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.
Democratic political parties with a history of commitment to statist economic policies face internal stresses when they come to power and preside over programs of wholesale economic liberalization. How do such parties and coalitions avoid splintering and manage to maintain electoral support?...
In many Asian countries, the early decades of independence after World War II were marked by tension between ‘indigenous’ political elites and business elites that were in large part alien, or from minority ethnic groups. This tension was one reason for the preference that most governments...
Gender', understood as the social construction of sex, is a key concept for feminists working at the interface of theory and policy. This article examines challenges to the concept which emerged from different groups at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, September 1995, an...
Recent research on industrial clusters in developing countries has unearthed some notable success stories of small local enterprises growing fast and competing in export markets. This Paper focuses on some conceptual and theoretical points which help to explain them.
Programme aid (import support, budgetary support and debt relief) has become an important form of aid in recent years. Unlike conventional project aid, there is no agreed evaluation methodology for these funds.
Rural development thinking can no longer claim that conflict falls outside its mandate, according to this edition of the IDS Bulletin. The nature of warfare in Africa is changing dramatically. War is being used as an instrument of policy, and becoming a way of life in the worst affected areas,...
While there is a widely-accepted thesis that economic liberalization and/or political democratization can reduce levels of corruption in developing societies, recent experience suggests that the relationship is variable and in some contexts corruption may increase in consequence.
1 May 1996
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).