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.
As the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues, there is a need to robustly support vulnerable communities and bolster ‘community resilience.’
A community resilience approach means to work in partnership with communities and strengthen their capacities to mitigate the impact of...
Relief, rehabilitation, and recovery from climate emergencies require getting the governance of disaster and crisis management right.
In Pakistan, there are five actions where response actors can either contribute directly, or facilitate action to enable effective interventions: Support the...
A public webinar on connecting and supporting preparedness 'from below', featuring expert speakers, videos from the field and debate.
Through a Wellcome Trust-funded collaborative award, the Pandemic Preparedness Project has been researching preparedness ‘from below’ since 2019. It...
*Please note this event has been postponed. Future date TBC*.
Nihal Perera is Professor of Urban Planning at Ball State University. His most recent books are People’s Spaces (Routledge, 2016) and Transforming Asian Cities (edited with Wing-Shing Tang, Routledge, 2013).
In this Sussex...
The Pakistan floods – re-building though women’s empowerment and sustainable design.
Watch now
https://youtu.be/TvIitZtGqyo
The floods in Pakistan have caused devastation on an unprecedented scale, leaving one third of the country under water and 33 million people displaced. The...
Climate change reductionism – assuming the causes and the redress for those suffering the worst impacts of extreme weather lies with climate change alone – undermines the rights of religiously marginalised persons, but broadening whose rights are being advocated for in climate change can...
There has recently been a global resurgence of demands for the acknowledgement of historical and contemporary wrongs, as well as for apologies and reparation for harms suffered.
Drawing on the histories of injustice, dispossession and violence in South Africa, this book examines the cultural,...
Emergencies heighten societies’ need to be governed. Accordingly, the COVID-19 pandemic put systems of public governance under severe pressure across the globe. Civic freedoms were widely curtailed for public health reasons. Scarce resources needed to be allocated swiftly, with little...
Interested in studying with IDS? Come and meet us at the University of Sussex's online Postgraduate Open Day on Saturday 12 November.
Book your place online
Saturday 12 November 10:30 - 14:30
You will get the opportunity to:
Attend live subject sessions with the academics who teach...
Health inequalities are avoidable, unfair, and there are systematic differences in health between different groups of people. Health inequalities exist due to differences and interactions between a variety of factors across a population, including income, housing, and environment, as well as...
Ahead of COP27 IDS alumni Suvojit Chattopadhyay, who studied Governance, Development & Public Policy, told us the ambitious actions the world should take to start addressing the challenges of climate change.
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...
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).