Amy Proctor

Industrial ecology and eco‐industrial development: A potential paradigm for local and regional development?

Gibbs, D., Deutz, P. and Proctor, A. (2005) Industrial ecology and eco‐industrial development: a potential paradigm for local and regional development?, Regional Studies 39 , 171–183. Increasingly, concepts such as sustainable development and ecological modernization have entered into local and regional economic policies and strategies. However, integrating environmental and economic aims has proved difficult, despite arguments that sustainability enables ‘win‐win‐win’ solutions. Eco‐industrial development is a recent policy initiative that attempts to integrate economic, social and environmental aims in a concrete form. Derived from concepts of industrial ecology, eco‐industrial developments seek to increase business competitiveness, reduce waste and pollution, create jobs, and improve working conditions. While these initiatives are said to offer a new basis for local and regional development, there has been little critical evaluation of eco‐industrial development.

The changing role of veterinary expertise in the food chain

This paper analyses how the changing governance of animal health has impacted upon veterinary expertise and its role in providing public health benefits. It argues that the social sciences can play an important role in understanding the nature of these changes, but also that their ideas and methods are, in part, responsible for them. The paper begins by examining how veterinary expertise came to be crucial to the regulation of the food chain in the twentieth century. The relationship between the veterinary profession and the state proved mutually beneficial, allowing the state to address the problems of animal health, and the veterinary profession to become identified as central to public health and food supply. However, this relationship has been gradually eroded by the application of neoliberal management techniques to the governance of animal health. This paper traces the impact of these techniques that have caused widespread unease within and beyond the veterinary profession about the consequences for its role in maintaining the public good of animal health. In conclusion, this paper suggests that the development of the social sciences in relation to animal health could contribute more helpfully to further changes in veterinary expertise.

Field Expertise in Rural Land Management

This paper explores the expertise of field-level advisors in rural land management. The context is the English uplands and negotiation over a Higher Level Stewardship agreement. An observed encounter between a hill farmer, his retained land agent, and an ecologist working for Natural England illustrates the multiple roles that field-level advisors have in regulating, directing, and influencing contemporary land management. The paper draws on field notes taken during work shadowing and in-depth interviews, to reflect upon the relationships that constitute field expertise—not only between farmer and advisor, but amongst the advisors too (and those who advise them). We argue that expert—expert interaction and the emergence of networks of practice are crucial to the development of field expertise and are key factors in the increasing complexity of the decision making underpinning contemporary land management.

Veterinary field expertise: using knowledge gained on the job.

Farm veterinarians are part of the knowledge-based economy in which professionals earn their livelihood by selling their expertise directly to clients. They face complex and ever-changing calls on this expertise. How do they keep their knowledge of livestock health and production up to date in practice? ACCORDING to the standard formulation of knowledge transfer, ‘field professionals’ such as veterinary surgeons act as intermediaries bringing science to the farm. Undoubtedly they do this, but findings from our research into the role of field advisers in knowledge sharing in the UK show that, in addition, vets actively broker different types of knowledge apart from formal science, and also generate new knowledge themselves. Does the profession appreciate this brokering role sufficiently? And should greater attention be paid to the knowledge generated ‘on the job’? As part of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded research project entitled ‘Science in the Field’, we interviewed and shadowed field advisers (vets, ecologists and land agents), their professional associations and land managers. Our interviews with the field professionals revealed the complexity of their knowledge sources. Professional associations were the most important source, through programmed CPD training, websites, publications and meetings of specialist divisions. Vets also updated their knowledge through other channels, including the internet, books, journals, magazines and circulars. These extraprofessional sources tended to relate as much to regulatory knowledge (such as policy or guidance documents) as to scientific knowledge. Working vets complained that they lacked time to refresh their scientific knowledge. They considered that most scientific output was not relevant or applicable to what they did. They expressed concerns about the shift in public funding away from applied work towards ‘blue-sky’ research. Some complained that published science was inaccessible, and most expected their professional organisations to filter out and synthesise information about scientific developments relevant to their …