The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of targets for reducing poverty and improving lives that world leaders agreed on at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. For each goal, one or more targets have been set, most for 2015.

The Millennium Development Goals are the international community's shared vision for development, providing strong quantitative targets for action within an agreed time-frame.

The goals are:

Overview

Sumernet’s aims were developed and articulated through initial discussions with research partners. The agreed overall objective is ‘to marshal regional and global intellectual resources for the production of policy-relevant knowledge on sustainability issues in the Mekong region.’

Such collaboration is intended to help bring together a regional ‘knowledge community’, made up of researchers and analysts committed to the over-arching goal of sustainable development in the Mekong region.

Regional Knowledge Network

Sumernet supports a regional network of research partners through logistic support for meetings, joint proposal writing and preparation of publications.

Electronic support for collaboration and coordination is provided through this website, an email discussion group, and dissemination of reports through Sumernet partners and SEI’s own distribution networks.

Capacity Building

Sumernet is contributing to capacity enhancement in research work in the Mekong region through a series of training courses in effective communications, proposal-writing and mentoring of young researchers. Participants of training courses are limited in numbers and are selected from partner institutions of Sumernet.

Applied Policy Research

The Sumernet research programme is building a regional community of practice for applied policy research. Researchers are expected to carry out ‘sustainability assessments’ using commonly accepted analytical tools and methodologies. Important perspectives in all Sumernet research are the situation of poor and vulnerable communities, and the status of vulnerable ecosystems.

Linking Scientific Research to Public Policy

Sumernet promotes the use of scientific knowledge in public policy making. Linkages between scientific research and public policy are supported through a built-in process of engagement with development actors, decision makers, and policy makers. The network identifies and makes use of existing forums for engagement between regional scientists, policy makers and international organisations. A series of policy briefs consists of summaries of research results and policy recommendations in a number of key sectors.

Knowledge Production and Sustainable Development

When Sumernet was first conceived in 2005, many regional development projects were under way. Major roads and other infrastructure projects, as well as bilateral and multilateral economic /trade agreements were in progress, and were vigorously debated in meetings and in the media. There was a generally acknowledged gap between the pro-development perspectives of governments in the Mekong region, supported in many cases through multilateral donor organisations and fuelled by trade liberalisation, and the perspectives of NGO campaigners, in many cases representing pockets of local resistance to specific development projects.

Many development agencies voiced their concern that an integrated approach was needed, for a greater diversity of views and perspectives on development to be incorporated in regional planning and policy. Yet, at that point, mainstream development views and alternative ones appeared to have reached an impasse.

Sumernet was established to support and promote the use of scientific evidence in policy making, and thus contribute to sustainable development as an over-arching goal.

In the four years since its inception, Sumernet has responded to the demand for ‘policy-relevant knowledge’ by creating an enabling environment among partner institutions, in which different perspectives and frameworks have been brought together in a synergistic manner through the identification of themes of common interest and the support of research that could not otherwise have been accomplished.

Meanwhile the dynamic policy environment in the Mekong region has overtaken many of the initial aims of Sumernet. Views that were once considered ‘alternative’ have been absorbed into mainstream perspectives, including – to cite just two examples - the centrality of public participation to a vision of sustainable development and the importance of demand-side management in energy planning.

The Sumernet secretariat, hosted at the Stockholm Environment Institute, is playing an integrative role in this process, by modelling and enabling the use of scientific knowledge in policy development, and through a programme of capacity building and networking amongst partner institutions.

The Case for Independent Research

Policy research in the Mekong region is often carried out in the form of short-term consultancies commissioned by business and multilateral organisations. Such research outputs are often not publicly disseminated, and may be heavily contested by groups external to the process.

Sumernet has worked to address that gap by supporting and promoting independent research on development ‘hotspots’ in the Mekong region.

In particular, in the first year of Sumernet’s research, three hotspots of Mekong development were identified for special attention: the dry upland regions of northern Lao, where foreign investment from within the Mekong region or nearby countries is changing traditional patterns of agriculture and settlement; Cambodia’s Great Lake, the Tonle Sap, South-East Asia’s largest freshwater body and source of food security for one of the poorest regions in the world; and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, one of Southeast Asia’s principal rice baskets.

Independent research on these areas has been supported through a programme of grants for institutions and individual research fellows. Three monographs have been produced outlining the state of knowledge in these areas, and numerous studies of key issues in these areas have been supported. More recently, Sumernet research has focused largely on themes and key issues at a regional scale or with strong transboundary implications. Seven thematic areas were agreed upon and research was undertaken according to these priorities.

The research outputs of Sumernet are available on this website and are rapidly being added to as the programme reaches the close of its current funding phase.

The Role of the Knowledge Community

Sumernet aims to establish a community of practice for sustainability in the region, and to coordinate research and capacity building efforts in Mekong countries.

Such a community of practice is now coming into being, through collaborative work undertaken by partner institutions of Sumernet, and through a diversity of efforts by individuals and agencies working in the region. Given that ‘knowledge’ is constructed by actors individually and collectively striving to make sense of new information within the frameworks of existing perspectives, Sumernet’s contribution is specifically to support Mekong researchers and research institutions in this process.

Sumernet’s focus is on domestic research institutions that are forging an independent path of intellectual inquiry, capable of feeding into policy making processes in their own countries.

Sumernet is helping to establish standards for independent research in the region, through training courses and research collaboration on areas of key importance to Mekong development. Many researchers and academics who trained in domestic universities have taken the opportunity to strengthen their writing abilities and research skills through training courses held over the past four years, including courses on science communications, proposal writing and fund raising. Senior researchers within the network have also provided coaching and mentoring support to others.

Sumernet is also playing a role in promoting and integrating indigenous views of sustainable development in the Mekong region, infusing development discussions with fresh perspectives from younger academics and disseminating them among those working on similar themes both domestically, regionally and internationally.

The Role of Research Networks

Sumernet is providing a basis for intellectual collaboration across disciplines and organisations, through networking among its 12 partner organisations and providing opportunities for individual researchers to interface with policy making processes.

Communications activities carried out through much of Sumernet’s first phase have helped members to identify and collaborate on areas of common interest, through an email discussion group, electronic and print publication of research outputs, and capacity building activities.

Individual network members have coordinated Sumernet activities in the areas of research collaboration, policy engagement, broadening and strengthening of the network, and knowledge support. Such a decentralisation of functions has maintained the momentum of joint activities, whilst sharing responsibility for achieving common goals.