Sustainability

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.

People

Melissa Leach

Emeritus Fellow

Lyla Mehta

Professorial Fellow

Ian Scoones

Professorial Fellow

Amber Huff

Research Fellow

Jeremy Allouche

Professorial Fellow

Lars Otto Naess

Research Fellow

Wei Shen

Resource Politics and Environmental Change Cluster Lead and Research Fellow

Shilpi Srivastava

Resource Politics and Environmental Change Cluster Lead and Research Fellow

Programmes and centres

Recent work

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Showing 1465–1476 of 15343 results

Report

Key Considerations: Operational Considerations for Building Community Resilience for COVID-19 Response and Recovery

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...

Eva Niederberger

16 November 2022

Past Event

Shifting power in pandemics

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...

16 November 2022

Past Event

Sussex Development Lectures

The impact of colonialism in Sri Lanka

*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...

16 November 2022

Past Event

IDS Annual Lecture

IDS Annual Lecture with pioneering architect Yasmeen Lari

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...

15 November 2022

Past Event

Unsettling Apologies: Critical writings on apology from South Africa

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,...

14 November 2022

Journal Article

The Governance Shock Doctrine: Civic Space in the Pandemic

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...

14 November 2022

Past Event

University of Sussex online Postgraduate Open Day

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...

12 November 2022

Opinion

A three-pronged plan for COP27

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.

Suvojit Chattopadhyay

10 November 2022

Brief

Mainstreaming Climate Risks into Rural Sanitation Programming in Lao PDR

SLH Learning Brief;13

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...

Jeremy Kohlitz & 2 others

10 November 2022

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).

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