Research Interests

Annette Aagaard Thuesen's current research is within the empirical fields: EU agricultural policy with specific focus on the LEADER part of the programme and the conditions for working in local action groups, village development, local council organisation, democracy and planning processes related to rural development. 

She is currently working on projects related to LEADER/local action groups, the interaction between civil society organisations such as village councils, citizens' associations and municipalities, strategic planning for villages, and the involvement of volunteers in alleviating the exclusion of citizens who for various reasons are not so digital. 

The theoretical approaches built upon are: Social innovation, social capital, democratic network governance, partnership organisation, meta-governance, coordination, participatory democracy, institutional capacity and co-production/co-creation.

Since 2023, Annette Aagaard Thuesen is president of the European Society for Rural Sociology.

For many years, she has taught at the Sociology programmes at the University of Southern Denmark in Esbjerg. From autumn 2024, she will also teach at European Studies at the University of Southern Denmark in Sønderborg.

In May 2010, Annette Aagaard Thuesen defended her PhD project on partnership organisation of rural development, more specifically the EU initiated LEADER partnerships. Partnership organisation in the LEADER context means that public, private and voluntary parties are allocated financial resources and decision-making power and join together in horizontal partnerships - also called local action groups. The task of the action groups is to create new development and solve specific problems related to topics such as settlement, business development, technology development and nature and environment. The purpose of the PhD project was to contribute to theory development on horizontal partnerships from a governance perspective. The PhD project was co-financed by the Steering Group for Environmental Strategies in Agriculture and Forestry (MJS) at the Nordic Council of Ministers. The project started in October 2006 and was submitted on 1 February 2010.