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.
Giulia Simula worked with pastoralists in Sardinia, Italy, during her doctoral research with the PASTRES programme. In this short video, she discusses what she discovered, and how this challenges assumptions about how pastoralists engage with different kinds of markets.
In recent years, there has been a push backed by some of the largest donor and relief organisations to plant the seeds of social protection systems in even the most difficult protracted crisis settings. The case for doing so seems compelling enough: to identify alternatives to costly, perennial...
Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, the more complex impacts of the disease are becoming clearer. Rising to these multidimensional challenges, IDS partnerships have gone above and beyond expectations in pursuing social science research to inform policy and practice.
Despite the constraints...
Can secessionism be a basis for affective or social polarisation? Despite much research on independence movements, their relationship to polarisation, a key mechanism theorised as increasing the risk of violent conflict, remains less understood.
We argue that the issue of secession can...
This blog post from the ARISE Hub - a research consortium of which IDS is a partner - provides reflections on some common misconceptions of informal settlements. Examples from ARISE research show that, contrary to common belief, processes that happen in these settlements are seldom haphazard,...
The floods in Pakistan have had a horrifying impact — over 1,000 people dead and almost 33 million 'displaced', a simple word that couches the absolute devastation of people’s lives, homes, and everything they have worked for their whole life.
This is a climate change disaster, but it is...
Our research on government policy responses to address the increase in women’s unpaid care and domestic work during COVID-19, across 59 countries of Asia and the Pacific, shows that less than 30 per cent of measures are care-sensitive and of these only 12 per cent are gender-differentiated....
Participatory research and inquiry is all about ‘putting the people who are experiencing the problems at the heart of finding the solutions’. As interest in participatory methods has surged, IDS this year produced a highly acclaimed and comprehensive handbook aimed at social science...
Despite climate change being a major concern for the sanitation sector, rural sanitation remains neglected in the wider discussions of climate impacts on WASH services.
Also, the voices of vulnerable individuals, households, and communities who are experiencing the effects of climate change in...
Two important new books have come out on the neoliberal restructuring of land and agriculture in Africa recently. Both take a radical agrarian political economy stance on the theme, but from different angles. Such analyses have important implications for thinking about agrarian reform, the role...
This CDI Practice paper by Peter Taylor describes the evolution of the Think Tank Initiative (TTI) evaluation approach as it engaged progressively with the complexity of the programme. It reflects critically on key lessons learned through process and outcomes. It also offers some takeaways for...
Access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation are intrinsically linked. Without a clean, safe source of water nearby it is nearly impossible for communities to have adequate sanitation facilities, and inadequate sanitation facilities often spill over and pollute drinking water sources....
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).