His career has focused on the issues of water, other natural resources and economic development. He has worked: as an engineer in the government water agencies of South Africa and Mozambique; as an epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Center in Bangladesh; as a professor of water resources at the University of North Carolina. In his 20-year career at the World Bank he held high-level technical positions (as the Bank's Senior Water Advisor) and managerial positions (Country Director for Brazil, the World Bank's biggest borrower). Mr. Briscoe's role in shaping the World Bank is the subject of a chapter in the definitive recent history of the Bank, Sebastian Mallaby's The World's Banker (Penguin, 2006).

He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering at Harvard University in 1976 and his B.Sc. in Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 1969.

In addition to his native South Africa, he has lived in the United State, Bangladesh, Mozambique, India and Brazil. He speaks English, Afrikaans, Bengali, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Briscoe has served on the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences and was a founding member of the major global water partnerships, including the World Water Council, the Global Water Partnership, and the World Commission on Dams. He currently serves on the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum; as a member of the Council of Distinguished Water Professionals of the International Water Association and is the first Natural Resource Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has published extensively in economic, finance, environmental, health and engineering journals. Recently he authored the World Bank's Water Sector Strategy, and the Oxford University Press books India's Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future and Pakistan's Water Economy: Running Dry.