Anna-Katharina Hornidge

Higher education cooperation in ASEAN: building towards integration or manufacturing consent?

The triad of cooperation, international exchange, and integration among institutions of higher education has become the new norm in the global experience of learning and academic training. The goal of improving and standardising the academic experience across countries is now typically also associated with fostering cultural and political ties and complementing processes of cultural integration and economic growth. Behind the rhetoric of many new initiatives, however, is a competition of geopolitical proportions, in which various national or regional systems of higher education try to shore up their positions or conquer new territory. In this paper we assess these discursive and material battles over institutional hegemony in Southeast Asian higher education by drawing on the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse. We critically address the competitive negotiation over higher education taking place between international and Southeast Asian educational players, asking whether these contribute more to integration than reinforcing dominant higher education domains.

Capacity Development for Integrated Water Resources Management: Lessons Learned from Applied Research Projects

This paper defines concepts of capacity and capacity development for Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), and particularly the recent contributions made by a German government funded research programme in this area. Based on the theoretical framework of nested domains of capacity development, the multi-level approach, the paper reviews previous work in this field and then summarises four case studies in Ukraine, Jordan/Palestine, Mongolia and Uzbekistan, which each highlight key aspects of these different domains. These activities took place under completely different settings, allowing some generic lessons for conceptual and practical advancements to be derived. The paper notes the need to align IWRM processes and capacity development processes as much as possible. The multi-level approach was found to be an essential framework for the activities. The paper also recognises the need for continuous and long-term approaches in capacity development, particularly in processes for organisational and institutional change where no single set of guidelines or practices will fit every situation. Specific directions for future work are suggested, including a closer link to work on water governance, as well as monitoring and the evaluation of capacity development.

IWRM in Uzbekistan: A Global Concept with Local Consequences

The chapter discusses research findings generated within the framework of the BMBF-funded project entitled “Economic and Ecological Restructuring of Land and Water Use in the Region Khorezm (Uzbekistan): A Pilot Project in Development Research” and implemented in 2001–2011. The authors look at the processes of how IWRM as a globalized concept for irrigation governance is locally operationalized and expressed in the implementation practices within specific conditions of contemporary Uzbekistan. The chapter begins with an overview of the processes which describe the variability of how IWRM principles have been incorporated in Uzbekistan at the level of official institutional policies. It then moves to a discussion of how these policies infiltrate into less formal work practices. We begin with an analysis of a “micro-level” water governance demonstrating important linkages between the officially endorsed IWRM agenda and historically and culturally-embedded systems of informal water management in Uzbekistan. Using an innovative method of inquiry and analysis called “institutional ethnography” (Smith 1987), we discover important points of disjuncture between the formal promises of IWRM-motivated policies and the actual outcomes of the pertinent policies for the marginalized water users. We attempt to explain this inconsistency and put forward an argument which elucidates how benevolent and well-intended policies under the IWRM framework become occluded by the organizational and political-economic administrative apparatus of state-led agricultural marketing in Uzbekistan. Our analysis offers an explicated account of IWRM as a practiced activity, opening up institutional issues that require informed and empirically-based reflection.