Andrew Copus is an Honorary Associate of the Institute. He joined the Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences Group in March 2013. Between 2005 and 2018 he occupied a part-time secondment as a Senior Research Fellow at Nordregio (Nordic Centre for Spatial Development, Stockholm). From 2005 to 2013 he was based in the Centre for Remote and Rural Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands. Previously Andrew was leader of the Rural Economy Team at the Scottish Agricultural College, Aberdeen (now Scotlands Rural College, SRUC).
Since October 2018 Andrew has been a member of the Scottish Government’s Expert Advisory Group on Population and Migration [2].
He is also a board member for the DAStU Department of Excellence on Territorial Fragilities [3], Politecnico di Milano.
Andrew Copus is an economic geographer by training, whose research interests relate to the changing rural economy and (territorial) rural development policy. Much of his work has been based upon analysis of small area, or regional, secondary data and indicators.
Andrew has long-standing interests in territorial disparities, the processes which lie behind them, implications for spatial justice, and appropriate intervention logics. These interests have recently been pursued in the context of demographic trends and the issue of sparsity, the role of rural business networks, the changing nature of peripherality, and the increasing importance of local-global interaction, urban-rural relationships, patterns and trends in poverty and social exclusion, and social innovation. In all these areas my underlying motivation is to enhance the evidence-base for policy, at Scottish, UK and EU levels.
Ongoing and Recent Projects
Links:
[1] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0382-836X
[2] https://www.gov.scot/publications/uk-immigration-policy-leaving-eu-impacts-scotlands-economy-population-society/
[3] https://www.dastu.polimi.it/en/dipartimento-eccellenza/
[4] https://www.espon.eu/escape
[5] https://relocal.eu/
[6] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/research/projects/demographic-change-remote-areas
[7] https://www.sruc.ac.uk/info/120671/our_projects/1806/strategic_research_programme/3
[8] https://islandsrevival.org/