Lincoln Academic´s Tenure Review Research

American Journal To Carry Overview Of Lincoln Academic´s Tenure Review Research

Lincoln University public policy lecturer Dr Ann Brower, who has been under some criticism by interest groups for her research findings on the politics and economics of the High Country Land Tenure Review, will see the issue aired soon in a top U.S. range management journal.

An overview article by Dr Brower, summarising most of her findings made in a report following her year as a Fulbright Scholar, has been successfully peer reviewed - a process involving several rounds of anonymous assessment and evaluation - and accepted for publication by the journal´s editor and associate editor after their own review of the material.

The wider work, first written-up in Dr Brower´s report to Fulbright-New Zealand, has been peer-reviewed in university seminars in New Zealand and the United States of America and by academic conferences in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Dr Brower holds a Masters degree in Forest Science from Yale University and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and won a string of top scholarships and awards along the way at both leading American institutions.

Her awards included a Berkeley Fellowship for doctoral study, awarded only to the very top echelon of PhD students entering Berkeley. At Yale, she received three scholarships for students in the forest resource management area. And she received the Morris K Udall Fellowship for doctoral research in environmental policy. Only two of these are awarded per year in the whole United States.

Dr Brower is bemused by the reaction to her research, which she has presented to academic audiences in New Zealand, the United States and Canada.

"I lecture in public policy, so I study how and why governments make decisions.

"In the case of my New Zealand work, it just so happened that it related to farm and high country usage. I specialise in natural resource politics. The `natural resource´ involved here was high country leasehold land. Tenure review is a question of law and economics, and of the politics that relates those two. My interest is at the intersection of law and economics. That intersection is politics."

Dr Brower says she is aware of wide interest in this issue and is pleased as a social scientist to be able to contribute information and analysis to this important natural resource debate in New Zealand.

ENDS

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