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Location research
Date
2026
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Abstract
Small island states mirror and magnify the sustainability challenges confronting the world. Aruba is a compelling example of a small island state, one where the community grapples with local and global sustainability challenges, trying to navigate the tricky path between economic development, social cohesion and environmental impacts. Sustainability challenges have become even more pressing, in Aruba and elsewhere, since our first volume was published ten years ago in 2015. This 2026 volume, like previous ones, documents the efforts made by student researchers from the University of Aruba and Utrecht University to address the pressures Aruba faces in meeting the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 agenda. It opens with a list of guiding principles and goals that these students compiled collectively in a UA classroom in February 2026, at the beginning of their 11 weeks together. The ideas in this list express our students’ ambitions to do research in ways that would be meaningful to others as well as to themselves. Taken together, they reflect the principles of community-based research that have been at the heart of our student research collaboration program since it was founded.
In 2026, a total of 21 student researchers completed papers for this publication. They include thesis-year students from the University of Aruba’s Sustainable Island Solutions through STEM program and students from University College Utrecht, Liberal Arts and Sciences and Global Sustainable Sciences at Utrecht University. The students supported each other’s process while working on their own research, morally and practically, providing feedback on approaches to research, and on the content, style, language and structure of the papers submitted for this volume.
The content of this volume includes work grounded in a range of fields: engineering, chemistry, data sciences, ecology, economics, governance and social geography. The topics include sustainability in food security, renewable energy and resource management, ecosystem restoration and pollution. The research papers appear here as submitted by the authors, including the occasional raw or not yet developed conclusion. Some of the contributions reflect completed studies, others are preparatory explorations, proposals for research that is still to be carried out. All the authors are still working on interpretation and presentation of their findings and will finalize these in consultancy reports or bachelor theses based on the results of the projects presented here. The authors also each wrote a personal reflection about the individual rewards of participating in community-based research, and these preface their papers.
A UA bachelor course (Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable development in small island states) served as a forum for mutual support and collaboration during the process of doing the research, and culminated in presentations of their work to the Aruban community in the newly renovated UA Maria Convent Chapel. Many people have made crucial contributions to the students’ success this year. We, and our students, appreciate the value and power of their contributions to this project as a whole. We want to express special gratitude to UA’s Tobia de Scisciolo, Diego Acevedo and Bart van Donselaar help in providing feedback on the student papers in preparing them for publication here. Britta Ricker and Nataliia Pustilnik coached and supported the students from the GSS track. Many others who have played crucial roles as guides, lecturers, mentors, advisors, facilitators, respondents, interview participants, and engaged citizens: thanks to you all! We hope that you have looked forward to the work that is presented in this volume as eagerly as we did!
Eric Mijts & Jocelyn Ballantyne
Project coordinators UAUCUU
Citation
Mijts, E. & Ballantyne, J. (Eds.). (2026). UAUCUU Student Research Exchange Collected Papers 2026 (Vol. 11). University of Aruba and Utrecht University.