Can you help shape our future priorities? Take a five minute survey now. Survey closes on 8 July.

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

Filter results by

Showing 1849–1860 of 15404 results

News

Sexual harassment common among young women workers in Bangladesh

New research reveals that young female workers (aged 18 to 24) in Bangladesh often experience sexual harassment at work, but their concerns about it are going ignored. Most do not dare to challenge men when witnessing or experiencing sexual harassment because of feelings of shame, and a lack of...

24 May 2022

Past Event

Between the Lines Podcast

Podcast S04 Ep5: The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling

In this episode of Between the Lines, BBC journalist Sana Safi interviews Max Gallien, Research Fellow, at the Institute of Development Studies and Florian Weigand, co-director at the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups at ODI and research associate at LSE. Max and Florian are editors of the...

24 May 2022

Brief

Tackling Workplace Sexual Harassment

IDS Policy Briefing 195

Based on case study research with factory and domestic workers in Bangladesh and Uganda, this briefing explains how social and gender norms constrain young women’s voices and agency in response to sexual harassment.

23 May 2022

Journal Article

Feminist Africa: African Women’s Lives in the Time of a Pandemic

This issue of Feminist Africa reflects on both the impact of COVID-19 on African women and African women’s responses to the pandemic. As a continent, Africa has endured decades of economic, political and social crises. Since the colonial period, the continent has been a primary commodity...

Dorte Thorsen
Dorte Thorsen & 2 others

23 May 2022

Opinion

Pastoralism against land grabbing: decolonizing development narratives for a just socio-ecological transition

The book “La terra dentro il capitale. Conflicts, ecological crisis and development in the Senegal delta“, (Land and capitalism. Conflict, Ecological Crisis, and Development in the Senegal Delta) written by Maura Benegiamo and published by Orthotes (2021), focuses on the relationships...

Maura Benegiamo

20 May 2022

Opinion

Equality for sanitation workers is key to transforming waste into Brown Gold

Sanitation workers in the Global South are some of the most marginalised people in the world. People from stigmatised castes, such as Dalits and Harijans, make up the majority of the sanitation workforce in India and Nepal. The children of manual scavengers can seldom escape sanitation work,...

Dr Amita Bhakta

19 May 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).

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.