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SANDEE
The Summer School primarily aims to provide economists with the basic skills necessary to teach and conduct research in environmental and natural resource economics.
3–17 May 2020
The form submission has been closed
The South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE), an initiative under the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development’s (ICIMOD) Regional Programme on Mountain Knowledge and Action Networks (MKAN), is organizing the 18th Summer School on Environmental and Natural Resource Economics on 3–17 May 2020 in Bangkok, Thailand. The Summer School primarily aims to provide economists with the basic skills necessary to teach and conduct research in environmental and natural resource economics. The course is intended for practising economists from South Asia and the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region interested in enhancing their knowledge of the interlinkages among economic development, poverty, and the environment. The Summer School will help participants develop research proposals that can later be submitted to SANDEE for its research grant competition.
The course will cover economic issues underlying sustainable development, biodiversity, externalities and market failure, policy instruments, non-market valuation, poverty–environment interactions, and natural resource use and pollution management. Participants will be exposed to theoretical issues and economic tools such as experimental economics and other relevant methodologies, combined with hands-on computer lab sessions for analyzing environmental problems in developing countries.
The course will be taught by the following distinguished scholars:
Additional guest speakers will be invited depending on their need and availability.
Mani Nepal, Programme Coordinator, SANDEE, and Lead Economist, ICIMOD, is the course director and Neesha Pradhan, Programme Associate, SANDEE, will administer the course.
The ideal participant should have a master’s degree or PhD in economics and a good understanding of microeconomics, calculus, and basic econometrics. Junior and mid-career faculty and researchers – especially women working in member universities of the Himalayan University Consortium (HUC) – are encouraged to apply. Priority will be given to junior to mid-career university faculty members and researchers who have submitted a research proposal to SANDEE on issues related to environmental and resource economics. Those who have already had training in environmental and resource economics through other programmes or universities or are likely to go overseas for higher education within the next few years are not eligible. Researchers from outside the region or from the region but living outside South Asia or the HKH region are not eligible.
The SANDEE Summer School is an intensive residential teaching workshop (around 90 contact hours). Participants are expected to read up on the topic of each day’s lecture beforehand and participate in individual and group assignments and discussions. Working days, on occasion, will extend from 9 am to 9 pm or beyond based on assignment demands. Participants are required to present an empirical paper and a research concept note during the Summer School. Last year’s Summer School agenda is available here.
SANDEE will provide a scholarship up to a maximum of USD 4,500 equivalent per participant in terms of course materials, international travel, meals, and accommodation during the Summer School (no cash). Participants are responsible for their local travel arrangements, travel insurance, visa fee, and other personal expenses. Shortlisted participants are required to pay a registration fee of USD 250 to confirm their participation.
The Summer School will be in a suitable venue in Thailand that is easily accessible by air from most cities in the region. The participants should arrive on 2 May and depart on 18 May.
Interested and eligible candidates from South Asia and the HKH region are requested to submit their application online and upload the following documents in PDF or Word format (one-inch margin, 12-point font):
Please submit your application by 22 February 2020. If you have any difficulty submitting the online form, please write to Neesha Pradhan at sandee@icimod.org mentioning the nature of the problem.
We request you to pass this information along to interested colleagues. We are also inviting nominations from colleagues who have been part of the SANDEE Summer School and other training activities in the past. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and approximately 24 participants will be invited to the Summer School.
Maximilian Auffhammer is the George Pardee Jr Professor of International Sustainable Development and Associate Dean in the Division of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley. Auffhammer received his BS in environmental science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996; an MS in environmental and resource economics from the same institution in 1998; and a PhD in economics from UC San Diego, in 2003. He joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2003. His research focuses on environmental and resource economics, energy economics, and applied econometrics. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research at the Energy and Environmental Economics Group, a Humboldt Fellow, and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His research has appeared in The American Economic Review, The Review of Economic Studies, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Economic Journal, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and The Energy Journal, among other academic journals. Auffhammer is the recipient of the 2017 Cheit Teaching Award from the Haas School of Business, the 2009 Campus Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley, the 2007 Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academies of Sciences, and the 2007 Sarlo Distinguished Mentoring Award.
Randall Bluffstone is a Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Economics and the Environment at Portland State University. His research and teaching interests focus on environmental and resource economics, including climate change, energy, pollution control, and deforestation in low-income countries. Bluffstone is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Forest Economics, Research Associate of the Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative, and Co-Coordinator of the EfD Forest Collaborative. In 2017–2018, Bluffstone was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Nepal. Prior to joining Portland State, he taught at the University of Redlands. Until September 1999, he was the Deputy Director of the International Environment Program at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) at Harvard University. While at Harvard, Bluffstone directed the HIID’s environmental policy programme in Central Asia and from 1994 to 1997 served as Senior Environmental Policy Advisor to the Government of Lithuania. Randall Bluffstone received his PhD in economics from Boston University and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal from 1983 to 1985.
Sir Partha Dasgupta is the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus in Economics at Cambridge University. He has also taught at the London School of Economics and Stanford University. He is the first economist to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a Co-Founder of SANDEE along with Karl-Goral Maler of Sweden. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is an honorary fellow of the London School of Economics and Trinity College (Cambridge). Sir Partha Dasgupta has received the Volvo Environment Prize (2002), John Kenneth Galbraith Prize (2006), Zayed International Environment Prize (2011), Blue Planet Prize (2015), and Tyler Prize (2016). He has been awarded honorary doctorates by Harvard University, Wageningen University, University of Bologna, Tilberg University, Catholic University of Louvain, and University of York.
Lata Gangadharan is a Professor of Economics and holds the Joe Isaac Chair in Business and Economics at Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on understanding and designing appropriate institutions for the environment and for development. She is a Co-Editor of Experimental Economics and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Gangadharan is an experimental economist and has conducted laboratory and field experiments to examine incentives in environmental markets; attitudes towards peer punishment to solve environmental dilemmas; propensity for corruption in different countries; and impacts of gender, norms, and social identity. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, Science, Nature Communications, European Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
Enamul Haque is a Professor at East West University, Bangladesh, and Executive Director at the Asian Center for Development. He holds master’s degrees in economics and agricultural economics. He completed his doctoral degree in natural resource economics from the University of Guelph, Canada. Haque has been a SANDEE faculty advisor for the past 20 years.
Mani Nepal is the SANDEE Programme Coordinator and Lead Economist at ICIMOD. He manages SANDEE’s research activities, coordinates trainings, and mentors SANDEE researchers. He has served as an Adjunct Professor at the Agriculture and Forestry University and Associate Professor at Tribhuvan University in Nepal; Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico, USA; and Visiting Professor at Kathmandu University. He has also held the position of Senior Economist at the Department of Finance and Administration, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. He has an MS degree in policy economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a PhD in environmental/development economics and applied econometrics from the University of New Mexico.
Joyashree Roy is the inaugural Bangabandhu Chair Professor at AIT, Thailand. She has worked in the Department of Economics at Jadavpur University, India, and is a National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research (ICSSR). She was a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley. She is a Founding Advisor of the Global Change Programme and Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF) Project at Jadavpur University. She was part of the IPCC 2007 Nobel Peace Prize-winning team and continues to serve as a Coordinating Lead Author of Working Group III of the IPCC. She has been a Chapter Author of Global Energy Assessment and part of the winning team of the Prince Sultan Bin Aziz Award for Water. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles on issues related to environmental and energy economics.
Regional Programme
