Development Intervention Disparities and the Poverty–Environment Nexus in the Lower Mekong Basin: Understanding Environmental Services in a Meso-scale Perspective

“Linking Research to Strengthen Upland Policies and Practice” This overall theme of the SSLWM conference 2006 suggests that policies and practices in upland development are generally deemed to be of better quality and higher impact if they are knowledge-driven or research-based. Nevertheless, the linkages between policy and research are not always smooth. This can partly be imputed to knowledge production itself, as among other: decisions-makers are often provided with contradicting answers for one question, levels of aggregation of results are frequently incompatible with the politico-administrative levels of decision making, simplistic blueprint solutions are offered for complex realities, or vice versa it seems impossible to make any generalisation beyond specific case studies. Such misunderstandings between development practice and knowledge production frequently emerge from ignoring some fundamental questions, which are important to researchers and practitioners alike.