I am a Professor in Deliberative Ecological Economics and interdisciplinary researcher working on topics related to sustainable development, nature conservation, environmental management, community resilience, and transformation towards wellbeing economies. I am Director of Ecologos Research Ltd and work as a Professorial Research Fellow at Aberystwyth Business School, Wales.
My main research interest is in people’s values around nature. I enjoy taken a broad view of the notion of value and values, looking through the lenses of economics, ecology, ethics, psychology and spiritual practice, and have a particular interest in how social processes shape values and in ways we can integrate economic and deliberative methodologies to better incorporate shared values of nature into decision-making. Examples of my work include the Deliberative Value Formation Model, which was developed as a theoretical and practical underpinning for deliberative processes for valuing public goods, and the Life Framework of Values, which provides a mechanism for more pluralistic, inclusive and relational valuations of nature, and which has been adopted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to organise its values typology.
I also work more broadly on new economics approaches that focus on holistic wellbeing for people and planet, including as lead for the Global Assessment for a New Economics, which has synthesised ten principles for transforming economics across 38 different new economic approaches. To read more about my projects click here.
I have previously worked at the University of York, Department of Environment and Geography where I coordinated the MSc in Environmental Economics and Environmental Management. I was also a Principal Investigator at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) where I led the Laurence Mee Centre for Society and the Sea, and have lectured at the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Leicester and Aberdeen.
I have authored over 70 peer reviewed publications with >7500 citations. My funding track record totals around £22, and I have played leading roles in research and consulting projects worth over £12m, funded by the European Commission, UK, and various other national research councils and charitable research funders. I am an Editor of the journal Sustainability Science, and was a Lead Author for the IPBES Values Assessment focusing on the conceptualisation of multiple values, and a principal investigator for the second phase of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, leading work on shared, plural and cultural values of ecosystems. I have also served as board member of the International Society for Ecological Economics and the European Society for Ecological Economics. For my cross-disciplinary deliberative valuation research with local communities in the Solomon Islands I received prizes from the European Society for Ecological Economics, the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Geographical Field Group. My public dialogue work around the Clyde marine plan (in association with Collinwood Environmental Consultants) was nominated for two awards by the Royal Town Planning Institute. Our collective work with IPBES was awarded the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity.