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.
The floods in Pakistan have had a horrifying impact — over 1,000 people dead and almost 33 million 'displaced', a simple word that couches the absolute devastation of people’s lives, homes, and everything they have worked for their whole life.
This is a climate change disaster, but it is...
Our research on government policy responses to address the increase in women’s unpaid care and domestic work during COVID-19, across 59 countries of Asia and the Pacific, shows that less than 30 per cent of measures are care-sensitive and of these only 12 per cent are gender-differentiated....
Participatory research and inquiry is all about ‘putting the people who are experiencing the problems at the heart of finding the solutions’. As interest in participatory methods has surged, IDS this year produced a highly acclaimed and comprehensive handbook aimed at social science...
Despite climate change being a major concern for the sanitation sector, rural sanitation remains neglected in the wider discussions of climate impacts on WASH services.
Also, the voices of vulnerable individuals, households, and communities who are experiencing the effects of climate change in...
Two important new books have come out on the neoliberal restructuring of land and agriculture in Africa recently. Both take a radical agrarian political economy stance on the theme, but from different angles. Such analyses have important implications for thinking about agrarian reform, the role...
This CDI Practice paper by Peter Taylor describes the evolution of the Think Tank Initiative (TTI) evaluation approach as it engaged progressively with the complexity of the programme. It reflects critically on key lessons learned through process and outcomes. It also offers some takeaways for...
Access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation are intrinsically linked. Without a clean, safe source of water nearby it is nearly impossible for communities to have adequate sanitation facilities, and inadequate sanitation facilities often spill over and pollute drinking water sources....
Today, the 24 August, civil society in Angola and in the diaspora will cast their vote to elect the next president, vice president and members of parliament. The election contest between the Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the party in power since the country’s independence from...
The rise of digital financial services has attracted growing attention from governments in Sub-Saharan Africa seeking to raise tax revenue.
In the context of global concerns around how governments can tax the digital economy and fintech, we evaluate recent debates over mobile money taxation in...
This study investigates the ways in which Syriac native speakers from Iraq conceptualise their understandings of various abstract domains, feelings, emotions, actions, customs, traditions and practices through their experiences of the concrete fields of food and drink metaphors.
The current study is an attempt to provide a linguistic, a historical, as well as a sociocultural record of the language variety spoken in Bashiqa (Northern Iraq) by one of the communities which represents a religious minority in Iraq known as Yazidis.
As health systems around the world grapple with providing care within the ‘new normal’ of Covid-19, IDS has stepped up collaboration with a major funder of global health research to make community engagement central to research on health inequities and complex health problems.
The UK-based...
23 August 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).