I commenced a PhD within DEV in October 2008. My research interests pivot around issues related to water resources governance in the nations of the lower Mekong River basin, especially the case of Thailand. I am interested in addressing questions of politics, power and knowledge regarding contestations and control over water, at different geographical scales from a broad political ecology perspective.  In particular, my research attempts to find satisfactory explanations for a prolonged societal fascination with irrigation development paradigms in Northeast Thailand, which might transcend traditional state-community and nature-society dichotomies. Presently, the region is witnessing endless planning and construction of new irrigation development at all scales (even in the face of an apparently rather dismal past performance record), that includes grand state-backed plans to either divert water out of the Mekong mainstream or transfer it via a network of canals and pipelines from “water rich” Lao PDR to the “arid” Northeast. Through both material and discursive analytical approaches to examining irrigation development, the research intends to identify some of the key drivers, pathways, processes and practices that emerge from an empirically-grounded case study of the Nam Songkhram Basin. I contend that there is an ideology of irrigation (termed “irrigationalism”) in operation as a potential explanatory mechanism, hitherto largely overlooked in the academic literature on Thailand.