Beyond Kulunda

Abstract

The setting of the KULUNDA project, its research questions as well as the answers and practical solutions, as they have been presented in the previous chapters, are principally restricted to the geographical limits of the research area itself. However, a wider horizon for the findings that it is given is of utmost importance, as steppe ecosystems worldwide are the world’s breadbaskets and one of the greatest sink of (soil) carbon in the carbon cycle. A formal background for such a claim is the project’s funding and organizational embedding into the FONA initiative of the German Ministry for Education and Research. FONA’s determination is research on sustainable development, in the case of KULUNDA focused on questions of sustainable land management. In this respect, results from the KULUNDA project strongly relate to regional development policy in the Altai Krai. As an overarching programme, FONA expects that some outcomes from the individual projects should be—given a certain amount of effort—transferable to other sites and situations. Even though the individual projects have not been designed with comparative approaches, FONA promoted and demanded exchange of experiences between research projects. Despite such a formal framework, the concept of regional geographic research itself carries a chance for comparison to validate findings and interpretations. This chapter tries to outline preconditions, structures and contexts of the KULUNDA project, which allows for conceptual conclusions about potential transfer to other regions and case studies.