Sir Gordon Conway, who was the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sussex between 1992 and 1998 and former Chair of IDS has died.
Early career
Professor Conway trained in agricultural ecology, attending the University of Wales (Bangor), the University of Cambridge and the University of the West Indies (Trinidad) before completing a PhD at the University of California (Davis).
In the early 1960’s, working in Sabah, North Borneo, he became one of the pioneers of sustainable agriculture, developing integrated pest management programs for the State of Sabah in Malaysia. He joined Imperial College in 1970 and in 1976, he founded the Centre for Environmental Technology. During the 1970s and 1980s, he lived and worked extensively in Asia and the Middle East, for the Ford Foundation, World Bank and USAID. He directed the Sustainable Agriculture Programme at IIED and then became representative of the Ford Foundation in New Delhi. Subsequently, he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex and was Chair of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).
He was President of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1998 to 2004 and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for International Development (DFID) and President of the Royal Geographical Society from 2004 to 2009.
Research
Sir Gordon was awarded five honorary degrees and fellowships. He is the author of The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for all in the 21st Century and co-authored One Billion Hungry: Can we Feed the World and Science and Innovation for Development (UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKCDS)). In November 2019, Food For All in Africa: Sustainable Intensification for African Farmers was co-authored with Dr Ousmane Badiane and Dr Katrin Glatzel. In 1992 he wrote with Robert Chambers the highly influential IDS Discussion Paper: Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century.
Tributes from IDS Colleagues
Ian Scoones, IDS Professorial Fellow
Gordon Conway was an inspirational interdisciplinary scientist who was passionate about agriculture and sustainability long before it was a fashionable topic. I was hugely influenced by him as a thesis supervisor, mentor and my first boss. Gordon established the Centre for Environmental Technology at Imperial College London in 1976 and I studied there for both my MSc and later my PhD. I benefited hugely from the spirit of applied, policy-relevant interdisciplinary research, which has shaped my work ever since.
In the mid-1980s Gordon started the Sustainable Agriculture programme at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and I joined soon after. Connections with IDS came when Gordon linked up with Robert Chambers and, together, they pioneered participatory diagramming approaches for rural development and later the ‘sustainable livelihoods’ approach, all drawing on Gordon’s long-term work on ‘agroecoystems analysis’. For a young researcher, these were exciting times and Gordon was fantastic to work with. He seemed to know everyone and was a brilliant networker, but he would always involve and listen to more junior people. These skills were of course essential as he took up ever more important posts, whether as the head of the Ford Foundation in India, the VC of Sussex, the President of the Rockefeller Foundation or the Chief Scientist at DFID. But despite such grand positions and an increasing array of titles and awards, he was always accessible, interested and supportive. He will be much missed.
John Thompson, IDS Research Fellow
I had the good fortune of meeting Gordon Conway when I was a graduate student conducting my doctoral research on farmer-managed irrigation systems in Kenya in the late 1980s. He came to Nairobi with Robert Chambers to share some insights from their respective work on Agroecosystem Analysis (AEA) and Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA). Their joint talk and subsequent conversations sparked new ideas and opened new opportunities for me for which I am deeply grateful. When I think of Gordon, the word that comes to mind is ‘pioneer’. He was always ahead of his time, pushing conceptual and methodological boundaries in crucial ways. His work on AEA and RRA helped revolutionise rural development research.
He also contributed new ideas and approaches to Integrated Pest Management (IPM), which helped reduce the harmful effects of pesticide use in agriculture, to Sustainable Intensification, which sought to combine the best elements of agroecology and biotechnology to improve global food security through a ‘Doubly Green Revolution’, to Sustainable Rural Livelihoods (with Robert), which informed wider debates on how we understand the dynamic nature of rural livelihoods and capabilities, and most recently, to Climate Change and Conservation Agriculture, which aimed to draw together insights from his earlier work to improve approaches to climate change adaptation and sustainable agriculture in dryland farming environments.
An applied ecologist with extensive field experience in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, he was a systems thinker and problem solver to his bones whose central focus was on helping poor and marginal farmers in complex, diverse, risk-prone countries. He was a friend and mentor to me over several decades as he was to countless early career researchers, both in the UK and internationally, taking the time to offer sage advice and support our research efforts. With his unique mind, boundless energy and generous heart, Gordon left a lasting impression on many of us working in the field of international agriculture and rural development and made the world a better place.
Simon Maxwell, IDS Emeritus Fellow
Sir Gordon Conway was an able and politically astute administrator, who knew how to parlay an establishment role into outcomes for the greater good: this he demonstrated as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex, as President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and as Chief Scientific Adviser to DFID.
He will remembered for those roles, and for his contributions to international organisations like the CGIAR. More than that, however, he will be remembered as someone with an unwavering commitment to the rural poor, and to the ideas which would help improve their lives. I first met him at Robert Chamber’s house in Kingston, before he became Vice-Chancellor, I guess in the late 1980s. Their shared enthusiasm for thinking about sustainable livelihoods sparkled – and indeed informed our rural development and food security research and teaching at IDS.
When he became Vice-Chancellor at Sussex, he negotiated a contract which allowed him to spend a day a week on his own research. That clever device allowed him to spend time engaging with researchers at IDS and across the campus, and also gave him the space to write The Doubly Green Revolution, first published in 1997 and notable for bringing environmental issues to the fore. I remember a knock on the door of my office on the top floor of the octagon one day, and Gordon opening the door and telling me he was going to write a popular book and asking for input. It didn’t happen very often, in fact never before or since, that the vice-chancellor came calling, so of course I said ‘yes’. I wish I could remember what input I made; probably it was merely to commend his perspective and his clear, approachable writing style. It made a difference to IDS, and the University, to have someone with Gordon’s track-record and energy in a leadership position. It validated our work and in some respects enabled it.
For example, it undoubtedly helped that Gordon was in DFID when Labour won the 1997 election and Clare Short became Secretary of State: work on rural livelihoods became a central focus of DFID’s commitment to the Millenium Development Goals, in both research and programming. Independent of academia and development policy, Gordon and Susan were admired and influential figures in Sussex – he was a Deputy Lieutenant of East Sussex.
Funeral details
The funeral date for Gordon will be on the 7 September at 11:30, the Meeting House, University of Sussex. This will be an opportunity for those who knew and worked with Sir Gordon to pay their respects.
A public memorial service will follow in the months ahead, which will be open to the broader university community.
Read the statement from the University of Sussex
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