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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News

New primer on livestock, food and climate ahead of COP27

In recent years livestock production has been criticized for contributing to the climate crisis. Several groups, including corporate lobbies and environmentalists alike, have called for a reduction in meat and milk consumption and a shift towards more plant-based diets. But these simplistic and...

14 October 2022

Past Event

Ethics in evaluation: Current debates and practice

Questions about ethics are increasingly recognised as central concerns of evaluation practice, especially in the context of policy and programming that aims to reach marginalised and excluded populations. Current localisation and decolonisation debates create further momentum for asking...

14 October 2022

News

Podcast: challenging misconceptions about food production

In this episode of the IDS Between the Lines podcast, IDS Fellows Dominic Glover and Lidia Cabral interviews Glenn Davies Stone – Research Professor of Environmental Science at Sweet Briar College, Virginia – author of the book: The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World. Listen...

13 October 2022

Publication

Humanitarian Evidence and Discourse Summary No.31

K4D Helpdesk Reports

This is the 31st monthly Knowledge, Evidence and Learning for Development (K4D) Programme’s Humanitarian Evidence Summary (HUMES), signposting to the latest relevant evidence and discourse on humanitarian action to inform and support their response. It is the result of one day of work per...

12 October 2022

Opinion

The link between inequities and poor diets in Brazil

Deeply rooted social injustices that contribute to hunger and food insecurity are difficult to remove, and the experience of Brazil over the past 40 years demonstrates this.  Following decades of promising results in the fight against hunger and poverty, a political and economic crisis...

11 October 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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