Date: Wednesday 11 October 2017
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Ian Hodge
Talk Title: ‘Neoliberalism, Institutional Blending and the Governance of Rural Land’
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College

The next St Catharine’s Political Economy Seminar in the series on the Economics of Austerity, will be held on 11 October, 2017 – Ian Hodge will give a talk on ‘Neoliberalism, Institutional Blending and the Governance of Rural Land’. The seminar will be held in the Ramsden Room at St Catharine’s College from 6.00-7.30 pm. All are welcome. The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Speaker:
Ian Hodge is Professor of Rural Economy in the Department of Land Economy and Fellow of Hughes Hall at the University of Cambridge, where he has worked since 1983. He was Head of Department of Land Economy between 2002-2011. His primary research interests are in rural environmental governance, policy and economics, property institutions and rural development. He has previously worked at the Universities of Queensland in Australia and Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. He has a PhD in Countryside Planning from Wye College, University of London and a BSc from the University of Reading.

Talk Overview:
There is a large literature on neoliberalism. Over time the literature has expanded to cover a variety of different issues. It is almost universally critical and has become increasingly incoherent and contradictory. One thread within neoliberalism, focusing on property rights, casts the debate in terms of public ownership and intervention versus private enterprise and ‘free’ markets. However, this obscures a more significant trend towards new approaches in governance that fall between these extremes that we term institutional blending. This recognises the major role of civil society, reallocation of property rights, provision of assurance and of public, private and third sector partnerships. It includes a role for an interventionist state that embraces many of the mechanisms that have been developed through neoliberal approaches. These will be illustrated taking examples from rural land management. The discussion questions whether this may represent a post-neoliberal approach to public governance.

Please contact the seminar organisers Philip Arestis (pa267@cam.ac.uk) and Michael Kitson (mk24@cam.ac.uk) in the event of a query