04.08.2023
On July 21, 2023, Jonathan Friedrich successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Sustainability Transitions in German Livestock Farming: The Role of Innovations, Incumbents, and Imagined Futures".
The successful defense took place at the Faculty of Geosciences and Geography of the Georg-August-University Göttingen. The Doctoral Committee awarded the outstanding quality of the dissertation
summa cum laude.
In his dissertation, Jonathan Friedrich investigated the interactions of societal visions of the future with bio-economic innovation processes and actors of existing regimes in regions of intensive livestock farming in Germany. He used a qualitative-empirical approach to understand the actors and mechanisms of sustainability transformations in livestock production.
His findings convincingly show that transformation processes in livestock production are emergent and mainly discursively driven by endogenous actors such as non-governmental organizations. His work also shows that bio-economic and manure-based innovations can potentially contribute to the use of manure surpluses, but also discusses the risks associated with these developments. One example is the risk of stabilizing existing socio-metabolic material flows. In his dissertation, Jonathan Friedrich also shows that livestock farms currently have little agency to deal with the challenges of sustainability issues and transformations. Therefore, these actors need support in order to meet the challenges of transformation processes, as they are made necessary by legislative changes (e.g. amendment of the fertilizer ordinance). The results have been published in several international peer-reviewed journals and are publicly available (see attached list).
Jonathan Friedrich was jointly supervised at ZALF by Prof. Dr. Jana Zscheischler and Dr. Sandra Uthes (co-leaders of the BMBF junior research group "BioKum") and at the Georg-August University of Göttingen by Prof. Dr. Heiko Faust (Professor for Social Geography of Sustainable Resource Use). Prof. Dr. Heiko Faust chaired the doctoral committee.
We congratulate Jonathan Friedrich and wish him continued success!
Overview of publications by Jonathan Friedrich:
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Friedrich J, Bunker I, Uthes S, Zscheischler J. 2021. The potential of bioeconomic innovations to contribute to a social-ecological transformation – A case study in the livestock system.
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 34: 24.
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Friedrich J, Zscheischler J, Faust H. 2021. Social-ecological transformation and COVID-19: The need to revisit working-class environmentalism.
GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 30(1): 18-22.
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Friedrich J, Najork K, Keck M, Zscheischler J. 2022. Bioeconomic fiction between narrative dynamics and a fixed imaginary: Evidence from India and Germany.
Sustainable Production and Consumption 30: 584-595.
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Friedrich J, Zscheischler J, Faust H. 2022. Preservation, Modernization, and Transformation: Contesting bioeconomic imaginations of “manure futures” and trajectories toward a sustainable livestock system.
Sustainability Science 17:2221-2235.
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Friedrich J, Faust H, Zscheischler J. 2023, forthcoming. Incumbents’ in/ability to drive endogenous sustainability transitions in livestock farming: Lessons from Rotenburg (Germany).
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions.
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Friedrich J, Holz J, Koch P, Pungas L, Eversberg D, Zscheischler J. 2023. Rural bioeconomies in Europe: Socio-ecological conflicts, marginalized people and practices.
GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 32(2): 219-224.
