Academics from many backgrounds gravitate to Bristol Leadership and Change Centre. Today we spotlight Professor Peter Case, who amongst other achievements has most recently become Editor-in-Chief for a new journal, The Journal of Tropical Futures. Here he takes the opportunity to discuss his interests as well as the new journal, it’s importance and how you can get involved.
Q1. Tell us a little about your background.
I’ve been a professional academic for over forty years and worked in various universities in the UK – for example, Bath, Oxford Brookes, Exeter and UWE – and overseas in Australia and Singapore with James Cook University (JCU). I’ve also held visiting positions at Helsinki School of Economics in Finland and the University of Humanistics at Utrecht, the Netherlands. I obtained my first chair at Oxford Brookes University by way of internal promotion and then moved to Exeter shortly after that. I joined UWE in 2005 and currently have part-time roles as Professor of Organization Studies at Bristol Business School and Professor of Management at James Cook University.
Q2 . How did you became interested in your research areas?
From a young age I’ve had eclectic intellectual tastes and my academic studies took me initially into the fields of economics, sociology and philosophy, whilst at the same time reading more widely in the humanities and social sciences. This eclecticism and broad curiosity are what brought me to disciplines of Organization Studies and Leadership Studies as they enable me to pull together the various fields I’ve studied over my lifetime as an academic. For the first twenty-five years or so of my career, I focussed on scholarly work and published mostly on topics related to organization theory and critical management studies. For the past several years, however, I’ve been turning my attention to more applied work in the areas of international development and global health. Again, I’ve discovered that these are fields in which I can draw on an eclectic intellectual background to work collaboratively with other colleagues on tackling the complex challenges that face societies, institutions and communities – particularly those in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.
Q3. Tell us more about your research and research projects, are there any projects you want to highlight? Any you would like to work on in the future? … Collaborations?
My research ranges across organization development, international development, rural development, global health, leadership studies and organization theory and philosophy. For more than a decade now I’ve been collaborating with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco –one of the top medical colleges in the USA – who are based in the ‘Malaria Elimination Initiative’ (MEI) research centre. My move into the global health space came about as a consequence of work I’d been doing on rural development in Southeast Asia – particularly a set of projects in Laos – aimed at improving the way that the government supported smallholder farmers. It was in this context that I and some other colleagues, who were expert in the local farming systems, began experimenting with the use of something called ‘Participatory Action Research’ – which, as the title implies, involves bringing different stakeholders together to participate in a process of researching challenges and, through structured exchanges and facilitated processes, co-creating and implementing solutions to those challenges. The work I did in Laos, funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research over a period of about nine years, proved very successful in coming up with practical solutions and changing institutional governance structures.
The three projects l was responsible for, for example, led to the application of management tools co-designed with stakeholders and resulted in an increase in gross incomes for approximately 1,350 smallholder households, translating to an economic impact of more than £2m over a seven-year period (2012-19). One of the projects involved encouraging the formation of farmer organizations and resulted in the establishment of a whole new organic coffee growing region in Northern Laos. The impacts of the project led to more consistent central government support for the delivery of agricultural extension services, more autonomy for district-level offices and, in the longer-term, directly influenced the Government of Lao’s national strategy for commercialising smallholder farmer production. These successes also attracted further investment from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank.
My work in Laos caught the attention of the then Director of the Malaria Elimination Initiative and I was invited to join a small team of senior malariologists to assess the state of programme management of malaria, globally, and write a report for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation setting out findings and recommendations. As the management expert in the group, I was the person who ended up presenting the paper to a strategy committee at the Gates Foundation and this, in turn, led to many doors opening. I started out being asked to join a team of US medics working on malaria elimination in Vietnam and, amongst other things, as I’d done in Laos, began experimenting with the use of Participatory Action Research methods to tackle thorny issues relating to delivery of malaria healthcare services. This experimentation led to some promising outcomes and I was given my own funding to ‘prove the concept’ in another context – this time in southern Africa – initially in Zimbabwe and Eswatini but then extending the work to Namibia. The research culminated in the team developing a set of Organization Development and Quality Improvement tools that can be applied in tackling a range of health system-related challenges.
The composite toolkit is called Leadership and Engagement for Improved Accountability and Delivery of Services (LEAD) Framework and is now available as an open access resource. Our work in the malaria space led to significant improvements in elements of programme delivery, including data quality and communication, as well as fewer drug stockout events. These programme delivery improvements subsequently resulted in improved detection, testing and treatment facilities for more than 3 million people living in malaria zones in Zimbabwe alone. Additional benefits, such as capacity building of healthcare professionals and development of UWE accredited training of National Malaria Control Programme staff also resulted in sustainable impacts in these regions.
Most recently I co-led an organization development project funded by the Gates Foundation which applied the LEAD Framework to assist with restructuring and improving HIV prevention services at national and subnational level in Zimbabwe. This was a collaboration between the Zimbabwean Ministry of Health and Child Care, USCSF, UWE, the Women’s University in Africa and two international NGOS – the Clinton Health Access Initiative and Population Services International. We’re currently writing up the final report for this project and have plans to publish the findings in the coming year; but we already know that the programme of Participatory Action Research has had a significant and far-reaching impact on HIV-prevention service delivery in Zimbabwe.
Q4. You have recently become Editor-in-Chief for a new academic journal the Journal of Tropical Futures. What gaps does this journal fill and what is its importance?
Well, as you’ll have probably noticed, a great deal of my work in recent years has taken place in the tropical zones – and, of course, one of my academic posts is based in tropical North Queensland, Australia. I have a passion for working in the tropics and there are a great many challenges facing populations in the region. I’ve been working closely with colleagues based at James Cook University, Singapore, for several years who share my interests in the region and, together, we came up with the idea of creating an academic journal that could be a mouthpiece for research on sustainable business, development and governance in the tropics. It took us about two years to get to a point where SAGE Publications – who saw potential in our proposal – agreed to contract the journal. We were able formally to launch in January of this year (2023). There are very many journals that focus on tropical environmental science, marine science, human and cultural geography and so forth but, surprisingly, very few are concerned with sustainable business and development. In other words, these themes are conspicuously under-served by academic journals currently.
We should be paying close attention as scholarly and practitioner communities to the complex dynamics of the tropics, in my opinion. Here are few telling facts that are worth pondering: about 4 billion people are currently living between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and by 2050 one in every two people and 55% of the world’s children under five, will reside in the tropics. 99% of the population of the tropics reside in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, while 80% of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity and more than 95% of its mangrove and coral reef-based biodiversity is located in the tropics. Most GDP (about 65%) is generated by the Global North yet, the externalities of this economic productivity are having disproportionate impacts on the Global South and tropics.
We’re currently experiencing a collision of tectonic plates globally, in my view, as the conventional drives toward economic growth clash with the interests of indigenous populations and environments. The tropics are disproportionately disadvantaged by the deleterious impacts of climate change, pollution of lands and seas, monocultural agricultural production and deforestation; to name just a few of the more pressing issues. What are we to do to halt exploitative policies and practices? How can the multiple inequalities that characterize the North/South divide be mitigated or reversed? In short, what is to be the future of the tropics? The key mission of the journal is to help address challenges relevant to sustainable business and management, social and economic development, as well as to governance in the tropics.
Q5. How can someone get involved with the journal, is there anything you would like to see in the future?
The journal is still in its infancy; so, as with any new journal, the immediate challenge we face is establishing a profile for JTF and attracting high quality manuscript submissions. Our plan in 2023 is to publish e-versions of articles using the SAGE OnlineFirst system and then release Volume 1 (Issues 1 & 2) in 2024. We plan on having two open issues per year initially and then expanding once the journal is more established.
We welcome contributions to the following themes:
- Sustainable Tropical Environments
- Public Policy, Regional Development and Governance
- Human and Workforce Development
- International Business and Trade in Tropical Regions
- Sustainable Business and Social Responsibility
- Sustainable Tourism, Hospitality and Marketing
Our plan is to publish rigorous empirical analyses (based on quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research), as well as case studies, theoretical articles and conceptual reviews. Please visit Journal of Tropical Futures for more information.
I hope that anyone interested and enthused by the journal aims and scope will be encouraged to write for this exciting new publication. I’m happy to discuss ideas for articles or look at draft manuscripts so would encourage people to get in touch directly with me by email if they’re considering submitting something. If anyone would like to serve as a reviewer for manuscript submissions they should also get in touch. My email address: peter.case@uwe.ac.uk
For more information about Peter, his work or his publications please visit his staff profile.