Fully-funded PhD position interested in the links between finance and rural development and the implications of these links for social, economic, and environmental justice.
The Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Faculty of Landscape and Society (LANDSAM) at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) has a vacant three-year PhD–position.
The world is an ever more financial place. Finance is increasingly central to models of economic and social development, from the local to the international scale. While finance is often associated with images of gleaming office towers and busy urban centres, it is no less important to rural areas in the global North and South alike. This PhD position invites candidates to develop research ideas on the links between finance and rural development processes, as well as the implications of these links for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Scholars exploring the expansion of finance have defined financialisation as comprising the growing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial channels in economic and social life. Many suggest that the phenomenon involves new patterns of profit-making that construe a structural shift in the character of contemporary capitalism. A sizeable body of work analysing financialisation from political economy and other heterodox economic approaches now exists. Critiques emphasizing the empirical and political limits to financialisation are also on the rise.
Financialisation is transforming development agendas, programmes, and initiatives. Indeed, the phenomenon may be shifting the way that development is understood. Rural peoples long excluded from access to credit and other forms of finance are becoming more tightly integrated into capital markets.
Agriculture, conservation, forestry and other rural-centred resource sectors are being transformed into new types of assets for distant investors. Yet there is increasing skepticism that these changes represent a democratisation of finance or that finance-led development yields exclusively positive social, economic and ecological outcomes.
We welcome research proposals by applicants undertaking case study, comparative, or conceptual inquires into:
- The implications of particular financial logics, practices, instruments and programmes for specific agriculture, conservation, forestry, or other rural-centred resource sectors and initiatives aiming to benefit local populations;
- The changing role and/or growing emphasis placed on finance in particular rural development programmes, agendas, and initiatives;
- Rural microfinance, safety-net and financial inclusion programmes intended to boost access to financial resources by rural residents;
- Theoretically-inclined research questions, for example, concerning the implications of financialisation for the agrarian question and socially-differentiated processes of rural transition;
- Related topics at the intersection between finance and rural development.
The main supervisor of the PhD Candidate will be Dr. Melanie Sommerville.
The applicant is made aware that an application for a PhD position at NMBU is at the same time an application for admission to a PhD programme at the institution. The documentation that is necessary to ensure that the admission requirements are met must be uploaded as an attachment.
Please feel free to circulate the position announcement to those who might be interested and/or to consider applying yourself : https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/241312/phd-in-international-environment-and-development-studies-finance-and-rural-development