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.
Renewable, decentralised mini-grids are a promising technology for electrifying remote communities in sub-Saharan Africa. However, most mini-grids struggle not only to obtain a profit, but also to recover costs.
Despite a rich cultural tradition of gender-fluidity, the transgender community in India have been stigmatised as a ‘criminal tribe’ through a colonial-era law. The community has struggled for their rights over decades, and only after significant engagement with the judiciary were they...
Pakistan is facing numerous socioeconomic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, including on food security. Food insecurity, which is a long-standing issue, has become more visible since the pandemic.
Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) partner the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI)...
After a summer-long Conservative leadership contest, the UK has a new Prime Minister. IDS Director, Professor Melissa Leach, highlights the international development policy areas she should be prioritising, and why.
The UK’s new Prime Minister (and former Foreign Secretary), Liz Truss, enters...
Despite a rich cultural tradition of gender-fluidity, the transgender community in India have been stigmatised as a ‘criminal tribe’ through a colonial-era law. The community has struggled for their rights over decades, and only after significant engagement with the judiciary were they...
During the Covid-19 pandemic, governments and development agencies across the world took steps to keep businesses afloat, including in the food sector. However, often inadvertently (and sometimes intentionally), this support was only accessible to some; notably the better connected, and formally...
A great new special issue – tobacco and transformation – is out in the Journal of Southern African Studies, edited by Martin Prowse and Helena Pérez Niño. With reflections on Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe (mostly), it provides an important overview of a crucial...
Eleven years ago, Susie Jolly published an article in this journal detailing the ways that international development work was heteronormative, assuming heterosexual gender stereotyped household models and framing sexuality as a problem of ill-health or violence, rather than a potentially...
Giulia Simula worked with pastoralists in Sardinia, Italy, during her doctoral research with the PASTRES programme. In this short video, she discusses what she discovered, and how this challenges assumptions about how pastoralists engage with different kinds of markets.
In recent years, there has been a push backed by some of the largest donor and relief organisations to plant the seeds of social protection systems in even the most difficult protracted crisis settings. The case for doing so seems compelling enough: to identify alternatives to costly, perennial...
Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, the more complex impacts of the disease are becoming clearer. Rising to these multidimensional challenges, IDS partnerships have gone above and beyond expectations in pursuing social science research to inform policy and practice.
Despite the constraints...
Can secessionism be a basis for affective or social polarisation? Despite much research on independence movements, their relationship to polarisation, a key mechanism theorised as increasing the risk of violent conflict, remains less understood.
We argue that the issue of secession can...
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).