Education and research on sustainable land use and Natural Resource Management. a new Danish-Malaysian university program. (Research Notes).

Introduction

This paper provides a brief introduction to a new educational and research collaboration between Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) and a consortium of three Danish universities focusing on sustainable land use and natural resource management (SLUSE).

The Danish government has since 1994 prioritized aid on environment and development not only in the least developed countries, but also in certain middle income countries such as Thailand and Malaysia. Part of this aid program has been the establishment of two Danish University Consortia on Environment and Development (DUCED) in 1996: DUCED-I&UA on Industry and Urban Areas and DUCED-SLUSE on Sustainable Land Use and Natural Resource Management. SLUSE was funded for a two year period by the Danish Cooperation for Environment and Development (DANCED Ministry of Environment and Energy) in 1998 and involves seven departments at three Danish universities: University of Copenhagen (UC), The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (RVAU) and Roskilde University Centre (RUC). The partners in Southeast Asia are universities in Thailand (Kasetsart, Chiang Mai, and Maejo Universities) and UNIMAS in Malaysia. In addition collaboration with universities in Rep. of South Africa and Botswana was initiated during 1999.

SLUSE aims at improving education and research on sustainable land use and natural resource management in Denmark as well as in countries receiving Danish environment and development assistance (DEDA countries), namely Thailand, Malaysia, Republic of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, and Swaziland. The objectives of the SLUSE program can be summarized as follows:

* to strengthen the Danish resource base with expertise in interdisciplinary approaches to land use and natural resource management;

* to develop an interdisciplinary environmental postgraduate teaching program collaboratively between three Danish universities; and in relationship to UNIMAS:

* to establish a partnership and support the development of a capacity building program in which a new Master's education on environment and development is a key element;

* to develop research activities in collaboration with UNIMAS.

In the following sections, the program in Denmark will be referred to as SLUSE-D and the UNIMAS program, which is currently under consideration for funding by DANCED, will be termed SLUSE-M.

Activities of SLUSE-D

The basic idea of SLUSE-D is to improve the curricula at the universities and increase the availability of courses that focus on environment and development. Students with relevant Bachelor degrees in social or natural sciences (Table 1) can, in addition to their regular university enrollment, register for the SLUSE program and thereby replace part of the first year of their Master's education with courses relevant to SLUSE. Fortyeight students enrolled for the academic year of 1998/99 and forty-seven for 1999/2000. Upon completion of their first year of the Master's program, the students will obtain a SLUSE Certificate. The second year of their Master's will be devoted to the thesis which may or may not be related to SLUSE, but students are entitled to financial support if they choose to carry out internship or field studies in a DEDA country such as Malaysia. The structure of the Danish Master's education and how the SLUSE-educational activities fit in is shown in Figure 1.

A number of new courses have been developed by SLUSE, some jointly between the three universities and others by individual departments. The most important is the Interdisciplinary Joint Basic Course on Natural Resource Management which is compulsory and one of the key SLUSE activities. The course is run in collaboration between all participating departments and focuses on training students in interdisciplinary subjects, particularly those of direct relevance to field work. The course contains lectures/discussions on theory and methodology in Denmark, two to three weeks field work in a DEDA country, and reporting in Denmark.

In 1998 the field course took place in Sarawak and Sabah and the 48 students were divided between 3 locations in Sarawak: Bau District, Ulu Batang Ai and Lemanak Oil Palm Estate, and one in Sabah: Kundasang. A group of 20 Malaysian students also participated as volunteers. The supervision during the field course was undertaken by eight Danish teachers and twelve UNIMAS teachers.

For the 1999 field course, the field-bound students from Denmark were divided into two groups: 23 students to Malaysia and the remainder went to Thailand. The 1999 field course in Malaysia was arranged to coincide with the Crocker Range National Park Scientific Expedition, XPDC 1999, which took place in Sabah in October. The students were located in three Dusun villages (Tikolod, Kuyongan, and Patau) on the southeastern fringe of the Crocker Range National Park in Tambunan District. The original intention with this course was to have an equal representation by UNIMAS graduate students, but unfortunately funding for the UNIMAS program was not obtained in time and only six UNIMAS student volunteers participated in the field course.

During the field course the focus has been on supervising students on the use of research methodologies typical for social as well as natural science. However, the students have prepared problem based mini-research projects beforehand and a significant amount of data collection also takes place. In 1999 the six village based student groups had 4-6 members working on agricultural intensification, income-generating activities, use of forest products, hydrology and soil erosion problems, land tenure, and the potential for tourism development. As all groups are ideally composed of students from different disciplines each topic is normally treated from both social and natural scientific viewpoints. The final reports will be the basis of an examination in January 2000 and if some of the projects have compiled publishable data, these will be edited for publication in the Crocker Range National Park Scientific Expedition monograph.

Other new courses developed at the Danish Universities include Environmental Impact Assessment, Environmental Anthropology, The Politics of Environment and Development, Community Forestry and Soil Pollution in the Tropics. Moreover, several Departments have remodeled existing courses to accommodate students from other Universities who are interested in broadening their disciplinary focus. These courses include topics such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing, Farming Systems in the Tropics, Land Evaluation, Tropical Forestry, Land Tenure and Social Institutions, Development Studies, Ecological Economic policy Analysis in Developing Countries, etc.

SLUSE-D is administrated by a Board consisting of the Managing Director and University Managers from the three Danish partner universities. An Advisory Committee to the Board includes representatives from DANCED, other ministries, and the universities. Teaching of the new and joint SLUSE courses is assured by six consortium lecturers employed full time, and by permanent staff at the participating departments.

The current funding of SLUSE-D ends in June 2000. It is, however, expected that a second phase will be funded, probably for a period of six years. Other than the activities mentioned above, a PhD program will also be introduced in the new program and is expected to be one of the driving forces for developing research activities. In-service training for graduates will also play an important role in order to upgrade the scientific level of the persons working with environment and development outside the universities.

SLUSE-M

SLUSE-Malaysia will, at least in its first phase, be based at UNIMAS. Collaboration with other universities in Malaysia is envisaged at a later stage, but in order to facilitate the initiation of the program, a one-university approach was opted for. The funding for SLUSE-M is expected from DANCED in late 1999 for an initial phase of two years, and, consequently, the activities described in the following are still in the planning stage.

The proposed SLUSE-M is developed on a concept similar to that of the ongoing SLUSE-D in which UNIMAS is one of the collaborators. The SLUSE interdisciplinary concept concurs with the teaching-learning approach at UNIMAS whereby the student's knowledge base is enhanced by a number of complementary and generic courses.

SLUSE-M has been designed as a new Master's education at UNIMAS with the aim of providing students with an M.A. in Social Science (Development Studies) or M.Sc. in Land Use and Water Resource Management or Coastal Zone Management. An intake of 20-25 students representing a broad number of disciplines from all over Malaysia and possibly other ASEAN countries is expected.

The education program of SLUSE-M is structured to comprise one year of intensified course-work and four months of dissertation work, making up a total of 52 credits (Figure 2). The course work includes a Joint SLUSE Module, UNIMAS Core Modules, and an Experiential Module. The latter, and to a large extent the Joint SLUSE Module are closely 'twinned' with the SLUSE-D Interdisciplinary Joint Basic Course. Consequently, the Danish and Malaysian SLUSE field courses in 2000 will be planned jointly, and the students from both countries will not only work together in the field but also plan their field study jointly over the Internet. The reports, however, will be written separately as it will be logistically difficult to run a joint examination. The Sungai Niah catchment area in Sarawak has been proposed as the field course site for 2000.

Besides the field course, it is also planned that some of the courses offered under the Joint SLUSE-M Module be jointly taught or facilitated by invited Danish teachers and UNIMAS teachers. In situations when the Danish teacher's physical presence at UNIMAS is not possible, a video conference mode of course delivery will be utilized.

The remainder of the SLUSE-module consists of new courses at UNIMAS such as Applied Environmental and Resource Economics, Land Use and Natural Resource Management, Water Resource Management, Environmental Management Instruments and Systems, and Monitoring Using Earth Observation (Eo) and GIS. In addition, the course work consists of a specialization in either Development Studies, Land Use and Water Resource Management, or Coastal Zone Management, and the Master's thesis work will also have to be carried out in one of these fields.

Finally, SLUSE-M includes funding for two PhD students to be enrolled at Danish Universities. On a more longterm basis, it is envisaged that an extension of SLUSE-M should include the development of a PhD program at UNIMAS within land use and natural resource management.

SLUSE-M program administration and monitoring shall operate at five levels:

1. Project Steering Committee (PSC)

2. Project Management Committee

3. SLUSE-M Academic Advisory Panel

4. UNIMAS Board of Post-graduate Studies

5. SLUSE-M Board of Studies.

The PSC shall be represented by DANCED, Economic Planning Unit, Project Director, State Planning Unit, Department of Higher Education, Department of Environment and the Sabah and Sarawak state environmental agencies.

Research

SLUSE-D and UNIMAS are in the process of developing research activities in Sabah and Sarawak based on the educational collaboration which has already been established as well as previous research collaboration between the participating institutions. A number of areas of joint interest have been identified and it is expected that during 2000, several proposals will be presented for funding. Ideas include natural resources inventory and watershed management, intensification processes of traditional farming systems, land resource use and conflicts, local perceptions of environmental change and sustainability, and recycling of urban and agricultural waste on farm land and organic farming. More concrete research projects will be communicated to the Borneo Research Bulletin once they are under way.

Concluding remarks

The SLUSE program is continuously evolving and lessons learnt from the first years are being incorporated into the planning of future activities. The execution of the Interdisciplinary Joint Basic Course in 1998, for example, required considerable revisions that were applied during the 1999 course. One of the main issues regarded the problem of interdisciplinary teaching and supervision which requires trade-offs between maintaining a high academic level in all disciplines while not leaving any students out. Our experience is that lecturing and discussions must adhere to general themes (e.g. sustainability, land degradation, deforestation) elucidated from the perspective of different disciplines, while specific theoretical disciplinary skills must be acquired in other courses.

Moreover, attaining interdisciplinarity in student project groups requires considerable control of group formation and the topics studied. Students must be forced to work with their own disciplines while at the same time acquainting themselves with methods and rationales of other disciplines. It is important that interdisciplinary group work results in reports showing how each discipline has contributed to the solution of a given problem. This is not necessarily evident in "democratic" student groups where choosing "the lowest common denominator" may be an attractive solution to accommodate everybody and distribute the tasks.

The Interdisciplinary Joint Basic Course and other SLUSE courses have created an interdisciplinary, interinstitutional, and intercultural academic environment for students and SLUSE staff alike. The students from the 1998 batch are already benefitting from these networks as they are gradually embarking on field work for their Master's theses in Malaysia, Thailand, and Southern Africa.

The SLUSE concept, as it is developed in the future, will hopefully inspire other institutions to establish similar collaboration especially with regard to developing joint interdisciplinary education programs which generally receive much less interest than research collaboration.

Contact:

SLUSE Denmark

c/o Department of Agricultural Sciences 

The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University

Thorvaldsensvej 40, opg. 8, 6th floor

1871 Frederiksberg C., Denmark

Tel: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

WWW: agsci.kvl.dk/sluse

SLUSE Malaysia

c/o Centre for Technology Transfer and Consultancy

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

94300 Kota Samarahan

Sarawak, Malaysia

Tel: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

http://www.unimas.my

Table 1

Distribution of students by Departments for SLUSE-Denmark intake 1998/99
and 1999/2000.

University            Specialization                     Students 98/99

University of         Anthropology
Copenhagen (UC)
                      Economics
                      Human Geography                          18
                      Physical Geography                        2
                      Biology                                   4
                      Near Oriental Studies                     1
Royal Vet. and        Agronomy                                  4
Agricultural
University (RVAU)
                      Forestry                                  7
                      Agricultural Economics                    3
                      Horticulture                              1
Roskilde University   Int. Development Studies /                1
Centre (RUC)          Geography
                      Int. Development Studies /                1
                      Anthropology
                      Int. Development Studies /                1
                      Biology
                      Int. Development Studies / Public         2
                      administration
                      Int. Development Studies /
                      Pedagogy
                      Geography / Public
                      Administration
                      Geography / Communication
                      Public administration                     2
                      Technology, Science and Planning          1
University of Aarhus  Ethnography
                      Political Science
TOTAL                                                          48

University            Students 99/00

University of                2
Copenhagen (UC)
                             1
                             6

                             6

Royal Vet. and               8
Agricultural
University (RVAU)
                             4
                             1
                             1
Roskilde University         12
Centre (RUC)






                             1

                             1

                             1

                             1
University of Aarhus         1
                             1
TOTAL                       47

Ole Mertz, (1)

Murtedza Mohamad, (2)

Jakob Magid, (3)

Torben Birch-Thomsen, (1)

Peter Oksen (4)

Quentin Gausset (5)

(1.) Institute of Geography, University of Copenhagen, email: [e-mail].

(2.) Centre for Technology Transfer and Consultancy, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, email: [e-mail].

(3.) Department of Agricultural Sciences, Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, Copenhagen, email: [e-mail].

(4.) Department of Geography and International Development Studies, Roskilde University Centre, email: [e-mail].

(5.) Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, email: [e-mail].