Progress in food safety is driven by behavior change. A better understanding of the beliefs, motivations, and economic pressures that influence food safety behaviors can yield more effective outreach programs and policy recommendations. This webinar will provide insights from Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety projects on food safety and social behavioral change among consumers, producers, and vendors in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, and Senegal.

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Guest speaker Emily Gurley, PhD, MPH is a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research involves novel surveillance strategies, improved collaboration between field epidemiologists and infectious disease modelers, and emerging and vaccine preventable disease transmission and prevention. Emily is Co-Director of Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance in Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Society for Public Health’s faculty co-lead for the Surveillance and Outbreak Response Team.

Talk by Tariq Thachil (Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)

Urban citizens in low-income democracies rarely hold elected officials accountable for toxic air. To understand why, we fielded a large citizen survey in Delhi, India, a highly polluted megacity where voters rarely prioritize air pollution at the polls. We find no evidence of conventional explanations for accountability failures: residents are aware of pollution’s adverse impacts, do not privilege development over curbing emissions, and are not fractured along class or ethnic lines on this issue. Instead, we find partisanship and sensitivity to the potential private costs of mitigation policies reduce accountability pressures. On the other hand, a simple randomized intervention (sharing indoor air quality information) that personalizes the costs of air pollution increases its electoral salience. We reveal key opportunities and constraints for mobilizing public opinion to reduce air pollution in developing democracies.

Tariq Thachi is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI), and Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent book (coauthored with Adam Auerbach), Migrants and Machine Politics, focuses on the political lives of poor migrants in Indian cities. His first book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India. He received his PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2009.

An array of social welfare programs have emerged in independent India, but how and for whom have these programs been constructed, what have their impact been, and what are the key challenges for the future?

Join us in-person or via zoom for a Chats in the Stacks book talk with Prabhu L. Pingali, professor of applied economics in the SC Johnson College of Business and director of the Tata-Cornell Institute (TCI) and Andaleeb Rahman, research associate in TCI and the Department of Global Development, as they discuss their new book The Future of India's Social Safety Nets: Focus, Form, and Scope (Springer Link, 2024).

Unpacking India’s social welfare programs in terms of their three essential aspects—focus (intended beneficiaries), form (transfer modalities), and scope (developmental objectives) Pingali and Rahman provide a comprehensive analysis of India’s safety net, combining insights from interdisciplinary scholarship on economic development, social protection, and the social policy process. The work assesses the achievements and shortcomings of these programs, while also proposing a transferrable framework that can help foster human resilience through social protection.

This talk is hosted by Mann Library. Light refreshments will be served.