John M. Bryden

John Bryden is Research Professor at the Norwegian Agricultural Economics Research Institute (NILF) in Norway, and President of the International Rural Network. He is Emeritus Professor of Human Geography at the University of Aberdeen where he formerly co-Directed the Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research. He was also Programme Director of The Arkleton Trust from 1980 to 2008. John has been an advisor on rural policy to the OECD, the EU, the World Bank and the Scottish government, where he was External Advisor to the Scottish Office Land Reform Policy Group and one of the external advisors on the Inter-Departmental Group on Rural Strategy from 1997 to 1999 as well as Secretary of the Cross Party group on Rural Policy in the Scottish Parliament from 2005-2008. He has coordinated six EU-funded trans-national research projects on rural development issues. John has been a visiting scholar at the University of Guelph, Canada; the University of Missouri-Columbia; and at Cornell University. John has been a keynote speaker or panellist at the major EU rural policy conferences including Inverness (1991), Cork (1996), and Salzburg (2003), as well as many OECD territorial rural policy conferences, and other conferences in Europe, Canada, USA, South America, India, Japan and Australia. He has published widely in several languages.