“The needs of the students should always come first” “xxxx 4
BOARD MEMBER INTERVIEW Chris Kalden leaves the institute after 15 years He trained to become a vet, but his passion for nature and the environment and his people skills launched him on a career in management from which he’s never looked back. After 15 years of serving the institute in a governance capacity, Chris Kalden retired from the board of IHE Delft Foundation and the UNESCO-IHE Governing Board last August. He looks back on an eventful but also very fruitful period for the Institute which he says has greatly strengthened its capacity to pursue its mission. He became involved with the IHE by ‘institutional accident’ but stayed on much longer out of passion for what the institute stands for, Kalden (63) told us when we met him in his office at the Dutch State Forestry Service, which he has headed since 2007. “I have spent much of my career in the outdoors, so to speak – first at a regional environmental organization, later as a civil servant in various roles focused on nature management and agriculture. In 1996, I was appointed director of the Government Service for Land and Water Management. The post came with a ‘quality monitoring seat’ on the board of the IHE Foundation. That’s how I became involved with the Institute, and it’s a responsibility that I took on with great pleasure. Water is such an interesting and important theme, after all, as it is so crucial to people’s lives and economic development. I’ve always been acutely aware of that. I grew up on the banks of a river in the east of the Rhine delta, an area which, over 700 years ago, more or less spawned the concept of Holland’s regional water boards. Also, water management is a key element in agriculture and nature management, my core areas of interest throughout my career. So, while I joined the board of the IHE Foundation more or less by accident, the IHE’s work was and is an area of great interest to me.” What prompted you to resign from the Foundation and Governing Boards? “It’s not healthy for an organization if executives hang on to their posts too long. I had wanted to retire sooner, precisely for that reason, but Henk Vonhoff – our chair at that time – urged me to stay on to provide a measure of continuity amidst various other changes that were happening. I did resign as chairman of the UNESCO-IHE Governing Board, however, when I left the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality in 2007 to become general manager of the State Forestry Service. Since I’d become involved with the IHE through the Ministry of Agriculture, I felt that leaving the Ministry meant I should take a step back at UNESCO-IHE.” How would you characterize your time on the governing boards of IHE Delft Foundation and UNESCO-IHE? “Never a dull moment. It’s been a very dynamic environment to be operating in, what with the perennial financial pressure faced by the organization, the global development dimension, the process leading up to the transition to UNESCO and the various shifts in Dutch policy towards the IHE. I’ve always greatly enjoyed coming to Delft and experiencing this mix of project-based work at a Dutch institute which is part of UNESCO.” You were closely involved from the beginning in the process that resulted in IHE Delft formally becoming an UNESCO Category I Institute in 2003. How do you look back on that period, also given the controversy surrounding the transition at the time? “I wouldn’t call it a controversy. At the time, we were asking the Dutch government and UNESCO to agree to a legal set-up for the IHE that was unfamiliar to both of them. Such things take time. You see, back then, we were one of six independent institutes in the Netherlands focused on professional training for foreign students, the others focusing on themes such as housing, or ICT. In 1999, the Dutch Ministry of Education, one of our key funders along with the Dutch Ministry of Development Assistance, decided that all these institutes should merge with universities. We feared that doing so would put our mission and focus on mid-career professionals at risk. We knew UNESCO because we participated in its International Hydrological Programme, and decided 5