Employees

Dr Rob Burton is a rural geographer/sociologist from New Zealand who has been living and working in Norway since 2011. Over a 25 year career in research he has been involved in research projects across a range of topics including: animal welfare, agri-environmental policy, farming culture, climate change, bioeconomy, cultured protein, and agricultural transition. Since arriving at Ruralis he has instigated and led a number of research projects including on climate transitions in the beef/dairy sector (NEWPATH, 2014), the development of a bioeconomy in Norway (BIOSMART, 2014), and the potential impact of synthetic animal proteins on the Norwegian economy (PROTEIN2.0, 2019).  In addition, he has co-written funded projects on crowdfunding for climate measures in agriculture (COOLCROWD, 2017) and integrating the bioeconomy with regional food systems (SYNAGRI, 2021). In 2021 he was lead author of a monograph entitled “The Good Farmer: Culture and Identity in Food and Agriculture” and currently has 49 peer-reviewed publications listed in the academic search engine Scopus. He is on the editorial board of Land Use Policy and is a regular reviewer for numerous journals.