Can you introduce yourself?
I am an Assistant Professor of Environmental Governance and Politics in the Geography, Planning and Environment group at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
I study the barriers that prevent transition to a more just, sustainable, and ecologically resilient food system. Namely, I focus on the way systems of land tenure, norms of property, and complexities of land access tend to water down and frustrate efforts to reform food systems. This dynamic, land governance shaping food and farming outcomes, is the Land Food Nexus. I’m interested in the ways that innovations and policy reforms to property, land tenure and land transfers may facilitate food system transformations.
Currently, my two major projects are a monograph about the land politics of the food movement and an investigation into how green transition policies are mediated by property regimes. My research on these topics has been published in journals including Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Agriculture and Human Values, Gastronomica, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. I have also written about land governance and food system sustainability for publications including The Green European Journal, The Sustainable Food Trust, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
I hold a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley, where my research explored how land access challenges in California hinder beginning farmers' aspirations. Previously, I was a researcher at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, studying the emerging land reform policy agenda and its environmental implications. My work has been supported by funding from the UKRI Landscape Decisions Programme, the Belmont Forum, the US Fulbright Program, UC Cooperative Extension, and Horizon Europe.
What are you currently doing your own research on?
Can the EU achieve its sustainability agenda without regulating land markets? Regulating land markets to achieve the EU sustainability agenda: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ajh4v_v1.
I also communicate my research through the Land Food Nexus Newsletter and in the Landscapes Podcast.
What is the best part of working with students?
Guiding them through a thesis project, where at the end they have made original insights about environmental issues important to them.