V. Santhakumar – författare

This book explores the possibilities of and the challenges in implementing Intercultural Education to address the internal divides in education in non-western contexts.

Land degradation that has been taking place in different parts of the world and its negative impacts are acknowledged widely. One estimate notes that nearly 20-40% of global land area is degraded or degrading (UNCCD, 2022). The main causes of land degradation include anthropogenic factors such as deforestation, wetland drainage, overgrazing, and the expansion of agriculture and industrialisation and urbanisation. The need for land restoration is accepted and a number of initiatives are launched for this purpose. However, a dynamic view of the livelihoods of people and their impacts on ecosystem is somewhat missing. There is a need to understand the real constraints which work at different levels and think about what may enable land restoration. This monograph is based on the research and field work carried out for the G20 Global Land Initiative. The research carried out so far indicates the need for a systems approach to understand the enablers of land restoration in each country, taking into account local communities and socioeconomic factors at each step. Though there are global efforts to fund and support land restoration in specific countries, these may be attempted without understanding the domestic incentives to degrade or restore land. Locating the international effort to restore land in the context of national and local incentives is the other focus of this book. The book examines how a variety of factors including human development, private sector initiatives, and efforts from local communities and governments can best be put to use in specific contexts for land restoration.

This book is a narrative of conversations between two professors, with different backgrounds, academic disciplines, life experiences, and from different continents. It shows how their discourse has brought them to a single destination defined by a mutual interest in the social purposes of universities, and a hope in common that their academic efforts will somehow do good in the world.The seventeen internationally-agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide focus for aspirations and plans regarding sustainability, but notably, the SDGs’ targets and indicators rarely provide detailed accounts of who is expected to enact change. This book addresses the role of higher education in this context and explores the social purposes of universities and their relation to the Sustainable Development Goals. It presents an academic analysis of this complex situation, based on insights from published literature on higher education, and the personal but very different experiences oftwo professors with this shared interest.