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Janet directs and undertakes applied research related to agriculture, the environment and rural development. Her research expertise centres on the evaluation and development of European and UK rural development policy and practice, with particular interest in integrated approaches, environmental sustainability and institutional adaptation.
She is well-known in policymaking circles in the UK and EU, has skills in facilitation and consensus-building, and is a regular speaker at international conferences. Her work has influenced the development and design of agri-environmental and rural policies in the UK, Ireland and Malta, and at the European level within the European Commission’s DGs for Agriculture and rural development, Environment, and Climate.
She sits on a variety of NGO and government-sponsored policy advisory groups in England including Green Alliance, the RSA’s Food, Farming and Countryside Commission and Defra’s Rural Academic Panel, and chaired Defra’s Nutrient Management Expert Group, 2021-22. Janet is a Director of Rural England CIC, and a Trustee of the Organic Research Centre and the Countryside and Community Foundation. She is a former President of the Agricultural Economics Society, a Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Societies and a Membre Associé of the French Academie d’Agriculture. She was awarded an OBE in the June 2022 Queen’s birthday honours for her services to rural research.
Janet acts as a supervisor for postgraduate students and is an External Examiner for two applied ecological masters courses at Imperial College, London.
Janet directs and undertakes research related to agriculture, the environment and rural development. Her research expertise centres on the analysis of European and UK rural development policy and practice, with particular interest in integrated approaches, environmental sustainability and institutional adaptation.
In 2024, Janet entered into a unique joint appointment with the Research Institute for Humanities and Nature in Kyoto, Japan, under which she is leading a four-year international project on cultural landscapes and rural resilience: Satoyama reconnections. The project involves participatory, action-oriented research in the UK, Europe and Japan to help sustain and strengthen longstanding human-nature interactions in high-nature-value landscapes, to benefit global biodiversity and climate goals. The partnership includes the Universities of Kyoto, Niigata, Porto, Bern, Umeå and Gloucestershire as well as AgroParisTech and Scotland’s Rural College.
Other projects Janet is currently involved with include addressing sustainable land management challenges in the south-west uplands of Exmoor and Dartmoor and the Horizon Europe project ‘RUSTIK’, which relates to the knowledge and information needs to enable sustainable rural development.
Agricultural policy; cultural landscapes; marginal farming; rural enterprise; rural policy; sustainable land management; upland ecology; upland futures.
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