Employees

Renate Marie Butli Hårstad is a researcher at Ruralis, where she has worked since 2015. She holds a master’s degree in political science from NTNU and defended her PhD in 2025 with the dissertation Animal Welfare in Transition – Ideas and Politics in the Norwegian Animal Welfare Field. The dissertation examines how animal welfare policy is shaped and transformed by the influence of new actors, ideas, and political tensions, and has helped establish animal welfare as a research field within political science.

Hårstad’s research spans agricultural policy, animal welfare, advisory systems, technology and change processes in agriculture, rural development, and sustainable food production. She has worked on projects including AGRILINK (Horizon2020) on advisory and knowledge systems in European agriculture; SmaT on smart technology for sustainable farming; GoodAnimal on animal welfare and sustainability in Norwegian food production; WELFARM on improving regulatory compliance in dairy and pig farming; Karbonmat on sustainable business models for soil carbon sequestration; and AGRILAND+ on utilizing Norwayʼs lost and underused agricultural land reserves.

She has served as work package leader in several Research Council of Norway–funded projects and works with both qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, surveys, document analysis, observational studies, and statistical analysis (STATA). Hårstad also has experience in research dissemination, teaching, and peer review, and has served as an external examiner at NTNU.