Hearing of citizens in municipality amalgamation

Foto: Colourbox
Foto: Colourbox

The project will look at the impact of the various forms of citizen participation had on the decisions made in the municipality amalgamation reform. The project “Citizen Participation at municipal amalgamation” is called for and funded by the Local government organization (KS). The project objective is to obtain more knowledge about how citizen participation in municipality amalgamation reform has been planned and implemented. The project aims to give municipalities more knowledge about how they should carry out citizen participation.

News

Artificial meat as a mirror of society

Such products, it is said, will be able to provide future consumers with affordable and satisfactory alternatives to…

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Publications

  • Article

2025

A-4/25 The impact of “artificial wool” on the New Zealand wool industry: Lessons for future substitution transitions in the agricultural sector

Contributors: Hugh Campbell
About the Result

Writers: Rob J.F. Burton, Hugh Campbell 

Biotechnology promises a technological solution to the development of sustainable food systems – not by making practices in contemporary agriculture more sustainable, but by completely replacing large sections of the food and fibre value chain. Historical examples illustrate how substitution technologies can be devastating for the agricultural sector (e.g., alizarin and indigotin dyes), but also how they can have vastly differing and complex outcomes (e.g., margarine and vanillin). In arguing for a need for a greater understanding of substitution transitions, we investigate the impact of cellulose-based artificial fibres (rayon) on New Zealand’s wool industry between 1910 and 1955. Using a publicly available database of New Zealand newspapers the study constructs the history of events from reports at the time and, importantly, analyses the response of the wool growing industry to the emerging threat of product substitution. We identify price fluctuations in agriculture that favoured artificial fibre production, a failure of the wool industry to appreciate the new industrial attributes of artificial fibres, the structuring effects of surrounding wars, and the presence of narratives of non-response as having significant influences over the substitution. To illustrate the utility of the findings, we draw conclusions concerning how substitutions might develop in the future, focusing on the case of cultivated animal proteins.

Journal of Rural Studies, Volume 114, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2025.103578

  • Article

2021

A-11/21 The promised land? Exploring the future visions and narrative silences of cellular agriculture in news and industry media

Contributors:

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