankment. And that embankment was done with a lot of corruption. The resettlement was badly handled. The embankment actually fell down in the first year. So it was, in some sense, a case of infrastructure done really badly. But then when it was finally done, it meant people could grow three crops a year, not one crop a year. And this production, the increase in productivity, is basically what transforms people's lives.

[B]

What a powerful and humbling experience that must have been to revisit a place where you had been opposed to something that turned out to be such a force for good.

[A]

It was enormously humbling, and I think for me was very important in trying to see the world through the eyes of the people who are affected by these projects, not through a discussion in the Washington Post or not through a discussion on Capitol Hill, not through a discussion with major lobby groups in Washington, but trying to see what happened on the ground. And for me, that's sort of a late motif. I worked in Mozambique, in the government of Mozambique, right after that, in a very young country, trying to find its feet, and the same thing of trying to learn what really made a difference in people's lives under very, very difficult circumstances. That's what I think I've done in my life.

[B]

We're going to take a short break. When we come back, I want to ask you about your experience in Brazil. This is the Global Prosperity Wonkast from the center for Global development, I'm Lawrence McDonald. My guest today is John Briscoe and we're talking about water and development.

[A]

SAM.

[B]

Welcome back to the Global Prosperity wonkcast. I'm Lawrence MacDonald. My guest today is John Briscoe. He is the winner of the Stockholm Water Prize and we're talking about water and development. John, in your long career you were also the World Bank's resident representative in Brazil. And in this paper I've been reading today and in our conversation you told me about a chance encounter with the Was it the Minister of Agriculture on an airplane?

[A]

Yes, it was. This was actually the first minister. After I went to Brazil as the country director, I happened to meet the minister. And the tale to me is a tale about Brazil, about pragmatism, but above all, in a way a tale about President Lula, who was the very successful president of Brazil for eight years, including the time I was there. The minister, whose name was Roberto Rodriguez, is large, has something like 7,000 hectares of sugar cane in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo.

[B]

This is not small, is beautiful. I get, sir.

[A]

No, this is Roberto was a highly trained agricultural engineer. Brazilian agriculture is an agriculture of a tremendous amount of knowledge. It's funny being in Brazil because Brazilians don't speak English much. And in fact, the only place I could ever speak English was a meeting was when there were meetings of the agricultural community in Brazil because they had so many PhDs trained mostly in the United States in agriculture. And the mbrapa, the Brazilian public enterprise for agriculture and livestock is has hundreds, literally of PhDs from around the world. This is because Brazil 30 years ago saw that they had good land, good water, and they could become an agricultural superpower.

[B]

I want you to tell the story, but I want to just Interrupt to say, it's not only knowledge, it's also size. I learned from your paper that Brazilian farms are bigger than US farms. I was astonished to see that.

[A]

Yeah. So Brazil's recipe, which I should add, is not a recipe everywhere, but it's. Brazil's recipe is incredible amount of knowledge. They, for example, are the world's biggest soybean producers. Twenty years ago, it was. Soybean was a temperate crop of temperate lands you couldn't grow in the tropics. And the Brazilian scientists figured out not only how to grow it, but how to grow it better than anyone else in the world.

[B]

I thought that was just me. I thought, wait a minute, don't we grow soybeans only in the north? I didn't know it had changed. I thought it was a lack in my initial knowledge. But I guess they developed new varieties as well.

[A]

They did, and they learned how to manage the soil and the new varieties so that Brazil is the biggest producer of soybeans. But the story with Roberto Rodriguez and about Lula, I think is a very interesting one. When Lula was elected as president, Lula came. His background was working in the auto industry in Sao Paulo, and he had his campaign manager. Subsequently, his finance minister was a person by the name of Antonio Palossi. And Pelosi is a very wise person. Pelosi was the mayor of a town in the interior of Sao Paulo where Roberto Rodriguez lived. And Pelosi said to Lula, lula, you know, you're president of Brazil. You gotta learn something about agriculture, being president of Brazil. So Lula went to the big annual agricultural fair in Pelosi's hometown. And Pelosi said, I want you to speak to Roberto Rodriguez. And Lula met with Roberto Rodriguez. And this is as told to me by Roberto Rodriguez. So Lula said to him, look, we've had all these large agriculture. Now we've got the Workers Party coming in. It's going to be land to the tiller. And basically we're going to follow a different model. It's going to be small holders, small holders, Small is beautiful, organic, all of those sorts of things. And then he turned to Roberto Rodriguez and he said, pelosi says you know a lot about agriculture. So what do you think of this? And Roberto, again, this is told by Roberto to me. He said, well, Mr. Lula, with all due respect, you were elected as president of Brazil, but that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, because Brazil can be the world's number one agricultural superpower. But if you follow that path, you're going to destroy the knowledge, you're going to destroy the scale, you're going to destroy our model of agriculture, which we can be the biggest and best in the world. He then expected Lula to say, well, I'm sorry, that's not the policy of my party. To which he was enormously surprised because Lula turned and said to Pelosi, how come nobody's ever explained this to me before? And then he turned to Roberto Rodriguez and he says, I want you to be our Minister of Agriculture. This is an amazing story. Yesterday I just got a push from Brasilia. Brazil has just produced its biggest agricultural output in history. They now produce almost twice as much as they did just 10 years ago.

[B]

This is relevant to a debate that's going on now concerning foreign investment in Africa. And I must say, my own predilections, my own biases are in favor of those who would see the land acquisition, the land leases going on in Africa as land grabs. The Chinese, the Koreans, others coming in, buying up these large tracts. You have a rather different view of that then, I think what many progressive people, people on the left who think that they care or in fact do care about global poverty and global hunger, would be surprised by your view. And what is that view?

[A]

Yes, I think the. I wouldn't say that that's entirely incorrect. If you see 100,000 hectares being leased out to a particular country for 30 years, that probably constitutes a land grab, because basically Nobody can farm 100,000 hectares. This is essentially on speculation that food prices are going to rise, which they are going to rise. But I think what becomes, where it becomes negative is it means any type of foreign investment in agriculture in Africa gets labeled very fast as land grab. So Paul Collier, the great economist, in many ways the great economist of Africa from Oxford, Paul, tells a very interesting story about a very progressive group of agricultural engineers and managers from, I believe, the UK or from Europe, who has started a project for 3,000 hectares in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now, if you're trying to. Africa has a lot of good land, they have a lot of labor. So they, just, like Brazil, should be becoming an agricultural superpower. But in order to do that, there are no roads, there's no electricity, there's no land rights, there's no knowledge. All of those things which are key in Brazil and have been key are missing in Africa. So somebody coming in and brave enough to invest their money in Africa really needs to be able to germinate that there are enormous positive multipliers from this in Africa and everywhere else in the world. And many of those very important and good endeavors which will provide essentially a springboard for broad development in Africa are being branded by Oxfam and others as land grabs. And therefore basically people say, well, forget it, I'll take my money to Brazil. And there is Africa once again left with no investment in this very important area.

[B]

How do you balance the concerns that motivate an organization like Oxfam so that local people are not displaced? Is the imperative of raising productivity so important that. And the barriers that investors would face in Africa, as you described so clearly, so large that the emphasis should be on bringing in the investment and not worrying too much about the other things or you know, these are difficult trade offs.

[A]

I don't think they should be trade offs because I think the investments as investments in agriculture really anywhere in the world will produce employment. They will be. So should you come in and shove the people off the land? Absolutely not. People, local people, as was this case that Paul described, would be the people compensated and employed in these projects. They will then be the tomato factory. They will be the all of the both backward and forward linkages. That means who's supplying the tractors and the fertilizers, who's marketing the grain, who's producing the tomato factories. These are all employment drivers that local people will and should be the beneficiaries of.

[B]

Well, John, congratulations on the prize. I feel like I got a preview of what is going to be very interesting remarks when you accept the prize and deliver your speech in Stockholm in September.

[A]

Thanks very much, Lawrence. And let me just give congratulations to the center for Global Development. Ten great years, I think in exactly the niche, as you can hear that I think is the critical one for development in this world. So it's a real privilege. Thank you.

[B]

Well, thank you very much and I'm delighted to have you as a colleague. Welcome to cgd.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

This has been the Global Prosperity Wonkcast from the center for Global Development. My guest today is John Briscoe. He is the winner of the Stockholm Water Prize and we've been talking about water and development. I do want to urge you to look on our website where we'll have a link to this terrific paper on water and agriculture in Africa. John knows about water all over the world but the Africa paper draws on not only Africa, but really his experience throughout his career. And I commend that paper to you. You can find the Wong cast online on itunes and on stitcher. Just search for Wonkast or CGD and sign up to hear a new interview every week. Until next time, I'm Lawrence MacDonald. Thanks for listening.

[A]

It.