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 15133–15144 of 15295 results

Publication

Export-oriented Industrialisation Through Primary Processing?

IDS working papers;19


Recent research suggests that East Asia's manufactured export success is not replicable in other developing countries, with lower skill/land ratios. This conclusion, however, is based on a narrow definition of manufactured exports. The present paper asks whether the chances of...

1 January 1995

Publication

Financing Health Services in Poor Rural China: A Strategy for Health Sector Reform

IDS working papers;17


Since 1950 China has transformed itself from the sick man of Asia' to a country with better than average health indices for its level of national income. This achievement was due to a number of factors including a dramatic fall in the prevalence of severe poverty, improvements in the rural...

1 January 1995

Working Paper

How Will the EU’s Response to the GATT Round Affect Developing Countries?

IDS Working Paper 11

The paper makes an initial analysis of the trade policy changes that the EU will implement to give effect to its GATT Round commitments. It focuses mainly on tariff changes in three areas: industrial products of interest to developing countries, temperate agricultural products, and goods on...

1 December 1994

Journal Article

Linking Relief and Development

25

The basic idea of linking relief and development is simple and sensible. But what is involved in practice and what are the barriers preventing it? This IDS Bulletin presents a collection of articles on the issues involved, a number of case studies, and perspectives from several leading...

3 October 1994

Journal Article

The Structural Adjustment of Structural Adjustment: SSA 1980-1993

IDS Bulletin Volume 25 No. 3

Structural adjustment can be dated to the World Bank's 1981 Accelerated Development (Berg) Report, albeit precursor World Bank programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. Togo, Malagasy Republic) date to the late 1970s.

1 July 1994

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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