Matthew Quinn
MA (Oxon)
Distinguished Visiting Fellow
- Welsh speaking
Overview
After thirty years as a civil servant innovating in the field of sustainability, planning and environment, I am now very fortunate to have the chance to consider the opportunities and challenges of that work from an academic standpoint. My research interest is in governance and sustainability, including transformation; co-production and participative governance; governance aspects of ecosystem resilience and services; place attachment; distributed economy, and society-science-policy interfaces.
Biography
I am an experienced public policy innovator with a track-record of delivering cutting-edge change, most recently here in Wales with the creation of Natural Resources Wales, the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Environment (Wales) Act 2016. Early career work in Whitehall included being part of the team that produced This Common Inheritance, the first UK Environment White Paper (1990) and authoring Planning Policy Guidance Note 13 Transport (1994) on planning to reduce the need to travel, drawing on research undertaken on a Nuffield and Leverhume Fellowship in 1992-93. I was appointed a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cardiff University for the period 2017-2022 and am currently on secondment from Welsh Government to the Sustainable Places Research Institute.
Honours and awards
Nuffield and Leverhulme Travelling Fellowship 1992-93, International Approaches to transport and the environment.
Within my broad interdisciplinary interest in governance and sustainability, I am currently undertaking specific work on:
- ecosystem and place-based partnerships, looking in particular at motivations and values of participants and the link to theoretical models of governance;
- sustainability transformation and governance, including barriers, innovations and the role of legislation
- historical and theoretical analysis of inherited systems, values, and tools of governance in the context of sutainability
