Hugh Campbell

Hugh has a long relationship with both the University of Otago and the Centre for Sustainability. He was an undergraduate at the University in the 1980s, and then completed a Masters in Social Anthropology at the university in 1988. He then spent time at Lincoln University where an academic interest in rural sociology, agriculture and sustainability began to form. Following completion of his PhD in Rural Sociology at the Centre for Rural Social Research, Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, he returned to the University of Otago in 1994 and developed university courses on rural society in New Zealand and on the global politics of food. In 2000, he was appointed founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Agriculture, Food and Environment at the University of Otago – the centre that subsequently grew into the Centre for Sustainability.

During his career at Otago, Hugh has had leadership roles in many research projects funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MSI). From 1995–2002, he was the Programme Leader of an MSI-funded programme, Greening Food: Social and Industry Dynamics. This programme examined the social and economic dimensions of developing sustainable agriculture in New Zealand. Specifically, the programme examined the development of organic production and Integrated Pest Management systems by food export organisations like Zespri and ENZA.

After 2003, Hugh co-led the social research team in the MSI-funded Agriculture Research Group on Sustainability (ARGOS) Programme. Working with the kiwifruit, dairy, and sheep/beef sectors, the ARGOS programme brought together 30 researchers from Otago and Lincoln Universities, and from the Agribusiness Group in Christchurch. It undertook a long-term study of social, economic and environmental dynamics on a group of over 100 farms and orchards in New Zealand. That project was extended through 2013–2018 as the NZ Sustainability Dashboard project.

From 2009–2014, Hugh was co-PI of the Marsden fund project Biological Economies: Making and Knowing New Rural Values. This project brought together researchers from across rural sociology and geography in New Zealand and resulted in the publication of two collections:

Biological Economies: Experimentation and the politics of agri-food frontiers (2016)

The New Biological Economy. How New Zealanders are creating value from the land (2018)

As a researcher, Hugh has published work on the social and economic dynamics of 'greening' food systems, the politics of sustainability under neoliberal governance, achieving sustainability via audits, food waste, transitions in agriculture and food systems in New Zealand, and theories of global food regimes.

In 2020, he published a book with Bloomsbury Academic –Farming Inside Invisible Worlds: Modernist Agriculture and its Consequences – on the agency of farms in the colonisation of New Zealand, the creation of modernist farming as the dominant for of land-use in New Zealand, and the many ways in which alternatives to modernist farming are emerging. The book is available on open access at www.bloomsburycollections.com