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

Lyla Mehta

Professorial Fellow

Ian Scoones

Professorial Fellow

Amber Huff

Resource Politics and Environmental Change Cluster Lead

Jeremy Allouche

Professorial Fellow

Lars Otto Naess

Resource Politics and Environmental Change Cluster Lead

Wei Shen

Research Fellow

Shilpi Srivastava

Research Fellow

Programmes and centres

Recent work

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Showing 1477–1488 of 14672 results

Report

Monitoring and Evaluation for Rural Sanitation and Hygiene: Framework

The monitoring and evaluation (M&E) Guidelines and Framework presented in this document (and in the accompanying M&E Indicator Framework) aim to encourage stakeholders in the rural sanitation and hygiene sector to take a more comprehensive, comparable and people focused approach to monitoring...

16 December 2021

Past Event

Matters of inclusivity in design and governance of digital health in India

This session opens up a conversation between state, tech and civil society actors in the context of the rapid increase in application of digital health solutions in India’s mixed health system, and the challenges of ensuring inclusivity. This consultation will ask what it means to take a...

16 December 2021

Journal Article

Do TJ Policies Cause Backlash? Evidence from Street Name Changes in Spain

Memories of old conflicts often shape domestic politics long after these conflicts end. Contemporary debates about past civil wars and/or repressive regimes in different parts of the world suggest that these are sensitive topics that might increase political polarisation, particularly when...

13 December 2021

Working Paper

Agents, Coercive Learning, and Social Protection Policy Diffusion in Africa

IDS Working Paper 559

This paper makes theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to the study of social policy diffusion, drawing on the case of social protection in Africa, and Zambia in particular. We examine a range of tactics deployed by transnational agencies (TAs) to encourage the adoption of...

13 December 2021

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).