Solar Powered Irrigation Pumps
As part of its Ganges Focal Region project, the CGIAR research programme on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) funded a two-year project titled ‘Reviving springs and providing access to solar powered irrigation pumps (SPIP) through community-based water use planning: Multiple approaches to solving agricultural water problems in mid hills and Terai in Nepal and India’. The project is led by ICIMOD in partnership with Helvetas (Nepal), ACWADAM (India), Atom Solar (India), and researchers from George Washington Universityand Harvard University. The goal of this project is to ensure affordable and sustainable access to drinking and agricultural water in the mid hill and Terai regions of Nepal and the state of Uttarakhand in India.
The first objective of the project is to revive drying springs by building a high level of understanding of localised spring hydrogeology; extensive mapping of all spring sources in the study areas; building a comprehensive understanding of the socioeconomic, policy, institutional and governance aspects of spring management; and making appropriate technical and policy interventions. The second objective of the project is to promote solar powered irrigation pumps (SPIPs) as a climate resilient and poverty alleviation solution to tackle issues related to the water-food-energy nexus in the Terai region of Nepal. The project will pilot 25—30 small size SPIPs (500—1,500 watt peak) in one or two districts in the Terai and carry out high-quality impact evaluation studies. The third objective is to incorporate components of spring revival and SPIP into community led WUMPs, which is being implemented in Nepal by Helvetas and will also be piloted in Uttarakhand for the first time under this project.
Innovation for Vulnerable Farmers: Drought and Water Scarcity Adaptation Technologies
September 10-12, 2014, Harvard University
Co-Ogranized by Noel Michele Holbrook (Professor Organismic and Evolutionary Biology) and Alicia Harley (PhD Candidiate Harvard Kennedy School of Government)
This one-day workshop brought together a diverse group of scholars from many countries and organizations (see appendix A for full list of participants) to explore key challenges in the innovation system for drought and water scarcity adaption technologies to meet the needs of small and marginal farmers. The focus on poor and marginal farmers was a conscious attempt to provide an opportunity to move the dialogue around water and agriculture away from questions of yield or water use efficiency and towards the challenge of serving the needs of the most vulnerable members of our global agricultural system. In particular, the workshop aimed to:
Provide a space for interdisciplinary discussion between different communities, including both scholars and practitioners across a wide variety of disciplines relevant to agricultural innovation and adaptation to drought and water scarcity.
Create a holistic understanding of the current innovation system for drought adaptation technologies for vulnerable farmers by synthesizing knowledge across a wide variety of technology categories and stages in the innovation system.
Diagnose weaknesses in the innovation system for drought resistant technologies relevant to the livelihood of vulnerable farmers.
Identify strategies for addressing key barriers in the innovation system with respect to the needs of the most vulnerable farmers.
Innovation and Access to Technologies for Sustainable Development: A Global Systems Perspective
April 24, 2014, Harvard University
This workshop on “Innovation and Access to Technologies for Sustainable Development: A global Perspective” brought together a diverse group of scholars to explore how the technological innovation needed for sustainable development can be promoted in ways that assure equitable access in current and future generations. The workshop also aimed to catalyze and identify new research in this area. The workshop was focused around four questions:
How have innovation systems evolved beyond national boundaries to the global (or transnational) level? How has such evolution varied by sector? What are the implications for scholarly research, policy and practice?
What processes and stages need to be included in useful frameworks for understanding or diagnosing innovation systems?
What are the methodological approaches that allow for generalizable understandings of innovation systems for sustainable development across cases?
What should transnational actors and institutions do to strengthen the innovation system for sustainable development at a transnational level?
These questions emerged from an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on “Innovation and Access to Technologies for Sustainable Development” that the workshop conveners have been undertaking since the Fall of 2011. The project has involved over 30 scholars investigating innovation for sustainable development around the world and across five sectors of need: agriculture, health, energy, manufacturing and water. The goal has been to move discussion of how to promote innovation with access beyond its disciplinary, sectoral and national silos, across which the sharing of lessons about factors responsible for success and failure has often been ad hoc and limited. As background for the workshop, the conveners distributed a working paper that has resulted from this research “The Global Innovation System: Diagnosing Ways to Promote Innovation and Access to Technologies for Sustainable Development” to conference participants. They also collated a series of 15 relevant papers from participants. A report summarizes the main themes in each panel from the workshop. The workshop was convened by the Sustainability Science Program (in cooperation with the Science Technology and Public Policy program) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Policitics & Development in an Emerging State: The Political Economy of Bihar
April 2014, Harvard University
Co-Organized by Rohit Chandra, Alicia Harley and Yusuf Neggers
This workshop began with a group discussion entitled "Interrogating Bihar's Growth Story" focusing on the the last two decades of Bihar's development. In the first part of this event, Michael Walton (HKS) and Jeffrey Witsoe (Union College) discussed the major economic and social transformations that have occurred in the state in the last to decades. In particular, they focused on what has changed in Bihar since 2005, when the state government changed after fifteen years of poor governance by a single political party. The conversation spanned issues of lower caste politics, the undermining and rebuilding of public institutions, public vs. private sector driven growth, improved law and order, and the centrality of land ownership and acquisition for many of these issues. Consequently, an audience of a about twenty students and faculty, primarily from HKS, posed more specific questions to Dr. Witsoe. At least 5-6 people in the audience had experience working in Bihar, either in the non-profit or government sectors, which made these debates quite detailed and productive.
In the second event, Jeffrey Witsoe discussed his newly released book, Democracy Against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India, at an event jointly organized with the South Asia Initiative at CGIS. At this event, Dr. Witsoe discussed a few chapters of his books, which focused on the longer term origins of caste-based political mobilization in Bihar, and in particular the rise and fall of Lalu Prasad Yadav, the leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal party. The composition of the audience was quite varied at this event, and included not only HKS students, but undergraduates and gradaute students from HBS and FAS. There was a lively discussion between Dr. Witsoe and students who had grown up in Bihar and experienced the results of these political movements firsthand.
The Role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Helping Decision-Makers Meet Food, Energy and Water (FEW) Needs
May 18 2013, Harvard University
Co-Organized by Sharmila Murthy, Laura Pereira, Alicia Harley, Daniel Shemie, Eunjee Lee, Patricia Guardabassi, Chao Zhang, and Scott Moore
What role can the data generated through Information and Communications Technology (ICT) play in aiding decision-making to meet current and future food, energy and water (FEW) needs in the wake of climate change?
The goal of this workshop was to help define an inter-disciplinary, scholarly research agenda to help address this critical question. Its scope was purposefully broad and reflected an attempt to bridge divides across academic disciplines and to foster conversation between technologists, policymakers and academics. The workshop was focused on exploring the current and potential uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the food, energy and water (FEW) sectors and also drawing lessons from the use of ICT in the broader field of development. However, it emerged that the use of ICT for development (“ICTD”) was still evolving and that many of the challenges to the effective deployment of ICT for FEW had parallels in other sectors.
Five key areas emerged from the workshop. These include
the role ICT can play in linking global governance with local knowledge and preferences,
the ethical dilemmas that have arisen in the ICTD context,
how ICTD can inform policy-making across different scales, and
the importance of context in employing ICT tools.