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.
Community engagement, in public health practice, includes a wide range of activities to work with community members to promote well-being and achieve more equitable health outcomes. This kind of work was critical to pandemic preparedness and response during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cleveland has a...
This short report describes findings from the Cleveland, Ohio site of the ‘Community Engagement in Pandemic Preparedness (CEPP)’ project. The aim of this study was to yield practical and operationally relevant lessons from COVID-19 and ongoing work to improve community engagement (CE) and...
This evidence brief draws on anthropological research in Ealing, a borough in Northwest London, to demonstrate how investing in community engagement infrastructure is fundamental to pandemic preparedness. While traditional preparedness often focuses on plans and protocols, the Ealing experience...
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's government presented the Federal Budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year which allocated nearly 50% of the budget to debt servicing alone while severing subsidies - with a 13% cut on power sector subsidies - and announcing plans to broaden the...
In recognition of outstanding research, the Centre for Social Work Innovation and Research (CSWIR) recently presented awards to Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) across the University of Sussex. Diana Ramirez Sarmiento and Sunisha Neupane, both PhD researchers...
Where do skills reside? Do they dwell in people, in practices, in technologies? The question might seem abstract, but it helps us to think shrewdly about how changing skills can respond to new challenges and opportunities.
Skills are fundamentally about agency; they express what a...
This blog offers a compilation of blogs published over the past weeks, which have offered a reflection on how local people understand ‘success’ and its changes over time especially in the period since the 2000 land reform.
We have worked in a diversity of A1 smallholder land reform and...
This paper examines the politics and dynamics of social assistance in Yemen, where international humanitarian aid dominates support to conflict-affected populations.
The development sector proclaims that it values dignity. Yet it often breaks this promise, with people leaving encounters with charities feeling bruised and unseen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T2L4v4DOhw
In this podcast, drawn from a recent lecture at IDS, research fellow Marina Apgar...
The development sector proclaims that it values dignity. Yet it often breaks this promise, with people leaving encounters with charities feeling bruised and unseen.
In this podcast, drawn from a recent lecture at IDS, research fellow Marina Apgar is in conversation with Tom Wein from the...
One of President Lula’s early acts as President of Brazil for the third time was to reinstate the national food and nutrition security council, after the previous President Jair Bolsonaro had dismantled it in 2019.
Earlier this month, I was at the inaugural meeting for this council,...
As rapid climate change is increasing the occurrence of extreme weather events, there is a noticeable increase in co-located hazards which refer to climate events that overlap or occur concurrently (e.g. droughts followed by floods or overlapping with heatwaves). Regions that are historically...
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).