Wetenschap - 23 maart 1995
Work Experience Leads to PhD
Work Experience Leads to PhD
During his time in Africa, Niek realized that the same problems in land use planning cropped up repeatedly. He admits, Results from land use planning projects may be under-utilized or abandoned. This could be avoided by involving the local planners from the start. There are other problems as well. For instance the data gathered locally sometimes is irrelevant to the model of land use planning, or data is quite simply not available. Sometimes the infrastructure has not been maintained. Then there is the issue of too much detail or too much overlap."
Observations on these problems, and suggestions for how to better understand and avoid them is the subject of his PhD thesis. Niek explains, We should first get the disciplines together to set common goals for a land use project. Including the local land use planners can be of mutual benefit. It has been difficult to include farmers goals in land use planning, since farmers often have difficulties making long term plans. This will require that we start working through NGO's (nongovernmental organizations) in order to translate farmers goals into scientific terms. After setting common goals we then need to carry out a multi-scale, multi-level analysis for an agro-ecological unit."
VRAAG = Niek defends his thesis on Wednesday March 29th a 16:00 in the Aula.