New Visiting Professor joins Oxford Water Network
Professor Dale Whittington, renowned globally for his research contributions to the fields of economics, public health, and water management, has joined the Oxford Water Network as Visiting Professor at the School of Geography and the Environment. Prof. Whittington has pioneered methods to understand the willingness of poor people to pay for clean water, generating insights for development policy over a 40-year career. Other major contributions include his research on water resource planning and systems analysis in some of the most complex and contentious river basins around the world, including the Nile and Ganges.
To begin his time as a Visiting Professor, Prof. Whittington will come to Oxford this term and give a talk on 7 March on the economics of Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and will use his time as a Visiting Professor to foster and expand both current initiatives with those at Oxford. He has active collaborations with several members of the Oxford Water Network, including Profs Simon Dadson, David Grey, Jim Hall, and Robert Hope and Drs Dustin Garrick and Kevin Wheeler. His active collaborations include a project (with Dr Wheeler and Prof Hall) examining the hydrologic, economic, and psychological impacts of the recent and substantial infrastructure developments that are occurring in the upstream Nile riparian countries of Ethiopia and Sudan. Prof. Whittington also collaborates with Dr Garrick on a GCRF project on informal water markets in Kenya and is actively engaged with Prof. Hope on the theme of water affordability central to SDG 6.1.
Prof Whittington is a professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He has also served in advisory and committee positions for the World Bank, the Global Water Partnership (GWP), the U.S. National Research Council, and a series of technical boards addressing water management in the Nile Basin. These roles include his position on the Oxford-led Global Water Partnership/OECD task force on water security and sustainable growth (2013-15), which culminated with an agenda-setting report launched at the World Water Forum in April 2015.