Professor Patrick Devine-Wright
Professor in Human Geography

Profile

NEWS: I have been appointed to the National Advisory Committee of EirGrid - the state owned electricity transmission system operator in Ireland. The committee will deliberate on topics such as methods of community engagement and participation as well as issues of benefit provision. 

Prof. Patrick Devine-Wright specialises in researching significant, policy-relevant environmental problems using an interdisciplinary collaborative approach that is theoretically informed and has clear pathways to impact.

Broad research specialisms:

• understanding the symbolic and affective dimensions of people-place relations, particularly concepts of place attachment and place identity
• investigating social and psychological aspects of siting new energy infrastructure such as wind farms and power lines, including ‘NIMBYism’ and public engagement
• understanding the motivation for pro-environmental and pro-social actions, particularly conceptions of citizenship applied to energy and environmental problems

Prof. Devine-Wright is an environmental social scientist who draws from disciplines such as Human Geography and Environmental Psychology. He held posts at the University of Manchester‘s School of Environment and Development (Senior Lecturer, then Reader) and De Montfort University‘s Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development (Research Fellow, then Senior Research Fellow) before joining the University of Exeter to take up a Chair in Human Geography in 2009. 

He acted as Principle Investigator for the ‘Beyond Nimbyism‘ interdisciplinary project, researching public engagement with renewable energy technologies, evaluated as ‘outstanding‘ in the end of grant peer review by ESRC and is currently a Co-Investigator on research projects funded by ESPRC (CLUES and Conditioning Demand), the Norwegian Research Council (Sustainable Grid Development) and the European Union (EuTrace: a transdisciplinary assessment of climate engineering).

He sits on the Social Science Expert Panel advising two UK Government departments: DEFRA and DECC, and formerly was a member of the National Advisory Group steering the Community Renewables Initiatives between 2001 and 2006; and acted as Lead Expert to the Office of Science and Technology’s Foresight Project on Sustainable Energy and the Built Environment (2008).

He sits on the board of the academic journals Environment and Behavior, Local Environment and PsyEcology; was guest editor of the 2010 special issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology on ‘Place, Identity and Environmental Behaviour‘. He edited a book on ‘Public Engagement with Renewable Energy: From NIMBY to Participation‘ published by Earthscan in 2011. A book on Place Attachment co-edited with Dr. Lynne Manzo (University of Washington) will be published by Routledge in 2013.

Institutional memberships

Chartered Environmental Psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society

International Association for People-Environment Studies

Qualifications

BSc Psychology (Trinity College, Dublin),
MSc in Environmental Psychology (Surrey),
PhD in Social Psychology (Surrey)

Career

Office hours: Tuesdays 11.30-12.30pm and Fridays 2-3pm

Contact details