Peter North

Professor of Alternative Economies
Department of Geography and Planning
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, UK

Research Interests

Pete North is Professor of Alternative Economies. He gained his BA in History and Politics in 1984. After a few years working for the Departments of Employment, Trade and Industry, and Environment, he gained his MA in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford (1993) and his PhD from the School for Advanced Urban Studies at the University of Bristol (1997). He was a post-doctoral Research Associate on a project on Local Business Representation in Local Economic Development at the University of Sheffield (1996-7). Between 1997 and 2002 he was Senior Research Fellow at the Local Economy Policy Unit at South Bank University. He joined the University of Liverpool in 2002. His research focuses on: (1) Low carbon transitions at the city and community level, especially processes of policy formation and partnership working between the public, private and community sectors around strategies for local economic development within an overall framework of resource constraint, climate change and economic crisis; (2) the politics of climate change and ecologically-focused social movements engaged in struggles about the implications of anthropogenic climate change and resource constraints for both humans and the wider ecosystems upon which we depend; and, (3) using micropolitical and ‘economic alterity’ frameworks, the social and solidarity economies as tools for constructing and rethinking alternative geographies of money, entrepreneurship, and livelihoods. His recent research focuses on left wing and green values in contemporary Poland.