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Emeritus Professor, Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, University of Lancaster
Professor Robin Grove-White is Emeritus Professor in the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at the University of Lancaster. His research interests focus on the development and implementation of new and original social science-based approaches to 'environmental' research. This has entailed intellectual leadership - in synergy with a key collaborator, Professor Brian Wynne - in the creation and rapid development of Lancaster University's Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC).
Between 1991 and 2000 Professor Grove-White was Director of CSEG, where his role was to contribute both an integrating intellectual vision and the hands-on research leadership which have underpinned most of these results. This involved innovations in research aspiration and method; the successful negotiation, supervision and maintenance of new patterns of cross-disciplinary research funding and collaboration (from a sociology of knowledge base, but involving disciplines across the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities); and the systematic pursuit of fresh patterns of creative interaction with 'user' bodies as different as the Forestry Commission, the Health and Safety Executive, Greenpeace, World-Wide Fund for Nature, the Hadley Centre, Lancashire and Cumbria County Councils, Unilever, and the European Commission.
The activities have been driven by an underlying personal conviction that under contemporary political, geo-political, and cultural circumstances, new modes of research - and more particularly, of research relationship between academia and wider society - are now necessary, particularly in the 'environmental' domain. Most of my own academic publications to date (see below) have sought to elaborate this theme, and to communicate the ways in which CSEC's initiatives are seeking to help bring it to fruition.