Colombo Plan needs regional open-door policy

STUDENTS will benefit from the government's scheme for an Asia experience.

Tony Abbott in Bali, APEC

AS promised, the Coalition government has announced a new Colombo Plan. The plan is a significant initiative and seeks to send Australian students to Asia - beginning with a trial next year in Indonesia, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong - to gain more Asia experience.

While this is laudable, we need more substantive levels of engagement with research training, partnership and collaboration within the region.

To develop such strategies we need a new rationale for the internationalisation that accentuates the regional public good and collective benefit.

Unfortunately our strategies for internationalisation of higher education have been conceived through the distorted frame of Asia capability or literacy. This was the rationale of the Asian Century white paper, which was aimed at promoting regional student mobility and, with it, the promotion of so-called priority Asian languages.

Such an Asia capability strategy seeks to understand the region. It implies that internationalisation is narrowly about cultural literacy and this is signified by its emphasis on language learning or the amorphous concept of Asia experience. This strategy was recently reinforced by the former government's decision to fund an Asia Capability Centre with the support of the business community.

The problem with cultural literacy approaches is that there is no sense of building a common educational and research community to deal with the shared societal challenges we face as a region. A common approach to internationalisation of higher education would not only allow us to focus on research and training but also develop a shared knowledge infrastructure, the benefits of which are mutual.

To really engage in internationalisation, our public policies and universities need to rethink our research links and partnerships with the region. This is all the more important as Asia builds world-class research universities that have increasingly become the source of highly skilled researchers. It is this new regional reality to which we need to respond in our research and internationalisation strategies, not to an outmoded idea of Asia experience.

There is certainly much that is already going on within our public universities and through bilateral agreements with India or China. A "public good" perspective would favour this policy approach instead of a focus on individual country study centres, such as the Monash-led Indonesia Centre recently announced by Tony Abbott, or the ANU China Centre supported by Kevin Rudd.

We can do three things to pursue a strategy to promote public goods. First, we can encourage and facilitate the movement of academics (as we have with students), particularly early career academics and postdoctoral researchers. Imagine a system like the reverse Colombo Plan for our post-doctoral researchers to move within the region.

While this would build real relationships and partnerships on common challenges, we would need to reinforce it by making it easier for academics in the region to come to Australia to work on projects, or even to teach.

Let me give an example: we have a lot of expertise on migration, which is now becoming a crucial transnational issue in the region. This is an area in which we could build shared collaborative research infrastructure of knowledge in the region.

Why not create a visa scheme for regionally based academics so they can be more mobile within the region? It would mean giving resources to our universities to facilitate and encourage this mobility.

Second, we need greater flexibility in getting research collaborators on grants funded by the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Under the current policy setting, these funding programs do not enable us to treat and fund researchers on an equal basis.

If we are really interested in building common research areas we need to develop more flexible rules.

One way this could be done is by allowing regionally based academics - who include Australian citizens - to become chief or primary investigators on certain research areas and topics. In the case of Indonesia, for example, this would help build research capacity in some of their public universities.

Finally, we need to see this collaboration not in terms of the Orientalist idea of Asia capability, but in terms of building a shared infrastructure - human and physical - to deal with the common challenges we confront in the region. This is the sort of regional public good that that should be central to the mission of our public universities.

Quite radically, it might mean that major Asian research universities have locations within an international research precinct at the heart of Australian campuses.

This flips the way in which internationalisation is usually conceived and would require major changes in the way grant-funding bodies such as the ARC operate.

We need to direct our strategies of higher educationtowards a comprehensive framework for regional research co-operation along the lines of an Indo-Pacific research area, somewhat like the European Research area, which is designed to allow researchers to move freely and to facilitate research co-operation across national boundaries.

There is little chance of a formal regional framework but Australia has much to gain by leading on this, particularly with the involvement of the ARC and leading research universities.

These are steps that the government can take by weaving webs of bilateral agreements with research funding agencies in South Korea, China, Japan and India.

As public research funds continue to decline, we need to develop a more comprehensive and region-wide framework for research co-operation and funding. These are the kind of strategies that will generate real benefit over the long term for Australia.

Creating such common research areas is costly, complex and difficult. It needs a long-term and transparent strategy for research on - and within - the region and one that is more than a mere appendage for a prime ministerial visit or the launch of a white paper.

Such a strategy will help create the much touted knowledge economy through the provision of regional public goods.

Above all, it has the added benefit of resisting the hollowing out of the public missions of our universities by shaping them to respond to emerging global and regional challenges, as well as the new educational powerhouses within the region.

Kanishka Jayasuriya is professor of politics and international studies and the director of the Indo-Pacific Governance Research Centre at the University of Adelaide.