Regional scale development issues

Collectively, to date, we have made considerable progress in building integrated models and decision support systems of regional-scale environmental-economic systems. We have learnt discipline specific content or knowledge and skills. We have evolved appropriate processes with which to develop, test and validate this discipline specific content or knowledge and these skills. For the purpose of this paper I would like to pick on two issues that I see that we have learnt from our content or knowledge research to date and from our process and skills experience to date. First, that we usually underestimate the complexity of the systems that we study and second that learning is important, that is once we have finished a given study, if we had to do it again we would do it differently. My choice is based on my perception that in practice, in reference to the next generation of practitioners we have three, not two systems that interact. We have the regional scale environmental systems, we have regional scale economic systems and we have the next generation of practitioners' learning systems. Given the above two issues of underestimating complexity and the importance of learning, what can we learn from our progress to date that will help us determine how we should prepare the next generation of practitioners? Do we prepare the next generation of practitioners the same way, as we were prepared? Or can we do better? If so how? The aim of this paper is to seek feedback from the-session participants. The paper first outlines seven perspectives or aspects to help focus participant feedback and then asks participants two specific questions.