Educational support

One of the priorities at the EfD-CA Center is educational support at different levels. In particular, our objective is to increase the local capacity of people at academic and non-academic organizations (NGO’s, public institutes, and civil society organizations) to conduct, critically evaluate and interpret research on environmental and natural resource economics and policy.

Our support for education is built on three pillars: i. strengthening the quality and reach of CATIE´s MSc Program in Environmental Socioeconomics, ii. education of people from non-academic organizations, and iii. mentoring of bright young researchers.

The educational support to academic institutions is mainly conducted by the different courses taught at CATIE by EfD-CA scholars as well as the tutoring of students on their dissertations.  EfD-CA is planning to continue its strong support of the MSc Program in Environmental Socioeconomics by offering high quality courses updated with recent research results and methodologies.  Complementary to this objective, the supervision of MSc and PhD students will continue to be a priority, especially because some of the students become critical in developing many of our research projects.

In relation to education of people from non-academic organizations, our main contribution will be offering capacity-building courses adapted to the target audience and updated with the most recent findings in policy design and evaluation in the region.  In the last two years of operations at EfD-CA, we have trained more than 50 people from all over Latin America in environmental economics and policy issues.  The participants in these courses have included government policy makers at different levels, technical staff of NGO´s, and local leaders, among others.  The presentation of EfD-CA research agenda and results has been very useful as a didactic tool as well as a mechanism to disseminate our work.