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81
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Introduction
I am an independent researcher and consultant. My research interests lie on the intersection of agriculture, sustainable regional development and innovation and transition studies.
I strongly believe in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and I apply both qualitative and quantitative methods in my research, ranging from Grounded Theory to Q-methodology and Social Network Analysis and Statistical Network Models such as ERGMS and SAOMs.
Additional affiliations
Education
September 1992 - September 1998
Publications
Publications (81)
The Technological Innovation Systems (TIS) literature has made considerable strides in exploring the spatial aspect of technological innovation dynamics over the past decade. Abandoning the purely national focus on TISs, scholars have theorized TIS dynamics simultaneously along multiple geographical scales, such as regional, national , and global....
Radical innovations aiming for sustainability usually need to transform existing institutions in order to become successful. From a transition perspective, institutional work is one of the actors’ core activities in order to maintain or disrupt the dominant regime. This paper explores how institutional work materialises in an emerging bioeconomy. O...
Bioclusters' promise of helping achieving sustainable bioeconomies has invoked great interest among policymakers and academia. However, bioclusters are not intrinsically sustainable. If they are to fulfil their promise, bioclusters must undergo green-restructuring. While cluster-research has elaborated on green regional development, we need more cl...
CONTEXT
Social networks play an important role in the diffusion of knowledge, and farmers draw on their personal networks to enhance their adaptive capacity to shocks. Different forms of proximity have been long recognized as important factors in knowledge and information exchanges. However, the specific roles and their interactions in agricultural...
Opinion leaders play a significant role in promoting innovation and technology adoption through effective information dissemination to potential adopters. However, personal traits that define effective opinion leaders, as identified in existing literature, may not fully align with followers’ desired attributes of an opinion leader. Additionally, li...
Bioeconomy clusters, besides stimulating economic and innovative performance, are expected to promote sustainable regional development. Despite their growing popularity, there is still a lack of awareness about how these clusters contribute to sustainability. This paper aims at increasing our understanding of the processes through which bioeconomy...
Green-growth theory asserts that green-innovations will allow us to decouple economic growth from pollution. Policies that promote green-innovations are therefore paramount. Scholarship has become increasingly interested in how green-clusters can contribute to sustainable innovation and decoupled green-growth. In this study, we create an agent-base...
Information and communications technologies (ICTs) play a key role in improving agricultural production, enhancing socio-ecological resilience, and mitigating rural poverty. However, the use of ICTs for agricultural development among smallholder farmers, especially in the least developed countries, still lags behind. It is therefore critical to und...
Embracing methodological individualism, the mainstream economic theory of the firm has little to say about the precarious nature of the firm's embeddedness in encompassing socioecological systems. The digital transformation of the theory of the firm can address this gap by deconstructing the standpoint of methodological individualism. In transactio...
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This chapter contains an investigation of clusters that specialise in the field of the bioeconomy: so-called bioclusters. An important distinction between regular industrial clusters and bioeconomy clusters is the additional goal of sustainable development that bioclusters are expected to generate. In this chapter, a new typology of bioclusters wil...
In this paper, we investigate the promises that are employed within and around clusters that were formed in the evolving bioeconomy: bioclusters for short. Our paper aims to provide a conceptual clarification of the biocluster concept. To that effect, we employ the prism of sociotechnical imaginaries. We argue that both industrial clusters and the...
The centroid method of factor extraction was very popular before the introduction of computers. Within the Q methodology community, this method is still preferred by some to extract factors. This R-script performs a centroid factor extraction and it can be used together with the QMethod package developed by Aiora Zabala.
This paper presents a systemic review of the contributions that stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs) and exponential random graph models (ERGMs) have made to the study of industrial clusters and agglomeration processes. Results show that ERGMs and SAOMs are especially popular to study network evolution, proximity dynamics and multiplexity. The...
Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit Bio-Clustern. Gegenwärtig sind die Erwartungen groß, dass Bio-Clustern eine Schlüsselrolle bei der Entwicklung der Bioökonomie zukommt, so dass die Förderung von Bio-Clustern in der Bioökonomiepolitik vieler Länder eine herausragende Rolle spielt. Allerdings liegt bisher noch keine allgemein anerkannte Definition für...
Bioclusters have grown in popularity in the last decade in response to the global environmental and climate challenges. These clusters envisage sustainable and local production value chains in different sectors of the bioeconomy. However, the sustainability of these clusters is often questioned because of the negative social and environmental effec...
This paper addresses the question how public-private partnerships function as systemic innovation policy in- struments within agricultural innovation systems. Public-private partnerships are a popular government tool to promote innovations. However, the wide ranging nature of PPPs make it difficult to assess their effects beyond the direct impacts...
Angesichts einer wachsenden und zusehends wohlhabenderen
Weltbevölkerung sind radikale Veränderungen notwendig in der Art
und Weise wie wir Nahrungsmittel, Energie und Rohstoffe produzieren,
konsumieren, verarbeiten und entsorgen. Dies umso mehr, da es
gleichzeitig gilt die Auswirkungen des menschengemachten Klimawandels
einzudämmen. In diesem Zusa...
Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) have been playing an increasing role in interventions aiming to generate and scale innovations in agricultural systems. However, the contribution of MSPs in achieving innovations and scaling has been varied, and many factors have been reported to be important for their performance. This paper aims to provide evide...
Questionnaire English t = 1 survey.
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Questionnaire French t = 1 enquête.
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Questionnaire English t = 2 survey.
(DOCX)
Questionnaire French t = 2 enquête.
(DOCX)
Biocluster initiatives have become an important tool for governments to establish, promote, and strengthen economic collaboration, learning, innovation, and employment within particular regions. However, in addition to issues like competitiveness and employment, bioclusters operate with the additional goal of fostering the transition to a sustainab...
This table is the data set used for studying the changes in the innovation networks in Burundi, DR Congo and Rwanda following a research for development intervention of CGIAR (Integrated Systems for the Humidtropics)
During the last two decades an increasing amount of large-scale farming operations have emerged all over the world: from (Eastern) Europe, to South America, China and the countries of the Former Soviet Union. These agribusinesses go under the name of mega-farms or agroholdings: horizontally or vertically integrated operations with farm sizes of up...
Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) are seen as a promising vehicle to achieve agricultural development impacts. By increasing collaboration, exchange of knowledge and influence mediation among farmers, researchers and other stakeholders, MSPs supposedly enhance their ‘capacity to innovate’ and contribute to the ‘scaling of innovations’. The objecti...
p>Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) are seen as a promising vehicle to achieve agricultural development impacts. By increasing collaboration, exchange of knowledge and influence mediation among farmers, researchers and other stakeholders, MSPs supposedly enhance their 'capacity to innovate' and contribute to the 'scaling of innovations'. The objec...
Multi-stakeholder (MS) platforms, such as innovation platforms (IP), public-private partnerships (PPP) are becoming more common but what they can achieve in innovation and scaling is limited and depends on different factors. This poster and the broader research paper provide evidence what MS platforms can and cannot achieve in their early phases an...
In recent years the field of social network analysis has seen an explosion in new and innovative methods to model the creation, maintenance and termination of networks. In my contribution to the special session of the EU-SPRI conference on the modelling of sustainability transitions, I explore what these statistical network models have to offer for...
The Sahel region has one of the most mobile populations in the world, with migration serving as a common household strategy to increase livelihood and social resilience. However, the Sahel region's population is extremely heterogeneous, and the processes and factors that contribute to migration are complex. Consequently, recent empirical studies yi...
Purpose: We investigate how the structural conditions of eight different European agricultural innovation systems can facilitate or hinder collaboration and social learning in multidisciplinary innovation networks.
Methodology: We have adapted the Innovation System Failure Matrix to investigate the main barriers and enablers eight countries (Englan...
This paper presents an interdisciplinary dialogue exploring the role of discourse in global strategic futures arenas. We use global food systems as a discussion case. Food systems are increasingly associated with a variety of global governance issues including the political economics of food insecurity and global environmental change. Collaborative...
In this paper we use a network perspective to study the micro level of agricultural innovation systems and investigate the different roles and functions that collaborating actors have to perform to spread their innovation both horizontally and vertically. Based on a literature review, we distinguish between three separate network functions: (1) lea...
According to transition science, system innovation requires experimentation and social learning to explore the potential of innovations for sustainable development. However, the transition science literature does not elaborate much on the learning processes involved. Senge's Field of Change provides a more detailed approach to the role of learning...
Report on the concept of sustainable agriculture for the SOLINSA project. Application of Q-methodology in different European countries.
Visit http://www.solinsa.org/home/ for more information on the SOLINSA project
This article gives an overview of the present day discourses on the sustainable development of Dutch agriculture. It aims to advance rural sociology by illustrating how these sustainability discourses actually contain completely opposing views of the future of the countryside. A qualitative analysis of interviews done with innovators in the agricul...
Issues of scale play a crucial role in the governance of social–ecological systems. Yet, attempts to bridge interdisciplinary perspectives on the role of scale have thus far largely been limited to the science arena. This study has extended the scale vocabulary to allow for the inclusion of practice-based perspectives on scale. We introduced "dimen...
In this article we investigate the different perspectives of sustainable agriculture held by participants of a Dutch innovation programme called TransForum. Using Q-methodology we have systematically elicited individual perspectives on agricultural innovation and extracted their common elements. We have compared these perspectives with existing dis...
The application of genetic selection technologies in livestock breeding offers unique opportunities to enhance the productivity, profitability, and competitiveness of the livestock industry in Scotland. However, there is a concern that the uptake of these technologies has been slower in the sheep and beef sectors in comparison to the dairy, pig and...
In this paper we investigate the organisation and functioning of the formal AKS and how it can support or inhibit innovative bottom-up approaches to knowledge co-creation and social/joint learning. We have investigated how the main actors interact within their respective innovation systems and how they are influenced by various institutional charac...
This paper presents a theoretical framework that can be used to discuss the question of how context, time and different participatory
process designs influence the results of participatory monitoring projects in terms of concrete outputs (such as sustainability
indicators) and the more intangible social outcomes (such as learning and stakeholder re...
This report gives an analysis of the current organisation and functioning of the Dutch AKIS, with special attention to the position of Learning Innovation Networks for Sustainable Agriculture (LINSAs)
In the project “Images of sustainable development of Dutch agriculture and green space” three PhD candidates studied the topic of images in sustainable development. Frans Hermans focused on the topic of societal images and their role and influence in innovation projects. The title of his subproject was “Social learning for sustainability in dynamic...
Ambitions for sustainable development invariably lead to pondering the future, because sustainability issues require a future oriented transition of existing, unsustainable systems and practices. Working towards transition requires thorough experimentation with a broad range of innovation projects. However, in the public arena, many such projects a...
Het Nieuw Gemengd Bedrijf is een initiatief van vier ondernemers die samen met kennisinstellingen werken aan een samenwerkingsverband van plantaardige en dierlijke productiebedrijven die hun afval- en grondstofstromen koppelen. Het Nieuw Gemengd Bedrijf is gepland in het landbouwontwikkelingsgebied aan de Witveldweg in Horst aan de Maas - buitengeb...
In order for sustainability assessments to realise their full potential, there is a need for criteria against which sustainable development might be evaluated. In this article, we employ a principle-based theoretical approach to develop a framework of sustainable development criteria. From an analysis of the different views of the concept of sustai...