Funded by the U.S. State Dept., cross-border project
focuses on ‘peri-urban’ development issues
HONOLULU (Feb. 3, 2012) – East-West Center environmental researchers have launched a new cooperative project with specialists in India and Pakistan to collaborate on studying development issues in critical ‘peri-urban’ areas that lie between cities and the countryside.
This project “offers a rare opportunity for Indian and Pakistani researchers to work together on a shared exploration of the challenges and impacts of an issue that deeply affects both nations,” said EWC research fellow Sumeet Saksena, the project’s principal investigator.
Funded by a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of State, the two-year cross-border project will bring together experts, scholars, promising young professionals and university students from both countries to explore the unique issues posed by these rapidly changing rural-urban interfaces.
“These areas have been overlooked from every angle,” Saksena said. “In both countries, peri-urban areas occupy large portions of the landscape, are home to tens of millions of people, and face serious environmental and human health problems that are often neglected by both rural and urban administrations.”
Saksena and fellow EWC researchers Shabbir Cheema and Jefferson Fox recently traveled to the region to begin collaboration on the project with scholars at the South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies in Hyderabad, India and the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Their research will focus first on the practical challenges of how to identify and map such areas, and secondly on pinpointing their primary development issues and exploring what kind of government structures and development tools might be best suited to deal with them.