Profile
Dr Pete Barbrook-Johnson is a Departmental Research Lecturer in the Economics of Environmental Change in the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) and the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment, both in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He is also a member of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford, and a Research Associate at St Catherine's College.
Pete's core research interests sit at the crossroads of social science and economics, complexity science, and environmental and energy policy. He uses a range of methods in his research including agent-based modelling, network analysis, and systems mapping. He regularly uses these, and other methods, to explore applied social, economic, and policy questions, and to support complexity-appropriate policy evaluation, but is equally interested in more theoretical aspects of complex adaptive systems.
Pete teaches on a range of undergraduate and masters courses across the School of Geography and the Environment, specialising in the economics of environmental change, and the use of complexity and systems sciences in environmental issues.
He has conducted research with and for the likes of UK government departments/agencies such as Defra, BEIS, the Environment Agency, and the Health and Safety Executive; and businesses such as Anglian Water and Mott Macdonald. Internationally, he has collaborated with research institutes and government in China, South Africa, Italy, and Ethiopia.
Pete is also a member of the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN) and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation (CRESS) and Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Previously, Pete was a UKRI-ESRC Innovation Fellow and Senior Research Fellow working on public-private partnerships and collaboration, a 'Knowledge Integrator' in CECAN, a Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, and a PhD student and then Research Fellow at CRESS. Prior to his PhD, Pete studied Economics at the University of East Anglia, before completing his MSc in Environmental Technology (specialising in Environmental Economics and Policy) at Imperial College London.