Summer 2013 - Oregon State Library: State Employee Information ...

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Nota Bene
A $20 million partnership between the UO and the African nation of Gabon
all started with a two-sentence class note sent to Oregon Quarterly.
FOR THE FALL 2010 ISSUE, OREGON
Quarterly received a class note
from Eric Benjaminson ’81, sharing
the news that he had been confirmed as
ambassador to the Central African Republic
of Gabon and to the Democratic Republic
of Sao Tome and Principe. Eric and his wife
Paula Benjaminson, a career foreign service
officer, would be headed to the region in
a few weeks. OQ passed the note to John
Manotti, an assistant vice president in the
University Development office; he thought
it would be of interest to professor of political
science Dennis Galvan, codirector of the
UO’s Global Oregon Initiative and a veteran
researcher in West Africa. As it turned out,
Manotti was right.
Late last year the Gabon-Oregon
Transnational Research Center on Environment
and Development was established,
funded by a $20 million investment from
the government of Gabon. The money will
be used to set up centers at the UO and in
Libreville, Gabon, where researchers from
the two countries will work together and
collaborate with Gabonese partners in the
transition from an oil-based economy to
one based on sustainable natural-resource
management and ecotourism. The many
new partnerships between Gabonese and
UO researchers will also contribute to the
development of the nation’s educational
system and support increased entrepreneurial
endeavor.
The UO is a natural choice for this
partnership, according to Gabon’s president
Ali Bongo Ondimba. “The University
of Oregon is a leader in the fields of natural
resources management, sustainable development,
green technology and architecture,
and urban planning—the foundations
on which we aspire to build in Gabon,” he
said during the signing ceremony in Washington,
D.C., last June.
A country of just 1.6 million people,
Gabon has been living off income from
its enormous reserves of oil since gaining
independence from France in 1960 (current
annual oil revenues amount to $14
billion). But the oil is expected to run out
within 20 to 30 years. “They need to diversify,”
Benjaminson says. “It is not a healthy
economy in the long term.” Fortunately, oil
is not Gabon’s only resource. Eighty percent
of the country is covered with relatively
pristine rainforest, and there are also
rich deposits of minerals. “The forest is a
smaller version of the Amazon forest—the
way it used to be,” Benjaminson says. “They
also have wonderful marine and riverine
environments, and good offshore fisheries.”
Effectively managing these resources
is a challenge. While Gabon has the world’s
largest population of forest elephants, for
example, their numbers have declined dramatically
due to poaching for ivory. Similarly,
the rainforest is also under pressure
from logging and agriculture.
The Gabonese government has pledged
to work on a host of issues, including sustainability,
climate change, education and
housing reform, land use, and infrastructure
such as roads, sanitation, and telecommunications.
“This is the Camelot period
in Gabon,” Galvan says. “They have a relatively
young president who has a small
group of close, young advisors around him
who are the country’s best and brightest.”
In 2003, then-president Omar Bongo
Ondimba (Ali Bongo Ondimba’s father) put
more than one-tenth of the country’s landmass
into 13 national parks. Gabon now
has the most protected rainforest of any
African nation, Galvan says, but the parks
are fairly inaccessible due to limited roads
and lodging. Park management is complicated
by the fact that many Gabonese have
traditionally hunted and gathered in those
areas. “We need to consider the needs of
conservation alongside the needs of people
facing poverty,” Galvan says.
Collaboration will be a key element
in devising, refining, and carrying out
research projects. “Every project will have
Gabonese partners,” Galvan says. “If I come
up with a research topic, my topic will
change as it gets infused with the Gabonese
sense of what a good research project
is and how to go about doing it.”
Enhancing Gabon’s education system
is also a strong component of the program.
The country’s only university has
an extremely limited PhD program and is
“underresourced,” Benjaminson says. UO
professors will have the opportunity to create
partnerships with professors in Gabon
and train students who can then come
to the UO for graduate study, he says. At
18 OREGON QUARTERLY | SUMMER 2013