Ãå±±½ûµØ

The study of people and the interactions between individuals in society is crucial to gain knowledge about how to foster sustainable and ‘just’ transitions in agri-food systems and beyond.

At Harper, the Centre includes the following research groups:

• Rural Resilience: exploring the robustness, recovery, and reorientation capacities of rural actors in a rapidly changing world.
• Engaging for Change: exploring how to include human ‘stakeholders’ substantively in designing and implementing sustainable change.
• Global Institute for Agri-Tech Economics: linking people, economics and science to analyse the role of innovative agricultural technologies in achieving global economic, environmental, and social objectives

The activities of the Centre are inspired by a for the social sciences in agri-food systems by Burch et al. (2023). Specifically, the Centre heeds the call for inclusion of social science research early on in the design of sustainable transitions to ensure that benefits (and costs) are spread fairly, and that unintended negative social and environmental consequences are less likely to occur. As Burch et al. write, “the underlying tensions afflicting agri-food technological development illustrate why it is so critical to have social scientists involved in innovations while they are being developed rather than after the fact.” Thus, while the Centre does explore questions of innovation adoption and behavioural change, it moves beyond ‘public acceptability’ and ‘willingness to adopt’ lenses.

The Centre explores how “social, economic, cultural, environmental and policy contexts” (ibid) affect, and are affected by, science and innovation. It aims to advance methods to study interactions between society and innovation, as well as to inspire efforts to include humans (and non-humans) substantively in the co-design of change. In doing so, the Centre’s work will provide recommendations to policy, industry, funders, and non-social scientists on how to co-design research and use policy instruments for sustainable and ‘just’ transitions.