Darnhofer, Ika

Darnhofer, Ika

Associate Professor

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.

Websites

Contact information

Dept. of Economics and Social Sciences

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU)

Feistmantelstrasse 4

1180 Vienna

 Guttenberghaus, first floor, right corridor, room OG1/23.

Recent publications

Relevant publications