Through multidisciplinary research and policy engagement we bring new understanding and action on critical issues around health and health systems, and how they overlap with other systems such as food, as well as nutrition, sanitation, epidemics and zoonotic diseases. Enhancing understanding of how to ensure healthy lives for all is a vital part of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Agenda 2030) and has been an integral focus of IDS’ work since its inception.
Our research and analysis on innovations in health services and systems – including work on identifying effective strategies to address the challenges of antimicrobial resistance – is accelerating progress towards achieving universal health coverage in Asia and Africa. Our work on nutrition spans the spectrum from dietary transition and globalisation of food systems, through to responding to the ways that marginalisation and inequity drive high child malnutrition rates. We bring vital social knowledge to aid effective preparedness and response on pandemics. We show how direct impacts on the spread of diseases such as Ebola can be achieved by bringing learning from research on social issues and contexts to the right people in the right organisations at the right time. Together with our global partners, we are generating and sharing new knowledge and evidence to identify the underlying causes of poor health and social inequalities, and the progressive policies and practices that can help bring about transformative change.
This comparative study in Sierra Leone is part of a wider anthropological research that entailed the conduction of larger studies in the Gambia and Guinea, and another small comparative study in Nigeria.
This paper compares and contrasts the cultures of activism and illness and treatment experiences of UK
and South African AIDS activists. By the 1990s AIDS public health discourse in the UK, and elsewhere in
the West, was reconfiguring AIDS as a manageable chronic illness that could be treated...
This paper focuses on why poor and marginalised people still lack access to economic, social and cultural
rights (also known as positive rights), despite a fairly mainstream support to positive rights in mainstream
development debates. In part this is due to the problematic division between...
The paper investigates how the moral politics of AIDS activism in South Africa are contributing towards
new forms of biological/health citizenship (Petryna 2002) that are concerned with both rights-based
struggles and creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness...
Debates about science and technology are central to the future of development. No recent controversy
has highlighted this as much as the debates about genetically-modified (GM) crops. Looking at the
experiences of anti-GM activism in India, South Africa and Brazil, this paper explores how...
This paper addresses a contradiction that lies at the core of the relationship between rights and
participation. Participatory development emphasises ideals of consensus, of openness to differences and
to resolving any conflicts these might create, and of the importance of grounding...
In this paper we outline the context of pregnant women’s lives and the plural health systems they
encounter in Koppal, the most deprived district in the state of Karnataka, south India. We combine
preliminary survey findings with qualitative work to illustrate the dynamics involved in...
1 January 2005
Why learn with us.
In an extraordinary time of challenge and change, we use more than 50 years of expertise to transform development approaches that create more equitable and sustainable futures. The work you do with us will help make progressive change towards universal development; to build and connect solidarities for collective action, locally and globally. The University of Sussex has been ranked 1st in the world for Development Studies for the past five years (QS World University Rankings by Subject).