Much of the international debate on natural resource management in the humid tropics revolves around forests, deforestation or forest conversion, the consequences it has and the way the process of change can be managed. These issues involve many actors and aspects, and thus can benefit from many disciplinary perspectives. Yet, no single discipline can provide all the insights necessary to fully understand the problem as a first step towards finding solutions that can work in the real world. Professional and academic education is still largely based on disciplines – and a solid background in the intellectual capital accumulated in any of the disciplines is of great value. If one wants to make a real contribution to natural resource management issues, however, one should at least have some basic understanding of the contributions other disciplines can make as well. Increasingly, universities are recognising the need for the next generation of scientists and policymakers to be prepared for interdisciplinary approaches. Thus, this series of lecture notes on integrated natural resource management in the humid tropics was developed . The lecture notes were developed on the basis of the experiences of the Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) consortium. This consortium was set up to gain a better understanding of the current land use decisions that lead to rapid conversion of tropical forests, shifting the forest margin, and of the slow process of rehabilitation and development of sustainable land use practices on lands deforested in the past. The consortium aims to relate local activities as they currently exist to the global concerns that they raise, and to explore ways by which these global concerns can be more effectively reflected in attempts to modify local activities that stabilise forest margins. The Rio de Janeiro Environment Conference of 1992 identified deforestation, desertification, ozone depletion, atmospheric CO 2 emissions and biodiversity as the major global environmental issues of concern. In response to these concerns, the ASB consortium was formed as a system-wide initiative of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), involving national and international research institutes. ASB’s objectives are the development of improved land-use systems and policy recommendations capable of alleviating the pressures on forest resources that are associated with slash-and-burn agricultural techniques. Research has been mainly concentrated on the western Amazon (Brazil and Peru), the humid dipterocarp forests of Sumatra in Indonesia, the drier dipterocarp forests of northern Thailand in mainland Southeast Asia, the formerly forested island of Mindanao (the Philippines) and the Atlantic Congolese forests of southern Cameroon.