Transition Land Economies

The transition town movement seems a fine thing, and it's hard not to trip over it everywhere. If we're to take peak oil and the consequent energy descent seriously, then Plan A it seems is business as usual but with a different energy source.  The sceptical transitioner is not prepared to bet their livelihood on that option, and market towns (and inner cities) up and down the town are organising events to look at local growing, increased efficiency and so on.  A really interesting expansion of Plan B would be to think about it in terms of transition land economies - transition town are often surrounded by lots of food growing land after all, and those livelihoods are would to be profoundly affected by transition too.  There's a reasons market towns are called market towns, and a mark of success would be if there wasn't room for the olives any more at farmer's markets.

Time management

Has anyone done any research on:

• Whether presentations on time management run to time?
• Whether there is evidence that evidence based policy works any better than any other kind?
• What capacities are needed for capacity building?

A rural story editor for the Archers

One of the original ideas of the Archers was to provide information on modern agricultural techniques to farmers with food security etc. etc in mind..  It's been going since 1950, and I've never met a farmer that listens to it though sometimes I've been too embarrassed to ask.  The programme still has an agricultural story editor, and still drops in quite heavy-handed information about farming techniques. But it's remit is much wider and it covers a host of social issues, often cited as an inspiration for some of the uses of broadcast media in community development.

So given that the programme is very likely one of the key sources of information about the rural world for a large number of people who don't live there - why not have a rural story editor?  Rural rather than or alongside  agricultural expertise is well established in both  academia and policy, and it's different.  Why worry so much about the technical information that gets dropped in the programme relating to agriculture, when it's the rural stories that matter most to society?

Satnav studentship

A really nice CASE studentship would be with one of the big satnav manufacturers or someone like the Carbon Trust. The idea would be to look at the sustainability implications of adding a least-cost option to route-finding software, as well as enabling cost tracking.  These translate nicely into carbon-reduction if there is an effect on consumer behaviour.   It would give a corporate sponsor a significant showcase project that may well prove popular with consumers.

 The student could spend the months of their masters project looking at the feasibility of producing a satnav device with this capability from a triple-bottom line point of view, including life cycle analysis, to work out what sort of effect it would need on consumer behaviour and how popular it would need to be in order to be worth doing.

The PhD project would then seek to investigate the potential for behaviour change, and may involve some software development too.