This year it’s 35 years since the establishment of the Environment Group at IDS. To mark this milestone, a new IDS archive Bulletin – Environmental Change, Development Challenges – Revisited – has just been released, edited by Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones.
The archive Bulletin includes 14 articles, most of which are introductions to earlier Bulletins, each highlighting many contributions from IDS researchers and partners from across the world. What are some of the characteristic features of IDS work on the environment over the years? How have these interplayed with wider debates on the global stage, and how can the lens of a particular research group help us reflect on these?
The new introduction argues that these include “a focus on place-based, historical and context-specific analyses, linking the local to the global; the foregrounding of social difference and inequality in analyses of environmental change; a focus on knowledge politics and the framing of policies and interventions; an emphasis on power and political economy and the structural constraints on change; and a highlighting of questions of justice, both around the causes and consequences of environmental change and in processes of transformation towards more sustainable futures.”
Environmental themes
The introduction introduces a number of themes reflecting the different archive contributions. First, is the connecting of environmental issues to long-established ‘development’ questions of poverty, vulnerability, inequality, access and livelihoods. For IDS work, environment and development are always intimately intertwined – put another way, development has always been, and always must be, sustainable development with questions of access and entitlement often being more important than absolute availability of resources. In defining environmentally-focused development strategies, longstanding IDS concerns with participatory and ‘bottom-up’ development and ‘sustainable livelihoods’ are seen to be important, in turn highlighting issues of gender and other forms of social differentiation, power and control.
Second, is the focus on ‘narratives’ as a way of both challenging mainstream, often misguided, perspectives on environmental change and defining new pathways towards sustainability. From the landmark edited book, The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment, published in 1996, to the many contributions on forests, water, soils and rangelands, IDS and collaborators’ work has highlighted how scientific and policy knowledges about environment are constructed through processes deeply implicated by power relations, and so histories of colonialism and development. Much work has explored alternative ways of knowing embedded in the histories, socio-cultural values and practices of citizens, local communities and indigenous people, and how these underpin alternative narratives that often provide better, contextually-appropriate guides to positive change.
Third, and particularly based on the work of the Sussex-based ESRC STEPS Centre (2006-2021), is the theme of how pathways to sustainability are constructed. Here, the implications of highly variable, non-equilibrium environments become particularly important, disturbing assumptions of stability and linear change. Uncertain conditions are always evident, where we don’t know the probability of outcomes, requiring the active negotiation of sustainability as a process, always amongst multiple actors in the context of uneven power relations.
Fourth is a focus on political economy, and wider questions of structural power that influence environment and development outcomes. This is a central feature of IDS and partners’ work on climate change, as it is around issues of land, water and green ‘grabbing’, as well as in relation to biodiversity, forest conservation and carbon finance schemes. Themes of inequality and structural violence come to the fore, and the introduction asks, “how can sustainability be fully integrated with longstanding concerns with development as a matter of wellbeing, rights and justice?”
Finally, the idea of ‘transformations’ to sustainability is highlighted, which goes beyond narrow, mechanistic perspectives on ‘transitions’. This involves thinking about how structural, systemic and enabling processes of change combine, for example. Central to this are issues of justice and, returning to the earlier core development concerns of who is involved and whose knowledge counts, important issues of distribution, representation and recognition.
Since the first IDS Bulletin explicitly focusing on environmental issues came out in 1991, edited by Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, there have been a number of important changes in focus. Today, environmental issues are much more central to development studies and practice. Climate change, for example, has risen up the agenda, with questions of how to encourage transformations to more ‘green’ and ‘just’ pathways for development being increasingly prominent. Yet, there are also some important continuities. In the 1991 Bulletin, the editors argued that “building and strengthening partnerships is also vital if environmental research is not to become intellectual colonialism”. This certainly remains true today, as do many of the other concerns of IDS work on environment and development over the years. Indeed, the importance of these has only sharpened as questions of sustainability have become more pressing, and the search for ways to enable people and nature to thrive together has garnered growing attention in policy, politics and public debate.
The archive Bulletin is open access, so do have a look at the many contributions – and importantly the articles that each of the featured introductory overviews point to. 35 years has generated a rich tapestry of reflections, and the next 35 years will surely see work on environment (and climate) even more central to questions of development at IDS and beyond.
