Research in Partnership with Developing Countries: Application of the Method of Material Flux Analysis in Tunja, Colombia

Because developing nations need to build a capacity for research relevant to their own problems, research partnerships are gaining increasing importance in the development discussion. It has become clear that efforts to solve environmental, economic, and social problems in developing countries with tools developed in the industrialized world have been inadequate in many cases. Due to rapid population growth and increasing consumption per capita, developing countries are, in a single generation, facing the problems experienced by industrialized countries over a period of 100 years (WHO 1989). Technical measures for solving short-term problems can have important immediate effects, but to achieve sustainability it is critical to develop tools for long-term planning. These will enable developing countries to better understand how different strategies affect outcomes and how strategies are sensitive to different levels and types of financing (Bower 1989).