Dr Stephen Devereux is a development economist working predominantly on food security, famine, rural livelihoods, social protection and poverty reduction issues. His research experience has mainly been in eastern and southern Africa, especially Ethiopia, Malawi and Namibia.
His books include ‘Fieldwork in Developing Countries’, ‘Theories of Famine’, ‘Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa’, ‘The New Famines’, ‘Social Protection in Africa’, and ‘Social Protection for Africa’s Children’.
The Food Equity Centre brings together researchers, policy makers, practitioners and activists to collaborate in developing solutions to inequities in food systems. It addresses the urgent need for research and action towards fairness, justice, and inclusion at a time when the Covid-19...
The Humanitarian Learning Centre (HLC) brings together high-quality analysis, dialogue and debate with accessible, operational learning to improve humanitarian response, practice and policy.
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is collaborating with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) to conduct an impact evaluation of the Social Cash Transfer (SCT) programme in Oromia and SNNP Regions of Ethiopia for UNICEF Ethiopia.
In November 2012, UNDP, UNICEF and WFP organised a high-level social protection policy dialogue with the Government of Swaziland and other development partners. Subsequently, the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) appointed a technical committee to develop a Joint UN Programme for Social...
To the international community, Brazil’s record on food security and social protection until relatively recently was exemplary, even enviable. The level of child stunting in Brazil fell from 25% in the mid-1980s to 15% in the mid-1990s and just 5% by the mid-2010s. This is a remarkable success...
30 August 2023
Food security, food systems, and food resilience are three related but contested concepts, with unique intellectual and policy histories. A new open access book brings together several contributions by global experts on these issues and highlights their interconnectedness. The book aims to...
15 May 2023
Despite being an upper-middle-income country, hunger is widespread in South Africa and is related to the triple challenges of poverty, unemployment, and inequality. According to the FAO, 45 per cent of the population experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2018-2020. South...
12 October 2022
The theme for this year’s World Food Day (16 October) is ‘leave no one behind’. However, the leave no one behind agenda as part of the Sustainable Development Goals focuses largely on addressing deprivation and not the broader inequities - injustices and power imbalances – that drive...
10 October 2022
IDS Report
Globally, our food systems are highly inequitable. In a world with enough food, hunger is becoming normalised for large numbers of people, while diets are worsening and obesity is rising. Racialised minorities are more at risk from obesity than other groups; indigenous communities have...
26 June 2023
This open access book compiles a series of chapters written by internationally recognized experts known for their in-depth but critical views on questions of resilience and food security. The book assesses rigorously and critically the contribution of the concept of resilience in advancing our...
1 May 2023
IDS Working Paper 581
Food systems are characterised by inequities in every component, from production through to consumption. This paper seeks to make sense of various perspectives and concepts that account for the multiple forms of inequity.
19 December 2022
IDS Working Paper 582
This paper starts from an empirical observation that levels of hunger or food insecurity in middle-income and high-income countries are often higher than might be expected, and in some cases are rising rather than falling in recent years. We document levels and trends in selected food security...
19 December 2022
In this Centre for Social Protection international conference we will discuss and debate the past, present and future roles of social protection as a development policy agenda, at a time of global uncertainty and multiple crises. Themes include social protection policy processes, social...
In just two decades since the early 2000s, social protection established itself as a vibrant social policy sector in countries across the Global South, from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to South Asia. Social protection appeared in several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. Even...
10 November 2022
Through our research, policy engagement, teaching and training, we support the emergence of development pathways that deliver both greater social justice and sustainability for rural people and places, while recognising their important interconnections with urban areas and the links between...
This short course is open to a wide audience of policy makers, practitioners, researchers and project managers who are already or will be working in the area of social protection. It aims to provide a platform for strengthening conceptual grounding and for engagement in critical debate about...