Philip Lowe

• Newcastle University

Understandings of socially distributed expertise as being key to living, interpreting and intervening in the world, are increasingly used in development narratives, referring usually to knowledge sharing across multi-stakeholder partnerships. This movement towards the democratisation of expertise challenges the ideological claim of science to be th...

In this paper we draw on in-depth research to explore inter-professional working in rural land and livestock management and introduce the novel concept of inter-professional expertise. An increasingly intricate regulatory framework, the diversification of the economic base of rural areas away from primary commodity production and a growing emphasis...

It has become part of the mantra of contemporary science policy that the resolution of besetting problems calls for the active engagement of a wide range of sciences. The paper reviews some of the key challenges for those striving for a more impactful social science by engaging strategically with natural scientists. It argues that effective engagem...

It has become part of the mantra of contemporary science policy that the resolution of besetting problems calls for the active engagement of a wide range of sciences. The paper reviews some of the key challenges for those striving for a more impactful social science by engaging strategically with natural scientists. It argues that effective engagem...

There is increasing emphasis on the need for effective ways of sharing knowledge to enhance environmental management and sustainability. Knowledge exchange (KE) are processes that generate, share and/or use knowledge through various methods appropriate to the context, purpose, and participants involved. KE includes concepts such as sharing, generat...

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...

It is commonly put forward that effective uptake of research in policy or practice must be built upon a foundation of active knowledge exchange and stakeholder engagement during the research. However, what is often lacking is a systematic appreciation of the specific practices of knowledge exchange and their relative merits. The paper reports on a...

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?

The organisation of veterinary specialisation was described as 'confusing and opaque' by Philip Lowe in his 2009 report into veterinary expertise in food animal production. Here, Andrew Gardiner, Professor Lowe and Justin Armstrong contrast the situation in the medical field with that in veterinary medicine and argue that a coherent model of veteri...

In the second of a series of articles reflecting on issues raised in the 2009 Lowe report on veterinary expertise in food animal production, Gareth Enticott, Philip Lowe and Katy Wilkinson discuss how extension of the political ideology known as neoliberalism is refashioning the veterinary profession in relation to food and farming, in both the UK...

Concern for the environment is a prominent feature of contemporary British politics and culture. Such concern is not new. Many of today's environmental pressure groups date from the turn of the century and a good deal of the legislation protecting the environment derives from the 1940s and 1950s. What is new, as Kimber and Richardson (1974) point o...

Animal and plant diseases pose a serious and continuing threat to food security, food safety, national economies, biodiversity and the rural environment. New challenges, including climate change, regulatory developments, changes in the geographical concentration and size of livestock holdings, and increasing trade make this an appropriate time to a...

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 begi...

Using primary survey data and interview evidence this paper analyses the implementation and enforcement of public and private environmental regulation in the Serbian Fresh Fruit and Vegetable (FFV) sector. This provides a basis for engaging in a wider debate on the nature of agri-food regulation in post-socialist economies. Depictions of the restru...

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The article seeks to initiate a debate on what part rural research plays in making real rural worlds. It does so through a review of the development of rural sociology. What started as a formal discipline in the United States in the early 20th century spread from there as part of the establishment of the post-war transatlantic liberal order. In the...

Regulation of Serbian agriculture’s water use is analysed as a basis for wider debate on European rule adoption. Three models that seek to explain patterns of non-compliance are assessed: external incentives; policy learning/lesson drawing; and Mediterranean syndrome. Although such models tend to be presented as competing frameworks, evidence sugge...

For the past decade, the policy community/issue network typology of pressure group interaction has been used to explain policy outcomes and the policy-making process. To re-examine the validity of this typology, the paper focuses on the UK government's response to the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) crisis, and in particular the decision to pursu...

In response to wide-ranging criticism of agricultural policy, especially within Western industrialized countries, new frameworks of justification are emerging and new hybrid policy fields have been established to tackle some of the ‘externalities’ of agricultural support. However, institutional frameworks are proving slower to change, partly becaus...

As the trend continues for veterinary practices to concentrate their services more on pet owners than the food industry, Philip Lowe asks whether vets run the risk of forfeiting their input into UK policy development and being branded as ‘just another private sector service industry’

Lowe P. and Ward N. England's rural futures: a socio-geographical approach to scenarios analysis, Regional Studies. The paper reports on an exercise to generate alternative future scenarios for rural England through a statistical approach set in a firm conceptual framework. It identifies predominant contemporary trends affecting England's rural are...

In a recent paper in this journal it was suggested that the conventional knowledge practices of disciplines are the fundamental obstacle to mutual understanding between academic experts. Such a position, we argue, underplays the institutional relationships that recreate expert and disciplinary divides. To demonstrate our case we discuss how in the...

Summary • The urgency and complexity of current environmental problems require ecologists to engage in cross-disciplinary research with social scientists, among others. • This study explores what ecologists expect from such cross-disciplinary engagements, through a review of editorial statements in key ecological journals and an empirical survey of...

Introduction Opening up fields of economic management to forms of environmental planning that are publicly accountable is a critical aspect of the transition of society towards sustainable development. But this is not an easy or straightforward task for those seeking to govern society. Indeed it has been at the core of environmental politics since...

The article discusses the evolution of the contemporary agri-food system, charting the increasing assertion of consumer concerns along the food chain and the resultant opposition to technology-driven models of food production. It sets out a case for closer integration between social and natural science research to reflect more effectively the compl...

ABSTRACT • Wild mammals have a long history of association with the human food chain, with some being the source for domesticated animals and others being considered traditionally as game species. Wild mammals are of negligible importance in terms of overall energy flows in agricultural ecosystems in Britain, but some wild mammals can have detrimen...

This paper provides an historical background to corporatist policy arrangements in British agriculture. It then examines recent changes in agricultural objectives, policy making, and conflicts. In particular it emphasises the politicisation of agriculture and tlie changed basis for corporatist initiative in policy making and implementation conseque...

Social scientists frequently find science and technology within their subject matter but, by and large, they do not subject them to critical analysis. This paper first shows how various approaches to explaining agriculture and environment all treat science and technology naively as black boxes. It then goes on to indicate how science and technology...

Dwyer J., Ward N., Lowe P. and Baldock D. (2007) European rural development under the Common Agricultural Policy's ‘Second Pillar’: institutional conservatism and innovation, Regional Studies 41, 873–887. The EU Rural Development Regulation (RDR) was launched in 2000 as the new ‘second pillar’ of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), promoting sust...

Rural areas in Europe have increasingly become cast as places of nature, and so consideration of sustainable rural development is preoccupied with the management and protection of environmental and natural resources. Yet rural areas are also places of business, commerce and living. This paper examines the character and treatment of rural economies...

When New Labour came to power in 1997, the party's manifesto had little to say about rural policy, beyond a proposal to allow a free vote to ban hunting with dogs and a commitment to establish a right to roam—essentially ‘old Labour’ and symbolic issues. However, in its early years the Blair government became drawn more heavily into rural policy re...

This paper provides an account of the origins and formation of the UK Research Councils' Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme and its approach to promoting interdisciplinary working between social and natural scientists. The programme is set in the context of broader developments in science policy, including a policy discourse centred upon s...

The divergent responses of three CEECs - Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia - to the common evolution of problems of agriculturally induced water pollution into matters of international concern is analysed from the end of their communist regimes to accession to the European Union (EU) in 2004. The early years of transition were characterised by an emer...

Since the early 1990s, the development of agri-environmental policy in the Central and Eastern European Countries has had to respond to the needs arising from the legacies of communist regimes and to the challenges of complying with the EU environmental acquis. Previous assessments of agri-environmental problems in the region have focused almost ex...

The article introduces the research commissioned under the first round of funding of the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme. The programme is a major UK Research Councils' initiative involving interdisciplinary research into many of the pressing public challenges facing the countryside. The bulk of funding under the first round of research propos...

The paper examines the implementation in England of the Rural Development Regulation (RDR), established in 1999 as the ‘Second Pillar’ to the Common Agricultural Policy. The paper argues that the limited UK allocation of European funds hampered the RDR's initial introduction. However, discretionary national funding decisions have meant that a radic...

The 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) epidemic effectively closed large parts of the UK countryside for several months. Local firms found their operations disrupted and suffered losses of trade. The individual and collective experiences of affected firms provide vivid insights into how rural businesses and the local economies they constitute operat...

The 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) epidemic cost over £8 billion and wreaked havoc upon the British countryside. The paper examines the institutional response to the crisis and the subsequent inquiries. Drawing on the 'garbage-can model' of organisational choice and ideas of 'policy framing', it argues that the institutional response to FMD was...

As environmental concerns press upon public policy so state agencies tend to enter into governmental 'partnerships' with environmental groups. On the one hand, these 'partnerships' allow the state to call upon forms of expertise held by the groups and to gain broad legitimacy for state policies. On the other hand, the development of policy partners...

According to Bruno Latour, the imposition of crude classificatory schemes onto complex entities has two main effects: firstly, the classifications lead social actors to sift the world into the schemes’ simple categories; secondly, underlying relations subvert the schemes’ functioning, resulting in the production of transgressive ‘hybrids’. Thus, cl...

A survey of farm households in Cumbria shows that foot and mouth disease (FMD) caused a 60% fall in revenue from traditional farm enterprises, a 17% reduction in earnings from diversified activities and a 15% fall in salaries from off-farm employment. Costs fell by 32%, leaving a net shortfall of £41,840. When analysed by farms which had had stock...

W ARD N., L OWE P. and B RIDGES T. (2003) Rural and regional development: the role of the Regional Development Agencies in England, Reg. Studies 37 , 201- 214. The Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) were established in 1999 to promote economic development in the English regions and inherited staff and programmes from the former Rural Development...

In the wake of BSE, the threat to ban fox hunting and Foot and Mouth disease, the English countryside appears to be in turmoil. Long-standing uses of rural space are in crisis and, unsurprisingly, political processes in rural areas are marked by conflicts between groups, such as farmers, environmentalists, developers and local residents. Using an i...

This paper adopts an actor-network theory approach in order to follow the associations of actors involved in the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) epidemic in the UK. We follow the chains of translation through three key stages: from virus to disease; from disease to crises in agriculture, the rural economy and rural policy; and from those crises t...

The paper examines the key new discretionary features of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) after the Agenda 2000 reforms. These include the possibilities for reallocating a proportion of farmers’ direct payments and the implementation of the Rural Development Regulation, hailed by the European Commission as the new ‘second pillar’ to the CAP. Th...

The paper identifies some key issues for public policy and for research arising from the recent outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease and from the approach that has been pursued to tackle the crisis. Although a number of EU countries have been affected, the paper reflects specifically on the experience of the UK where the outbreak appears to have star...

We argue that a “free” market — that is, a market in which the state does not intervene — is a theoretical impossibility in a state society. In place of the natural economy view of a market apart from the state, we offer a social economy view of the inescapable social structuring of markets through state regulation. Even when states institute polic...

The Government is currently setting up the Small Business Service (SBS), due to be introduced in April 2000, with the first franchises for local outlets being in place from April 2001. This is likely to have consequences for industrial and economic policy and for the way government supports and regulates businesses. As well as being of significance...

This paper considers and compares the responses of two EU Member States, France and the United Kingdom, to the EU Rural Development Regulation 1257/99. In proposing a range of measures concerning agricultural development, environmental protection and rural development, this Regulation seeks to redefine both the place of agricultural within rural te...

Cet article examinera, de manière comparative, les réponses de deux Etats membres de l'Union européenne, la France et la Grande-Bretagne, au Règlement communautaire 1257/99. En proposant une gamme de mesures relatives au développement agricole, à la protection de l'environnement et au développement rural, ce Règlement cherche à redéfinir à la fois...

There is currently considerable interest in devising and incorporating indicators into (amongst other things) agricultural and agri-environmental policies. The urgency of this process is increasing ahead of the impending World Trade Organization's inaugural scrutiny of such policies, and the perceived need for further reform of the Common Agricultu...

In this paper we examine the regulation of agricultural practice to reduce the risks of water pollution in England and Wales. We present case-study material concerning water pollution from farm livestock effluents and from agricultural pesticides, and focus on the ways in which farmers and farming practices are being reconfigured under the banner o...

December 1997 saw the Government publish its proposals for the establishment of Regional Development Agencies in England which, inter alia, will incorporate the rural regeneration work of the Rural Development Commission. These institutional changes come at a crucial time for rural policy with reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and European S...

This chapter examines the changing aspirations of farm households in rural Britain, focusing upon two aspects of contemporary farming - the phenomenon of farm succession, whereby the farm is passed on within the farm family from one generation to the next, and the changing environmental sensibilities among farm households. Almost all farm businesse...

England has one of the longest histories of industrialisation and urbanisation of any West European country. This has inevitably had a formative influence in the structuring of its social science research. For political scientists it has involved an almost overwhelming concern with urban political systems and industrial cleavages. An analysis of cl...

The influence of European environmental policy is transforming more than just the way that environmental protection is organised and implemented in the UK. The nature of environmental politics is also changing dramatically. The paper examines the implementation of the Bathing Waters Directive in the South West of England to illustrate how Europeani...

The authors define the rural economy not as a functional entity but as a complex, open system, the analysis of which requires an interdisciplinary approach oriented to the study of processes and interactions. This evolutionary perspective is illustrated by two generic studies of rural issues: the role played by the postwar planning regime in the de...

In this paper the emergence during the 1980s of a water pollution problem associated with intensive livestock production is examined. Farm pollution is socially constructed and is shaped by rural social change. Rural areas are experiencing social and economic restructuring with a resultant shift in emphasis from production to consumption concerns....