Areas of expertise

Municipal and regional planning and community development, place-based development, land-use planning, rural and regional studies, public participation and civic engagement, social innovation and inclusion, regional economic development and natural resource-based industries, qualitative and quantitative methods, GIS and spatial analysis, mixed methods.

Key qualifications

Aleksander Bern is a senior researcher with a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Oslo. His work focuses particularly on municipal and regional planning and community development, with an emphasis on place-based development and rural areas. His work ranges from commissioned research projects in Norway to international research collaborations, and he has extensive experience leading externally funded, interdisciplinary projects. His doctoral research examined architectural competitions as instruments of urban and land-use planning, with particular emphasis on political processes, place development, democracy and public participation. He also has experience in municipal planning and GIS from Ullensaker Municipality, the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage and the City of Oslo.

Bern has a broad and interdisciplinary methodological profile. He designs and conducts mixed-methods research combining qualitative, quantitative and spatial methods. He has particular expertise in GIS, official statistics and large datasets, qualitative and quantitative analysis, participatory research and workshops.

Bern leads the Norwegian part of ESIRA, a Horizon Europe project focusing on social innovation and inclusion in rural areas. He also participated in the ESPON project RURALPLAN, which explored innovative and participatory planning in regions experiencing population decline. In the project “Choosing the Mountains” (Å velge fjellet), he led a qualitative study of the lives, choices and values of people who had moved to Norwegian mountain municipalities.

Another key contribution is the evaluation presented in “The Role of Regional Plans in Safeguarding Wild Reindeer Habitats”. The project combined planning and document analysis, GIS, Delphi methods and workshops to examine how the plans have functioned as instruments for safeguarding wild reindeer habitats. Bern also led the development of the knowledge base for the revision of Hamar Municipality’s planning strategy.

Bern has also led and contributed to a number of regional and national analyses of value creation, employment and economic multiplier effects in agriculture and forestry. The report “Norwegian Forests: Value Creation, Employment and Multiplier Effects of Norwegian Forestry” is the most comprehensive example of this work. The analyses draw on official statistics, quantitative calculations and regional economic models