Research
- What is the potential of integrative concepts for nature management – especially the ‘Ecosystem Approach’ and ‘Nature-Based Solutions’ – to promote inclusive and holistic approaches? What can we reasonably expect of such initiatives and ideas, given the inherent limits of governing in complexity?
- How are different knowledges produced and used in decision-making? How do institutional capacities affect the use or influence of specific initiatives or datasets (especially those related to ‘Natural Capital’ or ‘Ecosystem Services’)? What does this mean for ‘mainstreaming’ new private sector groups into decision-making for nature?
- How are efforts for adaptive co-governance shaped and constrained by existing institutions and ways of working? Do new initiatives and institutions complicate or help navigate the resultant challenges? Do monitoring and evaluation programmes reflect and shape expectations of knowledge use?
Kerry’s main ongoing research projects
- Kerry leads ‘Galvanising Change via Natural Capital‘. This research explores if and how natural capital data and framings can be productive in galvanising changes for sustainability. This project also involves input from collaborators in SRUC. This project is funded by the Scottish Government RESAS Strategic Research Programme 2022-2027.
- Kerry researches (up)scaling and mainstreaming of catchment NbS in Scotland, as part of the broader ‘Aim NbS‘ project funded by the Scottish Government RESAS Strategic Research Programme 2022-2027.
- Kerry supports research on enrolling private sector actors and resources for sustainability, within the European-funded ‘MERLIN’ project, focused on catchment-based Nature-Based Solutions (NbS). MERLIN started in October 2021 and runs until early 2026.
Research approaches
Kerry takes a relational approach to understanding environmental governance challenges. Her work is nearly always collaborative – carried out with peers in academia, practitioners and those shaping conservation and nature management, such as NGO, policy and increasingly private sector actors. She predominantly uses interpretive qualitative research methods, e.g. collecting data from semi-structured interviews, workshops, participant observation, analysed using mixed inductive and deductive approaches. She also has expertise in quantitative methods for primary and secondary data collection and analysis. The conceptual basis of individual projects varies, but build on ideas from institutional and ecological economics, policy studies, and Science & Technology Studies (STS). Funding ranges from strategic longer-term research funded by the European Commission, the Scottish Government, through to more focused work via funders such as Alternet and NatureScot.
Kerry has co-supervised 2 completed PhD students. Kirsty Holstead built understanding of community water governance, funded by a Hydronation scholarship, with Dr Shona Russell at the University of St Andrews (PhD obtained 2023). Sam Poskitt appraised the potential of scenario-planning to support learning for sustainable development, joint funded by ESRC and the James Hutton Institute, with Dr Andrew Ainslie at the University of Reading (PhD obtained 2018). She is open to other supervisory relationships, dependent on securing funding.
Other roles
Her commitment to normative change and transdisciplinarity is reflected in a variety of engagements with policy and professional peers. Long-running engagements have been as her role as chair of the Sustainable Land Management Group (SLMG) of the Scottish Forum for Natural Capital (SFNC) and a member of the advisory group of the NatureScot Farming with Nature programme.
Kerry is also a trustee of the Orskov Foundation, a charitable foundation that supports students and communities to develop sustainable land use to support livelihoods in lower-income countries. Her own current research is mostly based in Europe, but she is always interested to support sustainable development in the Global South – which relates to her past research and field experience.
Past research
Within MAGIC ‘Moving Towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: Informing Nexus Security‘, funded by EU H2020, she carried out transdisciplinary research to prompt reflection on the suitability of European policy processes for nexus governance, particularly in relation to sustainable agriculture.
In 2021 she collaborated with Robin Pakeman and Mark Wilkinson on a SEFARI fellowship to identify a framework for implementing and evaluating NbS in Scotland.
She jointly led research with Kirsty Blackstock on how to achieve joined-up approaches to land and natural resource management that deliver to multiple societal goals. This also encompasses exploration of how interacting policy instruments shape consideration of tradeoffs in natural resource management, and the opportunities for ‘new’ private sector actors or new instruments such as Payments for Ecosystem Services. This was funded by the Scottish Government RESAS Strategic Research Programme 2016-2022.
Prior to that she jointly led work with Kirsty to understand the potential and challanges of implementing the Ecosystem Approach, funded by the Scottish Government RESAS Strategic Research Programme 2011-2016. This and several other projects have explored multi-level constraints on adopting more systemic and/or participatory approaches to environmental management, including: exploration of the barriers to implementing natural flood management in Scotland; analysing the first round of River Basin Management Planning for implementation of the Water Framework Directive in Scotland; and appraising the factors that can act as barriers to improving water quality.
She has explored the potential of scenario-planning to support natural resource management: she first explored scenarios of future change environmental, social and policy change for FP7-project REFRESH, then for COMET-LA (an EU FP7 project on Community-based Management of Environmental Challenges in Latin America) she explored if and how scenario-planning can assist communities to identify and develop sustainable community-based management. From 2012-16 Kerry used this knowledge to support Malawian villages and district-level planning for integrated natural resource management in two projects called “Water Futures: Towards Equitable Resource Strategies” aimed to improve the resilience of Malawia’s water management, whilst successor project ‘MAJI’ focused on how to take account of climate change.
Kerry has expertise on knowledge co-production processes relating to environmental management: she co-led WP2 for the FP7 project ‘SPIRAL’ (Science Policy Interfaces for Research Action and Learning, for biodiversity). She has used this expertise to help support practical science-policy connections in later projects such as MAGIC. For example, she helped designed the ESPPI:CREW project to evaluate science-policy and practice links for the Scottish Centre of Expertise in Waters and was involved in CATCH II, an initiative which aimed to try to better connect policy, practitioners working in and for integrated catchment management. In 2017-18 she a multi-partner collaboration “Monitoring and Evaluation for Ecosystem Management (MEEM) – Comparing theory and practice across Europe” to assess the extent to which adaptive management is supported by the monitoring driven by key European policies. This was funded as a ‘High Impact Action’ funded by ALTER-Net, Europe’s ecosystem research network.
Prior to working at the James Hutton Institute Kerry’s PhD research, carried out at Imperial College London 2006-2009, examined how combinations of individual views, culture and local institutions could influence the outcomes of community-based conservation in the Global South. In addition to policy-relevant work with NGOs, her prior experience included social research into attitudes towards nature resources in Trinidad, as part of an MSc from Imperial College. Her first degree is a MA in Natural Sciences, from the University of Cambridge.
