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Greener Futures Ulrike Ehgartner, Bob Doherty, Frank Boons and Clarence Bluntz
Event details
Our food system is really complex. And it has some major problems.
Food-related activities affect and are affected by socio-economic and environmental drivers. Businesses are amongst the most powerful of these. The question is, how can we design transformative business models to support planetary and human health?
Join our panel to find out how, together with Maastricht University in the Netherlands, the University of York is developing tools to assist small, local businesses that want to help transform our food system into one that is fairer, more resilient and fit for a Net Zero future.
This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
York-Maastricht Partnership
The York-Maastricht Partnership is a major strategic investment between the universities of York and Maastricht, intended to develop a deep and lasting relationship, and built around excellent sustainability research, teaching and knowledge exchange. The Partnership is very proud to support an event on a key theme to our new 'Creating a Greener Future' strategy.
About the speakers
Ulrike Ehgartner is a social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She joined the University of York in August 2021 as a Research Associate on the FixOurFood programme, researching local food economy initiatives and how they can impact production to consumption in a regenerative way. She is interested in sustainability, consumption and transformational change, with a focus on questions related to environmental issues, social inequality, agency and behaviour change. Concerned with how framings and understandings of social challenges are interrelated with policy making, collective individual behaviour and physical environments, her work focuses on the interplay between discourses, imaginaries and practices.
Bob Doherty is Dean of the School for Business and Society at the University of York and Principal Investigator of a 5-year programme called FixOurFood - transformations to Regenerative Food Systems from the Transforming Food Systems UK Strategic Priorities Fund, which will run from 2021-2026. This programme is funded by the Biotechnology Biological Sciences Research Council. Bob was seconded in April 2019-March 2022 into the UK Government Department, DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) as a policy fellow to work on Food Systems policy development. Before moving into academia in 2003, Bob spent 14 years working in the agrifood industry - first eight years in Animal Health for Coopers Pitman Moore, then five years as Head of Sales and Marketing at Divine Chocolate Ltd.
Frank Boons is professor of Political Economy of Sustainability at Maastricht University and Director of the Maastricht Sustainability Institute at the School of Business and Economics. He is also actively involved in SUM2030, the programme to link up sustainability across the university and make a concerted contribution to the sustainable development of the EU Region Maas-Rijn. Frank is also part of the UK’s National Initiative on Circular Economy Research (NICER), contributing in the Research Centre on critical metals, and as strategic advisor to the NICER Hub. Frank is also a senior Academic Fellow at the chief scientific advisory office (CSAO) of DEFRA, the UK Ministry of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. His research revolves around processes of transition in systems of provision towards sustainability. Frank has contributed to several areas with the aim of bringing in socio-economic and business perspectives into the environmental sciences. In doing so, he has helped shape the research on, and practice of, industrial symbiosis, sustainable business models and sustainable socio-technical transitions.
Clarence Bluntz joined Maastricht University in April 2021. Before that, he lived and worked in Paris and Berlin. He holds a PhD in management from Paris-Dauphine University. The focus of his PhD research was on the introduction of sustainability accounting into organisational processes. At the Maastricht Sustainability Institute, Clarence teaches on the joint Master’s programme between the University of York and Maastricht University.
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