Frances Rowe (Fran) is a Research Associate at the Centre for Rural Economy, Newcastle.
Fran has an extensive background as a rural policy maker and practitioner. Appointed to the Northumberland National Park Authority in 1992 she went on to chair the Authority for five years, and became a non-executive director of the former Countryside Agency. Her professional life resumed after a career ‘break’ with a young family to join Regional Development Agency One North East, in Newcastle, as the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 was at its peak. The subsequent refocussing of policy as lessons were learned became a testbed for new approaches to delivering rural policy with social, economic and environmental objectives.
A long standing professional relationship with the Centre for Rural Economy led to Fran undertaking an MSc in Food and Rural Development Research (rural social science). She is now in the final stages of writing up her PhD on contemporary arts and rural development. Fran likes to think that her experience as a policy practitioner, that involved commissioning several evaluations over the years, will be useful to CECAN along with insights from cultural policy and the arts, and is keen to explore evaluation of rural development policy: a classic nexus area.
