The objective of the project “The future of the margins. Conflicts and alliances in ‘marginal lands’ in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines” is to analyze conflicts regarding ‘marginal’ land in Indonesia, Viet Nam and the Philippines, and to formulate ways and policies to overcome these conflicts for contributing to sustainable development and livelihoods improvement. This is an integrated project with the involvement of universities, research institutes, local NGOs in the Netherlands, Indonesia, the Philippines and Viet Nam.

With the aim to integrate the information contributed by managers, policy makers, researchers and local stakeholders into a full proposal of the project ”The future of the margins. Conflicts and alliances in ‘marginal lands’ in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines”, an inception workshop will be organized from 23-26 January 2010 in Hue city. TBI Viet Nam, one of the project partners, will host this very important event.

At the workshop, presentations will be held about the history/overview of marginal lands use in Viet Nam and the world, and about the cooperation and conflict settlement strategies for marginal lands. Participants will also have the space to discuss the relevance for development, as well as the quality of knowledge generation and potential for innovation. Besides, a field trip will be organized to one of mountainous communes in Thua Thien Hue province, where a number of ethnic minority people are now living in disadvantage economic conditions, with various land use options, and several issues related to natural resources which need to be taken into consideration for research.

It is expected that with the inputs provided by the workshop, project partners will have more adequate information to develop a full proposal including task division and budget plan for project implementation in the near future.