My background is in Sociology, with a joint honours degree in Sociology with Gender Studies from Edinburgh University and a PhD in Sociology from James Cook University, Australia.  I am a research leader in land-water systems governance and part of the Society, People and Nature group.

My research focuses on governance, particularly land use and environmental policy making and implementation. I have an associated interest in the use of ‘tools’ as deliberative boundary objects in decision making and evaluation processes. I generally favour mixed qualitative methods such as interviews, focus groups and participant observation. Threading through my research is an interest in reconciling critical approaches to policy making and implementation with constructive engagement in knowledge exchange with policy actors. This reflects my interest in ‘studying up’ – using the politics and practices of participatory research to work with people in positions of power and authority.  Currently, I am working on how to practice policy coherence; and how to support transformation using Nature-Based Solutions. My stretch target is to do this whilst recognising social, environmental and geographical justice.

Ongoing projects

• Scottish Government Strategic Research Programme on Land Use Transformations (2022-27), supporting the Quantitative Story Telling work on the Agricultural Reform Programme and working on policy coherence for land use change.
• UKRI’s Local Policy Innovation Partnership Forth2O project, leading the partner connections WP assessing how we can implement the OECD’s water governance principles in Scotland.

Past Projects

• H2020 MERLIN (Mainstreaming Ecological Restoration of freshwater-related ecosystems in a Landscape context: Innovation, upscaling and transformation) (2021-25). WP Coordinator for Transformation working with economic sectors, with a focus on creating communities of practice to mainstream freshwater NbS within a range of policy and commercial approaches.
• Centre for Expertise on Waters research on projections of water scarcity for agriculture and distilleries (2023-24), working on translation of scientific knowledge to raise awareness and identifying ways to become more resilient.
• H2020 MOVING (Mountain Valorisation through Interconnectedness and Green Growth) (2020-24). WP Coordinator for participatory appraisal of value chain performance across 23 mountain case studies, with a focus on how value chains can be evaluated using a socio-ecological systems perspective.
• H2020 project “Moving Towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: Informing Nexus Security” (MAGIC – see also here) led by Mario Giampietro at Autonomous University of Barcelona (2016-2020), working on the Common Agricultural Policy and its interaction with the Water-Energy-Food Nexus, Climate Change and Sustainable Development Goals; and discussing with EU stakeholders whether the outcomes of the social metabolism accounting are feasible, viable and/or desirable.