Enhancing Community-School-University Partnership for Rural Landscape Conservation: a Case Study in Taiwan

Abstract

The study chooses one of the national-level geosites, the Lichi badlands in Taitung County, Taiwan, as a case study area. The area is surrounded by two rural villages; each has a branch of elementary school. Given research looks into the way how these communities and schools collaborated on planning and implementing common community development projects. It also focuses on analyzing the process and outcomes of setting up a school-community-university partnership platform for conducting collaborative projects. Through regular panel discussions during platform meetings and training workshops, local people and school teachers managed to work out a common ground for their interests and goals. They cooperated in drawing up and carrying out several geoconservation and geotourism projects aimed at enhancing a better understanding of relationships between the livelihoods of local people and the badlands resources. The image of badlands, which was originally negatively perceived by the local people, now was viewed as the local community’s resource with a positive impact on tourism development. School-community-university partnership platform proved to be an efficient tool in stimulating knowledge resources, relational resources, and mobilization capacity among the local stakeholders, while advancing geoconservation and rural community development.