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Cluster

Resource Politics and Environmental Change

Climate disruption, environmental change and resource scarcity have become the subject of growing policy attention, academic debate and popular political mobilization in recent years. These issues are linked in political and media discourses to phenomena ranging from famine, migration, urbanization and vulnerability to natural hazards, warfare, terrorism and other sub-national, national and international security threats.

Environmental and climate change – including framings of and responses to them – carry huge consequences for politics, the economy and for social and biological life globally. But at the same time, unequal power relations, diverse knowledge uncertainties, incumbent technologies and institutions, and issues around spatial scale and time horizons influence pathways to achieving just and transformative change. Understanding and untangling the complex, contested, cross-sectoral and multi-scalar politics of natural resources and environmental change and seeking out just, sustainable pathways of transformation are therefore more important than ever.

Our starting point is that the complex challenges around resource politics and environmental change require diverse, innovative and critically attuned methods and strategies for research, policy engagement and communication. The questions that we ask and knowledge that we produce, must reflect how dynamics of political and material exclusions – including those related to inequitable access to natural resources and technology, rights and citizenship, gender and labour – shape the contemporary terrain of environmental struggle and natural resource politics at and across different scales. How do forces of globalization and regimes of extraction, industrial production and consumption of resources affect states, landscapes, societies and conflicts in different places and different types of resource environments? What does environmental and social justice mean in diverse development contexts, across the global north and south?

Specifically, our research and engagement focuses on three overlapping themes: (1) Political economy and environmental change; (2) Climate and environmental justice; and (3) Scarcity, security and resilience.

Key contacts

Amber Huff

Resource Politics and Environmental Change Cluster Lead

a.huff@ids.ac.uk

01273 915805

Lars Otto Naess

Resource Politics and Environmental Change Cluster Lead

l.naess@ids.ac.uk

+44 (0)1273 915849

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Recent work

Upcoming Event

Communicating climate complexity: Arts and pedagogy

Climate change is complicated. So are the things we're doing about it. How might the arts help us to address that complexity? As educators and researchers in a university, how do we embed sustainability themes across our activities? As people on a planet, how do we talk and think about...

12 June 2023

Past Event

After the UN Water conference: Examining the global dissonance

How did the latest UN Water Conference influence the progress of global water governance? Join us in a hybrid discussion of what matters! Global water and sanitation governance still have a long way to go before attaining the ambition of SDG 6 to "ensure access to water and sanitation for...

7 June 2023

News

Podcast: Reframing climate and environmental justice

Questions of justice are relevant to all aspects of climate and environmental change, from how and where the impacts are felt the most, the allocation and prioritisation of funding, the type of responses that are considered, to how negative impacts can arise from mitigation, adaptation, or...

5 June 2023

Projects

Project

Climate Justice Scoping Study

This study, commissioned by the International Development Research Centre, identified gaps and future entry points for Southern-led research on climate justice. The study was framed around the concept of transformative climate justice, reflecting the need to bridge gaps between climate justice...