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.
Safe labour migration is key to international development. Labour migrants provide their families with more choices, such as finishing off an education, improving their houses, and avoiding indebtedness. In 2020, remittances sent home by Nepali international labour migrants were equivalent to...
Health and care partners in Brighton and Hove are to be part of a new Trans-Atlantic research project to find important lessons from the pandemic to help reduce inequality.
The Institute of Development Studies research project aims to identify the innovations and collaborations that have...
Forest carbon has been called a pseudo-commodity, meaning offsetting schemes such as REDD+ can increase the value of tropical forests gained from the developmental rent, even where integration into an imagined global carbon market is never achieved.
Watch...
Research on the context of COVID-19 vaccine ‘hesitancy’ can highlight a wide range of long-standing historical, political-economic, and social issues faced by marginalised communities. Young people, for example, were often labelled ‘vaccine hesitant’ when COVID-19 vaccines first became...
Given the health, social, and economic upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is understandable anxiety about another virus, monkeypox, quickly emerging in many countries around the world.
In West and Central Africa, where the disease has been endemic for several decades, monkeypox...
Lebanon’s 2022 parliamentary election was held in the midst of economic turmoil, and the first since the October 2019 uprising and the world’s largest ever non-nuclear explosions that devastated Beirut’s port. Despite ongoing commentary that there would be a low turnout, 49 per cent of...
This week is Masters Week at Sussex. Discover what postgraduate study at Sussex is like from the comfort of home.
Masters Week: Monday 13 to Friday 17 June 2022
Join our week-long series of live online sessions. We’ll have Zoom webinars where you can get personal statement tips, find out...
In modern warfare, the first widely acknowledged scientific study and documented case of environmental damage during conflict was the (direct and deliberate) use of Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals by US forces, from 1961-1971, during the Vietnam War in a policy known as herbicide.
The...
The Covid-19 pandemic and related restrictions have had profound socioeconomic impacts worldwide. Governments have been faced with responding urgently to mitigate such effects, especially for the most vulnerable.
Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) partner Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP)...
The Covid-19 pandemic has heightened growing global warnings of hunger and food insecurity. The related negative impacts are expected to last a long time, since in addition to issues inherent to health, there was an increase in unemployment rates and loss of income for individuals, added to the...
Eleven million fewer women than men voted in the 2018 Pakistan elections. A gender gap in political participation is common in many democracies around the world. To tackle this, many policy interventions focus on increasing participation through educational programmes providing information and...
13 June 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).