Stephanie Walton

Stranded assets in the food systems transition: risk and implications for the cattle and beef sectors in the USA

Stephanie Walton is a financial geographer researching the connections, tensions, and trade-offs between what we need from our food systems and what we expect from our financial systems. She is a doctoral candidate with the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group where she is currently researching stranded assets in the transition to sustainable and healthy diets, with a specific focus on the cattle and beef sectors in the USA. Her work sits at the intersection of food systems, political economy, spatial data science, and environmental economics, which she draws on to explore the contours of financial lock-in and identify potential pathways through it.

Prior to joining Oxford, Stephanie was a research associate at the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London. She worked on the SHEFS project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, to identify the policy barriers and enablers for scaling out diverse grain systems in the UK. Conversations with farmers, food processors, and retailers about how financial imperatives shape activity on the farm helped set her on the path toward her current research. She also contributed to England’s National Food Strategy and the EU Food Policy Coalition’s work on the EU Legislative framework for sustainable food systems.

Before entering academia, Stephanie worked in advertising in London and New York with major food and FMCG firms, where she became interested in how financial imperatives shape environmental and nutritional outcomes. After playing her own small part in shaping diets for economic ends, she decided to make the shift and pursued her MSc from King’s College London.