Cross‐Boundary Peer Learning in the Mekong: A Case of Field‐Based Education in Natural Resources Management

摘要

The Mekong has been the subject of a great deal of research and institutional innovation, both in the fields of regional economic integration (Australian Mekong Resource Centre 2007; Oehlers 2006) and of transboundary river basin management (Hirsch and Jensen 2006; Lebel et al. 2007). The Mekong Region as a cooperative development arena and the Mekong River Basin as a shared resource are represented institutionally through the Greater Mekong Subregion framework and the Mekong River Commission respectively. Bilateral and other multilateral institutions have also proliferated to respond to emerging challenges and opportunities. Increasingly, and despite considerable obstacles, such intergovernmental arrangements have been mirrored by non-governmental initiatives and strategies to develop civil society linkages through a kind of “regionalization from below” (Hirsch 2001; Khaosa-ard and Dore 2003).To date, however, active educational linkages within the Mekong framework have been quite limited. Within each riparian country, teaching about development, environment, and natural resource management has been limited mainly to generic knowledge, case studies from within each country, or textbook-based examples from other parts of the world. Despite high-level initiatives among university administrators such as the Greater Mekong Subregion Academic Research Network, there has been sparse exposure of teachers and students to comparative material from neighboring countries, and limited understanding among tertiary-level students of the Mekong River Basin as a shared resource or the Greater Mekong Region as an integrated development arena. This means that university students as the new generation of professionals continue to lag behind the rapid pace of regionalization in terms of a shared knowledge base and mutual understandings of diverse perspectives in different countries of the region.In this paper, we present an innovative exercise designed to be a modest building block in the construction of a regional learning community. The exercise is a research-based teaching exchange (hereafter referred to as “research exchange”) between programs at Yunnan University in China, Ubon Ratchathani University in northeast Thailand and the Royal University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The Yunnan students are enrolled in a Master of Human Geography, which emphasizes development issues with a primary focus on China and draws case studies mainly from Yunnan. The Ubon Ratchathani students are taught by the Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Liberal Arts which offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Social Development. The main focuses of the program are social sciences research methodology and development theory, providing students with basic skills through a practicum course outside the classroom. The program includes field-based learning in communities, and most of the field work is in northeastern Thailand. Therefore, learning about neighboring countries is very limited. The Royal University of Phnom Penh students are undertaking an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science. The program mainly focuses on classroom-based teaching within inter-disciplinary fields relevant to natural resources and environmental management. Field-based learning has the status of a supplementary course without credits. In all three cases, therefore, there is limited opportunity for learning outside the classroom and beyond the national context.The cross-boundary research exchange is innovative in two main respects. First, it is a central activity of the Mekong Learning Initiative, the first significant attempt to develop a practical collaboration between teachers and students in cognate areas of environment, natural resource management, and rural social change at eight universities in five Mekong counties. Second, it challenges conventional teacher-focused classroom-based learning through development of a field-oriented approach that we refer to as cross