Inge-Merete Hougaard

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

Currently, I am working on a collaborative action research project, Narratives and Co-creation in Multifunctional Land Consolidation, in which we explore the role of storytelling in the co-creation of landscapes in the context of multifunctional land consolidation in Denmark. The project is implemented in collaboration with three municipalities and the Danish Nature Agency, and we investigate how stories and narratives about the landscape and its history, as well as about citizens and public authorities, emerge in negotiations about the landscape and landscape values. Likewise, we explore how storytelling can become part of the process of co-creating new landscapes – including the role 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.

Previously, I have worked on resource rights, ethnic recognition and collective territories in the context of sand extraction in Colombia, as well as carbon dioxide removal through biochar and carbon capture and storage (CCS), and what role the promise of negative emissions play in Danish climate policy.

Theoretically, I am primarily inspired by political ecology and science and technology studies (STS), while I methodologically use ethnographic methods, participant observations, household surveys and interviews, as well as audio-visual methods.