Darnhofer, Ika
Institute of Agricultural and Forestry Economics Department of Economic and Social Sciences BOKU - Univ. of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria
Research interest
My research focus is on management and decision making on family farms. Although I appreciate the value of the various tools of neoclassical economics for informing farm management on the short-term and for commercial farms, I find they are limited in their ability to capture the complexity family farmers face, when making decisions over the medium to long term. I am also convinced that limiting ourselves to quantitative data and mathematical analysis curtails our ability to capture important aspects of events.
Currently my research focuses on resilience as a primary management goal of family farmers. Although resilience thinking has primarily been applied at the spatial level of whole social-ecological systems, I believe that many principles can be applied at the farm level, and that these will help us understand how farmers manage their farm under real-life conditions.
Biography
I have been working at the BOKU since 2000, after a few years in the private sector. While my current research focuses on Europe, I did research in Kenya for my MSc and spent two years in Ethiopia for my PhD. But I still like to travel, so that in 2008 I enjoyed the opportunity to spend a 6-month sabbatical at Lincoln University in New Zealand, and in 2015 I spent another sabbatical at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.