OK, it’s official now: after a working life of about 15 years I will finally have my indefinite contract at Wageningen University. So while teaching (a lot), publishing (less than I should/want to), attracting research funding (more than I dared dream of), and presenting and writing my research vision to the advisory committee, I must have done enough right to convince the committee that the university should keep me. The committee will reconvene in about a year, however, to decide whether I’m good enough to be appointed associate professor.

So yes, I’m happy that I can continue with what I am doing, and that I can further develop my line of research here. I like Wageningen University, although I admit that the only other universities I have ever worked at were Tilburg University, where I did a post-doc from 2006 to 2008, and UC Santa Barbara, where I have spent a sabbatical in 2010. The environmental economics tradition in Tilburg is much more theoretical and monodisciplinary than the one in Wageningen. Admittedly, they publish more in the top journals like JEEM, ERE, or REE than we do, and I think we should have the same ambition. On the other hand, the tradition in Wageningen is more problem-oriented, more involved in developing countries, and more interdisciplinary. I feel the Wageningen approach suits me better.

How do I feel about the whole tenure track system? A lot of people complained before, during, and after its introduction. And yes, I’m one of them, but I’m convinced it’s better than my university’s old system. The elementary particle of Wageningen University’s institutional structure is the chair group, which comprises a scientific discipline or subdiscipline such as aquatic ecology, environmental systems analysis, or environmental and resource economics. The head of a chair group is the chair holder, and in the old days the chair holder was mostly the professor of the chair group. There were some personal professors, but mostly these positions were created by the management, after which a suitable person was recruited. In other words, staff smart and ambitious enough to become a professor had to wait for the chair holder to leave, and hence mostly left before the chair holder did. I’m sure there was a way of getting rid of truly disastrous professors, but mediocre professors could remain unchallenged for their entire career because the smarter staff went elsewhere. The old system was a recipe for stagnation and intellectual laziness.

At least tenure track offers the staff that would have left under the old system a path towards professorship inside Wageningen University. This raises the question how many professors a university can pay, and this question has been asked repeatedly. I don’t know how the university expects to pay for all these people, but my experience in Tilburg, which at the time employed about three professors in environmental and resource economics (besides a host of others in microeconomics, experimental economics, and what not), is that tenure track can develop the organisation into a healthy market for ideas. As far as I could see the professors in Tilburg seemed colleagues rather than rivals, although I guess there must have been some form of competition for funding and the brightest students. They exchanged ideas, read and commented on each other’s papers, and wrote papers together. (The Dutch language has a great word for this: conculega, a portmanteau of the Dutch words for competitor and colleague.) I think that is a much healthier situation than the little monarchies we have had so far in Wageningen.

So if I think tenure track is an improvement, what do I complain about? Partly the way it is implemented; partly the typical problems you always run into when you introduce a new system; partly the logical disadvantages of tenure track. Wageningen University tenure track staff is expected to meet 18 different benchmarks, including teaching load, teaching evaluation scores, funding, publications, and PhD supervision. Originally these benchmarks were set by natural scientists and applied to social science, but this has been corrected, up to a point. A lot of criteria are unclear; some information we get is self-contradictory. This all shows that the organisation is still learning from its experiences, and I’m sure they’ll get it right someday. Nevertheless, it makes you feel like a cross between a front soldier and a guinea pig. More fundamentally, publish-or-perish has enhanced the risk of academic fraud and created a boom in predatory open-access publishers. We will have to be more vigilant with respect to plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication of data. (I’m tempted to refer again to Tilburg here, but I won’t: first, Diederik Stapel wasn’t at the Economics Department; second, his fraud has taken place on such a massive scale and over such a long time that I don’t believe publish-or-perish was the main reason.)

The Mekong delta is just about the flattest region in Vietnam. In some places, where extensive green rice fields stretched between lines of trees that marked the otherwise perfectly straight horizon, we almost felt like we were back in Holland. A place as flat like this must be as exposed to floods as The Netherlands.

And it is. Even fresh-water areas here have a strong tidal variation. Usually the people take advantage of the steady rising and falling of the water level, irrigating their rice fields and catching small shrimp to grow further in ponds and baskets. Water is central to life in the Mekong delta: until the government improved road infrastructure, most transport took place by boat. The floating markets around Can Tho are popular tourist destinations. But the water is a treacherous friend. In 2000 the Mekong raised about 5 meters high, submerging hundreds of thousands of houses, and drowning hundreds of people as well as cattle and crop. The area saw another big flood in 2011.

Expectations are that the flooding problem will get worse as the global climate gets warmer, bringing heavier rains and a higher sea level. But even a climate change skeptic should be able to see the importance of learning to deal with these heavy floods. Much of what the inhabitants can do makes sense even if no climate change occurs: strengthening dykes, building higher or stronger houses, buying insurance to cover the financial risks of crop and cattle loss. One of the big questions is what the government can or should do (planned adaptation in jargon), and what the local residents do (autonomous adaptation).

Binh is the smartly dressed gentleman in the center. The ponytailed Dutch guy in the ugly red shirt, that would be me.

One of our PhD students, Phung Thanh Binh, does his research on flood insurance in the Mekong delta, under the supervision of my colleague Zhu Xueqin and myself. Are local residents interested in getting flood insurance, and if so, under what conditions? What insurance premium are they willing to pay for a little bit more coverage? If they have flood insurance, will they still prepare for floods or will they transfer some of the risk to their insurance company?

I presented my research vision to the “Severe Assessment Committee”, i.e. the ladies and gentleman who decide on my position at Wageningen University, last Tuesday. Due to the timing of my contract their decision is a bit more complex than it would otherwise be. Usually they decide whether a candidate gets tenure as an associate professor, but in my case they need to decide whether I can become an associate in one year’s time. It’s a long story.

Anyway, I think the presentation and the discussion went well. You can find my slides here, in case you’re interested.

Fingers crossed now.

The last four weeks Monique and I spent our Christmas and New Year’s holiday in Vietnam. We made it a holiday combined with a little bit of work: we started in the North, where we met one of my PhD students, Trinh Quang Tu, and visited such tourist destinations as the Mai Chau valley, Tam Coc, and Ha Long Bay. After a few days in the ancient city of Hué and the picturesque merchant town of Hoi An we continued to Ho Chi Minh City, from where we travelled to the Mekong Delta. In the Mekong Delta we had reserved some time to meet people at Can Tho University, visit aquaculture farms in the regions where Tu does his research, and to visit one of the research sites of another PhD student of mine, Phung Thanh Binh. In the following weeks I will post my impressions of my trip.

Vietnam is a magnificent country, with wonderful people, stunning views, delicious food, and a fascinating history. Despite the obvious traces of a millennium of Chinese domination and a century of French domination, the Vietnamese have a strong sense of independence. I think the Dutch and the Vietnamese have something in common: two relatively small countries, surrounded by big powerful neighbours and the deep blue sea. During the Anglo-Dutch wars the English called the Dutch ‘frogs’ because of our wet and muddy natural habitat (they later later applied the same pejorative to the French, but then for culinary reasons). I like to think there is a similarity between the Dutch frogs in their cold Rhine and Meuse delta, and the Vietnamese tortoise, a mythical specimen of which provided a magic sword to Le Loi, the Vietnamese emperor who kicked the Chinese Ming dynasty out of Vietnam, in the tropical Red River and Mekong deltas.

But Vietnam is also a country in transition from a poor communist economy to a bustling capitalist economy, with all the environmental and social issues associated with that process. You can see beautiful big houses next to crumbling shacks. Small businesses everywhere, Pepsi and Samsung billboards next to Communist propaganda posters. New infrastructure is being built, and shiny new office buildings. Streets and shores are littered with plastic bags and bottles. Both deltas are under threat from upstream dam construction in neighbouring countries, and from climate change. Large areas of mangrove forest have been cut to make room for shrimp farms. And don’t forget the motorbikes. You cannot escape the motorbikes, buzzing their way through the streets like angry hornets with vehicle horns.

And no, I am not going to mention the war.