As I depart from Cape Town International on my way to Addis to co-facilitate a UNEP workshop on how to use the Green Economy Toolkit that has been developed for UNEP by SI Projects (back home next Thursday), I reflect back on an amazing week that started with presentations by the Masters students who have completed their research projects (pic is of me doing a braai for them) and ended with the students who are starting their Masters research projects due for completion end 2016. The whole idea is that in a transdisciplinary environment where it is very difficult to teach a particular research methodology, the best way for students who are commencing their research to learn about research methodology is to listen to students who have completed their research. When they listen to other students who have struggled and experimented all along the way, they soon realize there is no ‘right way’ to do research. They realize that research is an exploration that transforms them as they wrestle with the nexus between the real world they encounter and different ways of knowing. In the process their simplistic assumptions and normative commitments get questioned and challenged at the most fundamental levels, often triggered existential crises that can be profoundly transformative. As I always say to them: ‘Try to believe what you are skeptical about, and try to be skeptical about what you believe.’ This is easier said than done. The research topics of the ‘class of 2016’ are as follows:

• food insecurity amongst women in the informal economy
• how to promote the sale of healthy food in poor urban areas
• the commercial viability of a technical invention that converts plastic into diesel fuel
• Integrated Management Systems for corporates
• the role of ‘Big Data’ in qualitative (not quantitative) assessment of corporate sustainability performance
• African storytelling and the African environmental ethics
• globalisation, growth, urbanization and urban labour markets
• small-holder agro-ecological systems
• how the Sustainability Institute can be BBBEE partner for Independent Power Producers of Renewable Energy
• water politics in the Eersterivier Valley
• unraveling urban planning in Cape Town
• governance for accelerating sustainability transitions – a complexity perspective
• circular economy in Stellenbosch

This is an amazing group of students and I look forward to this time next year when they present their finished products – or the following year for those who will take two years (which is most of them). This is my favorite week of the year! What a ride, what a privilege to be part of it all.