Our interdisciplinary research explores how pathways to sustainability, green transformations and equitable access to resources such as land, water and food can be achieved and help us meet the environmental as well as human development-related goals of the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.
Our work builds on a long tradition of critical social science engagement with environmental issues and resource politics in collaboration with partners globally. It explores how pathways to sustainability are shaped by political-economic and social processes, and understands how they are driven by technology, markets, states and citizens. Our research sheds new light on how we can achieve green transformations that move us from fossil fuel to renewable energy, from throw-away to circular economies. It addresses the politics of sustainability, and understands how transformations occur at local levels as well as global, in both rural and urban settings, and be led by citizens as well as national governments. In doing so, it shines a light on how sustainable resource use, consumption and production is shaped by issues such as gender, livelihoods and politics.
The ESRC STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) is an interdisciplinary global research and policy engagement centre.
Southern Africa is in the midst of a major food crisis. Fourteen million people are reported to be at risk. Most commentators agree that since around 1990, livelihoods have collapsed in many areas, with an increasing number of people, particularly in rural areas, vulnerable.
This paper is a story of the making of a policy, one that included many different players, located across a variety of sites. By tracing the origins of the millennium biotechnology policy in Karnataka state, south India, examining the content of and participants in the debate that led up to it,...
The World Trade Organization (WTO) declaration launching the current multilateral trade negotiations put developing country interests and the concept of special and differential treatment (SDT) at its core.
International development agencies are increasingly using rights-based language. But how can their policy and practice support people's own efforts to turn their rights into reality?
Based on the author's own experience as head of a bilateral agency country office, the paper tells a story about how the donor community became engaged in a conflict about monitoring the Poverty Reduction Strategy.
This research project into the magnitude, causes and consequences of destitution in the former Wollo province of Ethiopia was motivated by combination of empirical and policy concerns.
The empirical context is an apparent contradiction between ‘official’ evidence from household surveys,...
Which factors contribute to effective citizen participation in local governance? This is one of the central questions underpinning the work of LogoLink, theLearning Initiative in Citizen Participation and Local Governance. The experienceof LogoLink partners and other actors devoted to promoting...
Through work in southern Africa this research programme has explored the challenges of institutional, organisational and policy reform around land, water and wild resources. The case study sites have been in Zambezia Province, Mozambique, the Eastern Cape Wild Coast in South Africa and the...
Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce is widely believed to promise a radical change in the way that firms trade with one another. B2B e-commerce applications are being promoted as tools that will enable producer firms in developing countries to reduce their costs substantially, thereby easing...
Evaluates the concept of global public goods in terms of its usefulness for guiding debates on people's access to freshwater resources, and argues that more attention needs to be paid to two issues—first, the divergence of perception of the nature of the good and of how it should be accessed...
1 February 2003
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).