The major project objectives are to improve the Agricultural Education in Thailand as an efficient channel for agricultural production that contributes to the food security and high quality food for global consumption. This will be achieved. This will be achieved through cooperation on Double Degree Master Program (DDMP) between the 4 leading HEIs in in agriculture in Thailand that emphasizes the participative approach for sustainable agriculture, with the cooperation of 4 HEI in Europe. The implementation and consequences of the project will greatly contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals by developing capacities in the Thai HEI in agriculture to address “Sufficiency economy”, the new concept developed by the King Bhumibol Adulyadej that proved effective by Thai Ministry of Agriculture to integrate agricultural production and social and environmental sustainability. With the well design programme in cooperation with private companies/farmers, the graduates are equipped to be in agriculture and natural resources management capable to support agricultural production/intensification/food security together with environmental sustainability and social equity. Through the integrative activities of the project, the realization of significant contribution of Sufficiency Economy for agricultural sustainability, conserving biodiversity and environment will be developed. This initiative DDMP between 4 Thai leading agricultural universities is the first cooperation for the benefit of agricultural students which will be a model for other disciplines in the future. Through this project, in the near term, agriculture will be seen as an attractive occupation and an employment option for rural youth through the promotion of problem solving research, skill training and entrepreneurship building. Thai participating universities can then offer assistance to ASEAN countries and other developing countries.

Since 2013, Albania is going through a process of structural reforms on several areas. The reform on territory administration (Law 115/2014) reduced the number of the local units to 64 municipalities. Both rural and urban areas constitute now these new larger and more complex territorial units. The local administration has a limited knowledge on sustainable territory administration of both rural and urban areas and their interactions. Secondly Albania is moving forward on its process of joining the EU. Implementation of the acquis communautaire, requests necessary reforms for Albanian government on national as well as local institutions. Thirdly the reform on higher education and scientific research of 2015 (Law Nr 80/ 2015), created a new type of third cycle degree Master called Executive Master which adapts even more the teaching offer with the job market needs. The main objective of the project is to address new job market needs induced by new and forthcoming Albanian public policies by collectively designing 9 teaching modules on sustainable territory administration, agricultural policy and negotiation, as well as innovation on rural areas.The project tends to improve the classical way of curricula building by proposing adapted teaching modules build up by building blocks that will serve to several teaching level (i.e. professional master, Master of science and executive master). This will increase the possibilities of collaboration among HEI-s (public and non-public) that want to build up master degrees dealing on the same issues without being competitorsThe project is focused on a strong relation with the job providing institutions and the importance of the practical work that will be projected, conducted and evaluated jointly with actors of the sector. The project will capitalize the practical and theoretical findings of their own students and lecturers by using them as theoretical and case studies in master teaching modules.

The MS FSCC project brings five leading Southeast Asian higher education institutions in agriculture and life sciences from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia to build a joint master’s degree on the topic of Food Security and Climate Change. These HEIs have been working together within the Southeast Asian University Consortium for Graduate Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC) since 1989 and have a concrete experience of exchanges in Science and Academic programmes but never reached the level of building a joint degree. The MS FSCC was designed on the model of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degrees in Europe. It aimed at responding to acute needs in the professional sector that developed recently, where each individual university may not have all the disciplinary resources to address such topics at the highest (postgraduate) level. This difficulty is generally increased when the professional targets of the learning objectives lead to multidisciplinary orientations of teaching and research. A consortium of universities sharing common learning objectives and organising the mobility of students according to their individual academic strengths was assumed to be in a better position than individual Universities to produce graduates relevant to the market needs. This is the case with Food Security and Climate Change to prepare graduates to work at implementing the commitments of the member countries at the last Paris Conference on Climate Change, while taking into consideration the challenges of food security linked with the recent implementation of the ASEAN integrated market. This corresponds to a new professional challenge in the area of agriculture in SE Asia. The UC has the necessary skills to address this challenge, but individually, none have all the skills needed to properly address the training needs in this domain. Building a joint degree and using mobility to get the best offer in the region may better address that new challenge rather than what they would do individually. Simultaneously with the development of the synopsis of joint MS FSCC programme was the challenge of offering a dual/double degree, an innovation that the UC had never done before. By building common rules to govern within the MS FSCC: exchange/mobility of students, mutual recognition of courses between pairs of Universities within the UC, organisation of summer schools to offer courses to accommodate all students, option to have one semester mobility in Europe to complement the local supply of courses, FSCC-wide quality assurance system recognised by each of the collaborating Universities, and joint evaluation of master thesis between academic teams, Departments, Faculties of the different co-graduating Universities, the UC has experimented agreements that lead to building other post graduate joint programmes, a major institutional innovation in the SE Asian academic world. Whereas building this joint degree was much inspired by the European experience of the Erasmus Mundus programme, it required several adaptations and innovative rules in the participating Universities’ academic systems. These adaptations took more time than initially expected as it had to be accepted in five Universities in parallel and in real practice, for real students, in a real joint programme, and not just in theory. These innovations have been clearly identified, and at least they have been addressed in the case of a first collaborative programme, run with three successive cohorts of students.