Department organization>
Assignments & Research Topics
The Social Sciences, Agriculture and Food, Rural Development and Environment Department at INRA (SAE2) has been commissioned to describe the social and economic world forms of organization, to produce analytical frameworks for their understanding, and to provide the conceptual and operational tools to enlighten public and private actors in the fields related to production, markets and agricultural exchanges, transformation and distribution of farm and agro-food products, food consumption, environment and natural resources, land use and rural development and science-society relations.
The Social Sciences at INRA (SAE2) contribute to the establishing of scientific considerations on citizens and their relations with agricultural, rural and agro-food sectors, food safety, environmental, spatial and territorial concerns. They help to raise scientific argumentation in social and economic fields within the framework definition and evaluation of public policy, international negotiations, relationship between economic actors and public debates.
Inside its own research
and within a wide range of various mechanisms and cooperating approaches,
the SAE2 Department takes into account the progress in the fields of biotechnical
sciences and symmetrically the other departments of INRA integrate the
economic and social realities into their research.
Three thematic fields
The first field (consumption, distribution and transformation) gathers research work aimed at understanding the social and economic mechanisms in food consumption and food processing. It can be subdivided into two sectors, one on food consumption, behaviour and its determinants, the other on agricultural and agro-food trading and processing.
The second field (production and markets) develops research on farm management and agricultural markets and their changes when faced with economic, social and regulation changes. It can be subdivided into two groups, the first one on farm and the ability to adapt and evolve, the second, on French, European and International markets for agricultural and agro-food products.
The third field (environment,
open land, and society) concerns interactions between the activities,
the environments and lands in accordance with a triple perspective: a
perspective of sustainable development in the case of research on resources
and environment, a national and regional perspective in the case of rural
areas, a consensual and responsible perspective in the case of living
organism transformations, science and democracy.
Partnership
An important part of the Social Sciences Department's activities is developed within a structure of partnership at the national and international levels:
- Scientific partnership to conduct research in association with researchers outside the Social Sciences Department,
- Applied partnership
to meet the various sorts of requirements from other institutes and
organizations.
Key figures
- 400 people, including 160 INRA researchers and staff, 100 assistants and 100 scholars in Joint Research Units and Associated Law Units.
- 40 PhD students.