Rural Development Seminar

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The Seminar for Rural Development (SLE) is an institution of the Life Sciences Faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin , which is assigned to the Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute for Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences .

The SLE was founded in 1962 for the purpose of a job-related postgraduate course for development cooperation and has since gone through various stations. The course is now called "International Cooperation (IZ) for Sustainable Development" and deals with the entire relevant subject and method field. In the meantime, the SLE has undergone structural and organizational changes and today has four areas of work of roughly equal weight:

  • SLE study: Postgraduate study “International Cooperation for Sustainable Development” - since 1962
  • SLE Training: Training courses for international specialists and managers - since 2006
  • SLE Consulting: Consulting development organizations and universities - since 2008
  • SLE research: application-oriented research on topics of international cooperation - since 2013

The four fields of work of the SLE are closely interlinked in terms of content, organization and personnel in order to create synergies and ensure a transfer of knowledge between the fields of work.

History and funding

The SLE was launched in 1962, one year after the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) was founded, as a “Seminar for Agricultural Development”. It initially belonged to the “International Agricultural Development” department at the Technical University of Berlin , in order to train diploma and state examinations graduates for the professional field of international development cooperation. This made it the first official educational institution for German development cooperation and was geared towards tropical and subtropical agriculture. Hans Wilbrandt, who was also director of the Institute for Foreign Agriculture at the TU Berlin, was in charge of the project.

In the decades that followed, the SLE repeatedly realigned its teaching content and methods to the guidelines and debates of international development cooperation, broadened its focus and relied on interdisciplinarity at an early stage. With the reorganization of the Berlin universities in the course of German-German reunification , the SLE was assigned to the Agricultural and Horticultural Faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin in October 1992 and renamed the "Seminar for Rural Development" in 1994. Until then, the abbreviation SLE stood for "Seminar for Agricultural Development", which reflected the focus on agricultural topics. "This renaming should make the broader approach of the SLE, which goes beyond agricultural topics, clear in the name too." With the renaming, the fact that agriculture-independent topics were increasingly being included in the teaching at the SLE was taken into account. As a result, the range of topics was continuously adapted, which is why rural-urban relationships and urban development topics are now also dealt with in the four work areas. In 2003 the SLE moved from Podbielskiallee in Berlin-Dahlem to the Fischervilla in Hessische Strasse in Berlin Mitte. In April 2014, as part of the faculty reform at Humboldt University, the SLE was incorporated into the life sciences faculty together with the Thaer Institute.

The expansion of the SLE can also be seen in its SLE financial budget. In 2015, the total funds of the SLE amounted to 2.4 million euros, compared to around 1.0 million euros in 2009. The basic funding for the SLE course is shared by the BMZ (more than 50% in 2015), the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises and the Humboldt University. It has only increased slightly in recent years. The three other fields of work are financed by the SLE through third-party funds it has acquired. In 2015, the third-party funding amounted to around 1.3 million euros - almost five times as much as in 2012 (284,000 euros).

Directors of the SLE
1962-1964 Hans Wilbrandt
1964-1970 Peter von Blanckenburg
1971-2003 Bernd Schubert
2004-2011 Carola Jacobi Sambou
Since 2012 Susanne Neubert

Fields of activity and development of the structure

The SLE has been part of the Humboldt University of Berlin since 1992 and since the faculty reform of 2014 it has been an institution of the Faculty of Life Sciences, which is thematically assigned to the Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute for Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences. Individual professors from the Thaer Institute are represented in the seminar council of the SLE, as well as in the advisory council of the seminar. This also includes representatives of other organizations in German international cooperation and representatives of the SLE sponsors. There is also close cooperation with the Thaer Institute in research projects, especially with the socio-economically oriented chairs.

The cooperation takes place within the framework of scientific research accompanying projects of development organizations and through advice on development policy issues. Furthermore, research and commissioned studies were carried out in the postgraduate course before the establishment of the SLE field of work, which continues to be a central component of the program. Today, multi-year research projects on topics of rural development and neighboring areas are also carried out. The research projects are financed by federal ministries and development organizations. The SLE is thus a university organization; Due to the clients from development policy practice, the seminar is also intended for the practical application of research results. Therefore, in addition to academic research, the development of systems for the exchange of knowledge between research and practice is an important part of the work of the SLE. These include a. Concepts for the transfer of research results into politics and practice ("Knowledge Exchange" and "Knowledge Brokering").

The gradual thematic expansion of the SLE is also reflected in the composition of the participants in the postgraduate course. In the beginning it was mainly agricultural engineers who have a degree , but now around a third of the 20 participants each year can be assigned to the fields of agricultural sciences and applied geography . Although this share has been strengthened again in recent years, as “green” topics are experiencing a renaissance in IC, many participants also come from other disciplines, e.g. B. political science or economics. In doing so, the SLE reacted to the increasingly complex requirement profile in IC and the challenge of looking at the associated tasks from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The fields of work that the SLE has expanded over the years and in particular since 2012 also include courses in the area of ​​SLE training and the range of SLE consulting. The SLE pursues the goal of offering a coherent program both in the context of the training courses and in the university curriculum advice. SLE Training is aimed primarily at specialists in the field of IC from countries in the Global South . Accordingly, the cooperation partners of SLE Consulting such as the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique , the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil , the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales in Colombia and the Institut Polytechnique Rural in Mali are universities in the Global South. The SLE supports these educational institutions in developing courses of study that address development cooperation and combine this with methodological approaches and the acquisition of important "soft skills". This is intended to achieve more effective cooperation through better trained and advanced skilled workers in Germany and in countries in the Global South.

With the expansion of the SLE to four expanded fields of work, the size of the scientific staff also increased: from three permanent scientific employees (as of 2012) to more than 20 scientific employees in 2015. In addition, external, experienced lecturers, trainers and team leaders cover parts of the teaching , research and training.

Approaches and goals

The SLE tries to combine science and practice. The strategies developed should be as socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable as possible. The SLE teams are usually composed of an interdisciplinary structure, which applies to both the research projects and the teams in the international projects of the postgraduate studies. In addition, a multi-level approach is pursued in which the strategies are anchored from the local to the regional to the national and international level.

In postgraduate studies, thematic, methodical and communication courses alternate. In addition, newly acquired skills should also be directly applied in practice. This includes B. the organization of the "Development Policy Discussion Days (EPDT)", which the participants have been holding together with the Heinrich Böll Foundation for 15 years on current development policy issues. Furthermore, commissioned studies in developing and transition countries form a central part of postgraduate studies. These are commissioned on behalf of national and international IZ organizations such as the German Society for International Cooperation , the KfW Development Bank , the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations or non-governmental organizations. In recent years (as of 2016) studies have also been carried out that were funded by the research side, e.g. B. in the context of BMBF -financed joint projects.

Publications and events

The SLE has had its own series of studies since 1972. The empirical analyzes published therein are mostly the result of more than 150 international projects from the SLE study field. In addition, the SLE has been publishing scientific analyzes and studies on general development topics in the development policy topic series since 2012 and a discussion paper series since 2016. This serves the rapid dissemination of first results from ongoing research projects in the SLE research field. The four-page SLE Briefing Papers on current, discursive topics in development policy have been published since 2013. Among other things, the topics of the Development Policy Discussion Days (EPDT) are highlighted. Last but not least, the SLE prepares an annual report and sends the annual newsletter to the more than 900  alumni .

network

In addition to the informal networks that SLE graduates form, there is also a formal alumni network within the framework of the “Friends and Sponsors of SLE”, which organizes development policy events. The appraiser Hannelore Börgel is the chairwoman of the association.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The SLE began in 2006 with the “SLE PLUS” work area, which formerly referred to the SLE's advanced training program for international specialists in development cooperation. See SLE lifeline: https://www.sle-berlin.de/index.php/das-sle/lebenslinie
  2. ↑ SLE BERATUNG began with the cooperation and the master's degree at the University of Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. The SLE laid the foundation stone for this in 2002 with a commissioned study in Mozambique. See SLE lifeline: https://www.sle-berlin.de/index.php/das-sle/lebenslinie
  3. ↑ For the interlinking of the fields of work, see SLE strategy up to 2020, in particular the organizational chart (p. 11) and page 17f. https://www.sle-berlin.de/index.php/das-sle/organisation/strategie-bis-2020
  4. ↑ https://www.sle-berlin.de/index.php/das-sle/historie . Last accessed: 1.3.16, 11:28 am.
  5. ↑ The term “rural area” appeared in SLE studies of the 2000s. In the SLE “Strategy up to 2020”, structural change, urban-rural relationships and rural areas are listed as the focus of consideration in addition to rural development (page 31).
  6. ↑ SLE: Annual Report 2015, p. 49.
  7. ↑ https://www.sle-berlin.de/index.php/das-sle/historie  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.sle-berlin.de  
  8. ↑ SLE: Strategy up to 2020, page 19.
  9. ↑ In addition to graduates in agricultural science and applied geography, there are above all geographers from other disciplines, economists, economists, social scientists and ethnologists.
  10. ↑ SLE: Strategy until 2020, page 9. Quoted from: https://www.sle-berlin.de/files/sle/Gesamtstrategy%20bis%202020.pdf . Last accessed: May 29, 2016, 2:45 p.m.
  11. ↑ https://www.sle-berlin.de/index.php/publikationen/sle-auslandsstudien
  12. ↑ https://www.sle-berlin.de/index.php/publikationen/entwicklungspolitische-themenreihe . Last accessed: May 31, 2016, 1:25 pm.
  13. ↑ https://www.sle-berlin.de/index.php/publikationen/sle-discussion-paper . Last accessed on July 26, 2016