The ENVS8018 - Partnership Research for Agricultural & Natural Resource-Based Development seminar series will showcase a range of speakers over semester 1, 2022 to explore the challenges and opportunities in the global food system.

Achieving food and nutrition security, poverty reduction, improved wellbeing and greater equity, while conserving and enhancing natural capital, and delivering climate change mitigation and adaptation outcomes, are amongst the greatest and most demanding challenges of this century. The UN Sustainable Development Goals articulate ambitions for each of these elements, and progressing towards those ambitions requires that we also address the synergies and tensions between the SDGs.

Over the past 50 years, a global network of institutions and initiatives has emerged to catalyse and communicate research, enable and link researchers, in support of agriculture and natural resources-based development to address these global challenges. Australian researchers, policy makers and practitioners have contributed to this network and activities in a variety of ways; the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) has played a central role in many of these. ACIAR’s partnership mode of research for development is acknowledged globally as an exemplar that other seek to emulate.

Please email Peter Kanowski for the zoom link if you wish to attend online.

About the seminar

Appropriate social sciences research is central to effective agricultural research for development. Understandings of society and social relations frame approaches to partnerships and to research; social relations, including those defined by gender, shape research engagement and outcomes. How do we tale a people-centred approach to agricultural research for development?
 

About the speaker

Dr Clemens Grünbühel is the Research Program Manager for Social Systems. Before joining ACIAR, Clemens was a Senior Policy Expert at Stockholm Environment Institute in Asia and was a faculty member at the School of Environment, Resources and Development of the Asian Institute of Technology. Clemens has also held various positions at the CSIRO, the Mekong Institute, and the Universities of Klagenfurt and Vienna and has partnered with multiple international and research and development organisations.

Clemens holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Vienna and has 20 years of expertise in sustainable resource use, climate adaptation, and social development. His expertise includes participatory rural and community development, social impact assessment, institutional analysis and scenario building. Clemens has been the team leader of over ten projects as well as the technical advisor to over 30 projects.