Overview
My research aims to address two inter-related questions:
First, what are the main drivers of policy change and shifting patterns of rural governance in the rural field? and second, how has this policy change been mediated through the agency and livelihood strategies of particular actors, especially farmers, but also other environmental managers of various sorts?
More recently I have become interested in contributing to understandings of some of the larger movements of policy that are being promoted through institutions like the World Trade Organisation and in the material and ideological framing of the so-called 'post-productivist' project for industrialised country agriculture. At the same time, I have been exploring the way stakeholders on the ground can be brought into the debate about alternative rural futures and the role of expert and lay knowledges in defining those futures.