Jonathan Dolley
Associate Fellow (SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit)

Research

I research the links between urban development policy, peri-urban food systems and potential transformations towards sustainable urbanisation in rapidly urbanising countries with an emphasis on how research can contribute to empowering marginalised groups to shape those transformations.

DPhil research: Sustainability, Resilience and Governance of an Urban Food System in China: A Case Study of Peri-Urban Wuhan.

My DPhil research focused on China with a case study of an urban food system in Wuhan. The central research question was: 

What are the implications for peri-urban producers of government policies to promote food system resilience and what are the lessons for enhancing sustainability and resilience in urban food systems?

My thesis concluded that the current approach to governance of Wuhan’s peri-urban vegetable system is building an increasingly exclusionary pattern of resilience. It is a form of resilience building which is likely to undermine broader normative sustainability goals around social justice and environmental integrity and have mixed future implications for food system resilience as a whole, particularly in relation to livelihood outcomes for peri-urban farmers and food safety outcomes for urban consumers in general.

The key lessons from this research are that the concept of resilience can be used to support either a narrowing down or an opening up of normative framings of system outcomes and can contribute to obscuring or revealing the multiple process of change unfolding across the levels of system context, structures and actors. These dualities in the way that resilience thinking can contribute to normative and analytical framings need to be explicitly acknowledged if serious unintended consequences of resilience building interventions are to be avoided.

Risks and Responses to Urban Futures (2015-2016):

As a research fellow on this ESPA (espa.ac.uk) funded transdisciplinary project with partners in India I was involved in analysing the connections between urbanisation, changes in peri-urban ecosystem services and experiences of poverty and health risks among peri-urban farmers.

STEPS Centre Urban Theme (2016-2017):

In this project I was part of a research team reflecting on and investigating how transdisciplinary research can contribute to challenging elite capture of urban development policy and democratising urban environmental agendas through working with alliances of poor and pro-poor actors over long periods across multiple research projects.

Understanding trade-offs between SDGs in urbanising contexts: Novel methods of mapping rural-urban interactions in food systems to analyse risks and opportunities for environmental and human health (2017 - present).

For this Sussex Sustainability Research Fund (SSRP) project I am working with our University's informatics department along with a wider team from across multiple schools to explore ways of integrating computational methods with transdisciplinary research for mapping, analysing and visually communicating the interactions between urbanisation, urban pollution, peri-urban food systems and human health in India and China.