Research School CERES

By Wouter van Beek

In its research programme CERES focuses on resources, its guiding questions directing towards the processes of perception, access and management of natural and human resources in the first place, and in the second place towards the relation of resource dynamics to strategies for development. Resources, then, in CERES parlance, are multiple: the natural resources of the physical environment as well as the human resources of labour, knowledge, capital, and organization. Thus, even religion can be considered as a resource, in as much as people can use it in their strategies for coping and in the processes of identity formation.
CERES research, and thus CERES PhD training, is multidisciplinary, problem-oriented and comparati- ve. This means that CERES is organized along lines cross-cutting disciplines and continents. The projects are grouped into three "clusters". In the first the notion of resource centres on physical resources in relation to human resource management, technology and transformations in rural areas: "Ecology, Security and Rural Transformation". The second cluster studies issues arising from urban industrial production in their relationship to development strategies, while the third group of projects addresses state and civil society relations and identity formation. In the projects of these clusters, the natural tendencies of researchers to cling to a geographical specialization and to disciplinary discourse is complemented by the problem orientation they share. Interdisciplinary discourse, difficult as it is, is crucial to the CERES mission. Thus, the projects address issues of a general nature located in various continents, with the research supported by the various local units. For instance the project Comparative Industrialization, New Technologies and Labour Markets is the result of a cooperation between Amster- dam, the ISS and their associate INTECH of Maastricht, and carries out research in Africa and Asia. The project "Rural-urban relations and labour issues" unites researchers from Nijmegen, The Hague, Utrecht and the associated Africa Studies Centre in Leiden, and works on all continents. Not all major projects involve cross-continental comparison, and in not all of them are disciplines joined, but for the whole CERES programme it is deemed essential.
The majority of CERES researchers work in Africa and Latin America. Even so, a the number of Asianists in CERES is considerable. Development studies in Asia are carries out on several projects. In the first cluster research is done on systems of social security in Indonesia and India, related to property rights and legal pluralism. The biologists of CERES, members of the same cluster, work on tropical forest systems in China and the Philippines. The latter area is important in the research of one institute associated with CERES, the Centre for Environmental Studies at Leiden (CML). Drought-related research, though located primarily in Africa, finds some counterpart in research done in Rajasthan, India. The ecological opposite, the management of coastal zones is primarly Indonesia-focused. Irrigation studies also concentrate mainly on Asia, i.e. Indonesia as well as India. Transformation of the rural economies and societies is very intercontinental, and as such includes quite a few studies of Indonesia, India, and Vietnam. In the Asian context, the various levels of socio-economic integration, the functioning of markets, the problems of poverty and labour, of farm versus non-farm production, form the core of the "Asian commitment" of CERES.
In the second cluster the this rural research is complemented by research on industrial production in Asian cities, on living conditions and habitat in those cities, again mainly in India and Indonesia. Asia is underrepresented in the third cluster: the relations between state and civil society are studied mainly in Latin America and Africa, and the same can be said about the CERES studies on identity formation. Still, quite a lot of comparative work is done which does includes Asian countries in its comparative parameters. Emancipation studies form an exception to this trend, as Sri Lanka and India are the main sites for this research.
All things considered, the CERES involvement in Asia is considerable but far from complete. Cooperation with other research schools and institutes and coordination of future research endeavours will remain a leading CERES policy, especially for Asia.

CERES
Heidelberglaan 1
P.O. Box 80140
3508 TC Utrecht
The Netherlands