Dr Damien Jourdain from the Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development passes his Habilitation to Direct Research exam through the University of Montpellier.

Dr Damien Jourdain, who works for the Centre de coopération internationale en  recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD) and is a research fellow in the department, recently completed his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR, Accreditation to Direct Research) which is the highest university degree that can be awarded in France.

The HDR exam takes on the form of a thesis and defence, which is very similar to a doctoral exam. This degree, which is equivalent to becoming a Professor in South Africa’s university system, is required to supervise a doctoral thesis or to become a thesis reviewer within the higher education system in France.

Dr Jourdain’s thesis reflected the work he has already done, and an opportunity to present his future research plans. For his exam, he focused on the balance required between the use of natural resources to produce agricultural goods and the natural resources required for production of other services in society. Achieving this balance requires policy instruments or institutions to provide incentives to encourage progressive adaptions of agricultural systems through technological changes. Dr Jourdain looked at three countries; Mexico, Vietnam and Thailand, to find adaptations to incentive instruments that would change the use of natural resources by farm households. He found that three types of approaches were used according to the field problems encountered: ex-ante analysis of the economic attractiveness of agricultural techniques, particularly through simulation, ex-post analysis of their adoption and analysis of producers’ preferences. To understand this better, he proposed a research project aimed at refining our understanding of producers’ preferences along three lines: the influence of risk and ambiguity in our analysis of preferences, the heterogeneity of preferences within households, and finally, the relationship of these preferences with pro-social norms.

While he enjoyed the thesis aspect of the exam, he also found that the defence of it stimulated some interesting discussions between him and the examiners and provided some new ideas. Passing this exam means that he can now supervise doctoral candidates from the Doctoral School of MUSE (Montpellier University), which he will be doing from October 2021 when he starts supervising a French doctoral candidate who is working on the potential uptake of ‘ecological intensification’ techniques in Zimbabwe.

The qualification will provide Dr Jourdain with many new opportunities for research and collaboration, and we look forward to seeing the outcome of his next project.