Inge-Merete Hougaard

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With a background in Political Ecology, International Development Studies and Public Administration, I study the everyday politics of rights, access to and use of land and resources, including negotiations over nature and landscape values. My main research interests revolve around resource rights, climate politics, state-making and landscape change. 

Currently, I am involved in two research projects. Narratives and Co-creation in Multifunctional Land Consolidation is an action research project, developed and implemented in collaboration with three municipalities and the Danish Nature Agency. We investigate how stories and narratives about the landscape and its history emerge in negotiations about the landscape and landscape values in the process of multifunctional land consolidation. Likewise, we explore how storytelling can become part of the process of co-creating new landscapes – including stories of non-human actors. I am particularly interested in exploring conceptualisations of nature , and how questions about the right to access and use of land and resources emerge in the co-creation process between landowners, other citizens and public institutions.

The other project, based at Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), focusses on climate politics and the role of negative emissions. In the project, we explore the promise that negative emissions holds for future carbon reductions, and the risk this implies in terms of delaying or deterring climate change mitigation efforts. Focussing on Denmark, I explore the discursive and material manifestations of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) practices, specifically biochar and carbon capture and storage (CCS). Combining political ecology with science and technology studies (STS), I am particularly interested in how temporalities, infrastructures, and socio-technical imaginaries converge with state-making and national identity, as well as ways in which negative emissions are enacted.