Director, Social and Environmental Safeguards/
Regional Director, Greater-Mekong Sub-region and the Pacific
Email: shanetarr@yahoo.com
Dr. Shane Tarr is a polymath whose width of professional experience is
difficult to capture in a few short paragraphs. He covers agriculture (he has a
cattle farm in New Zealand and assists his Thai partner on her farm in Loei
when he has time), gender and development, socio-environmental affairs and
infrastructure development with equal ease. He graduated in Economics and
Sociology at the University of Waikato, NZ in 1973 following this with
post-graduate qualifications in Farming Systems (University of Sydney,
Australia, 1976), Asian Sociology (MSocSc .University of Queensland, Australia,
1986) and a PhD in Development Studies at the University of Queensland,
Australia in 1989 through which he revealed ground-breaking research on the
socio-economics of plantation development in Southern Thailand. He has lectured
at universities in Australia, Thailand and the USA and was an Adjunct Professor
of Development Studies at the University of Adelaide until he got bored with
introspective academics but he maintains close contacts with the University of
Ho Chi Minh because he finds Asian academics to be intellectually more exciting
these days than most Western academics.
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| With the nephew of Vo Nguyen Giap (now 102) the man who defeated both the French and the Americans in Vietnam |
Dr. Tarr may be best known in the public domain for his presence in Cambodia at the start of the Khmer Rouge regime and he has been involved in the political and social economy of the region since that time in a wide variety of roles. He undertook the first Asian Development Bank (ADB) Poverty Assessment in Cambodia in 2001. Dr. Tarr worked with the founders of FoodWorks on the ADB’s Stung Chinit Water Resources Development Project in Cambodia during which he notably fought off an attack on his survey team by post-KR guerrillas. He has worked with us in the Philippines evaluating two rural area development projects for the European Union, in Laos on water management for the ADB, Uzbekistan on grains productivity (also ADB) and on gender empowerment in Pakistan for USAID. In the private sector he supervised rice exports from Vietnam to Ukraine for FoodWorks.
Dr.Tarr has confined his work principally to the Greater Mekong Sub-region (mainly Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam) and to the Pacific (Papua New Guinea), although he has worked in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan), China, Pakistan and Uganda. Until around 2006 Dr. Tarr worked in the areas of rural development and especially on poverty reduction and gender issues in agriculture including upland agriculture among indigenous groups in Vietnam, Lao PDR and China. Since then, however, he has aligned his talents more to infrastructure development and has undertaken a wide variety of projects as the social development specialist on urban renewal and climate change, water supply and sanitation and energy projects (hydropower dams and associated facilities including transmission lines). His clients have included the ADB, The World Bank, The Vietnam Expressway Corporation and the Ital-Thai Construction Group (one of the largest in South-east Asia).
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| At Ban Souksavang, Attapeu Province, Lao PDR holding community consultations related to an ADB-funded hydro-power project |
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| Interviewing dragon fruit farmers, horticulture fair, Phnom Penh, Cambodia |
