Pioneering integrated coastal management course produces fifth batch of graduates, gears up for collaboration with universities around Asia

ICM is a well-recognized ecosystems-based approach for the sustainable development of coastal areas and the course was developed to introduce concepts, principles and tools related to ICM so that graduates can apply them in the course of their work.

The intensive seven week course, held at the AIT campus in Bangkok, is specifically designed to provide mid-career professionals from government and non-government organizations with the opportunity to learn from ICM programs and experiences with a focus on Asia. The main course modules included in the program are: marine and coastal ecosystems, principles of integrated coastal management, tools for implementing integrated coastal management and coastal project development, evaluation and management. 

This year the participants were from Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Pakistan, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. The course also includes a one-week in-country practical field study. This is the third year that the practical field-project has been completed in-country, in Thailand, a departure from previous years where students returned to their home countries to pursue individual projects. 

For the 2015 course, the participants visited Koh Tao, which was the focal site for Thailand for a recently completed MFF Regional Project on Small Islands Governance (http://bit.ly/1kocEHQ). Dr. Suvaluck Sathumanusphan of Mahidol University and Dr. Sakanan Plathong of Prince Songkhla University were also able to provide their valuable input as technical resource persons. In addition to exploring mangrove ecosystems, the students were also able to explore coral reefs this year. It was their first time for some of them to snorkel and see live corals. The culmination of the field study was the presentation of the students’ Integrated Management plans for Koh Tao to the Mayor and other key stakeholders in the island.

Moving forward the ICM course will become a permanent professional course recognized and supported by other regional programmes and countries in the region. 

In this respect MFF is seeking collaboration with university networks in the region to ‘anchor’ MFF learning and outcomes in national institutions (e.g. through development of ICM course curricula, provision of course content and supporting training of trainers).

In line with this thinking MFF country programmes have this year undertaken ICM national capacity needs assessments, in order to identify the need and interest from national universities (or other training organizations) to develop national ICM courses.

The three primary objectives of the national ICM capacity needs assessments are: to examine the ongoing coastal management capacity-building initiatives and training in order to help identify the niche that MFF can fill with its training initiative and to avoid replication of effort; to examine the skills, knowledge and attitudes of the ICM practitioners, so that the information in the ICM Course can be molded to meet the actual needs of people; and to build relationships with academic institutions and individuals that MFF can potentially collaborate with to deliver ICM national training. 

In preparation for decentralizing the regional course and supporting individual national partner institutions to integrate the course into their national academic programmes, MFF in partnership with AIT has revised the course structure and content and initiated packaging ICM course materials including; the ICM Handbook for participants, power point presentations for each of the technical sessions, class exercises and case studies. Preparation of the ICM course materials is expected to be completed by the end of the year.