Professor Terry Marsden keynote speaker at the ESRS conference

Director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute, Professor Terry Marsden, will be providing the keynote note speech at the European Society for Regional Sociology (ESRC) Conference in August this year. The conference is entitled "Places of Possibility? Rural societies in a Neoliberal World" is being held in Aberdeen, Scotland from August 18-21st 2015. 

The European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) was founded in 1957 and is the leading European association for researchers, policy makers and scientists interested in the study of rural issues. At the conference, Professor Marsden will be taking about his paper "New powers: Exploring the rural eco-economy beyond neoliberalism" which looks at how the current intensification of efforts to develop post-carbon solutions to the global food/energy security problems is developing a highly contested policy/technology/production/consumption arena; and examines how current attempts to resolve these new productivist priorities are embedded in combinations of sustainability, security, sovereignty and resource governance concerns. These conditions have profound implications for the management, regulation and spatial development of rural areas, with new contested framings of the bio-economy and the eco-economy; and further deepening of neo-liberalist regulation in some regions and the emergence of the 'New Rural Paradigm' in others. The paper argues that it is important to develop and apply a critical 'post-normal' sustainability science approach to developing the place-making properties of the eco-economic model of rural development, as well as examining the implications of the wider and more dominant bio-economic framing. Professor Marsden concludes that to achieve synergies between sustainability, security, sovereignty and effective resource governance, a more place-based eco-economic model of development needs to be progressed.