Position
senior lecturer / associate professor

Background

MSc Human Geography, PhD Social Sciences, Catholic University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Rural Development Sociologist specialized in agrarian transformation processes in Africa with an emphasis on land reform, small scale farming, technology development and social change, endogenous development and rural livelihoods. Over the years, he has done substantive fieldwork on socio-technical dimensions of maize and soil fertility (re)production in Kenya and land reform in South Africa. Theoretically he combines actor perspectives with broader questions related to political economy.

He supervises a substantial number of MSc and PhD research projects and is external examiner and reviewer of journals. He is also member of the Netherlands Committee of the South African Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD).

In 2006 he is appointed adjunct Professor at the University of Fort Hare, Alice, South Africa.

Languages
Dutch and English (fluent); German, French and Swahili (fair)

Research
Styles of farming, technology and strategic niche management; the impact of the introduction of agro-technology on poverty (with cases from West Kenya and Zimbabwe), agricultural and rural development dynamics in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, and land and livelihoods in East and Central Africa. More recently, land reform and processes of land restitution is studied from an actor perspective.
Regional specialisations are on East, Central and Southern Africa.

Publications
publications for Wageningen University

Collaboration
a range of Universities in Kenya (University of Nairobi), Zimbabwe (University of Zimbabwe) and South Africa (University of Fort Hare, Rhodes University, University of Kwazulu-Natal) as well as agricultural research institutions and NGO’

Keywords

rural development sociology, agrarian transformation, small scale farming, technology development and social change, endogenous development and rural livelihoods.

Teaching  

Businesscard

we@wur