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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

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Showing 1069–1080 of 15397 results

Brief

A Participatory Assessment for Climate-Induced WASH Vulnerabilities in Bangladesh

SLH Learning Brief 16

This SLH Learning Brief is intended to provide inspiration to practitioners and WASH experts on how to adapt existing vulnerability assessment tools to integrate climate considerations. A sanitation-focused climate lens was added to existing ward vulnerability assessment tools due to the...

Samiha Nuzhat & 3 others

28 July 2023

News

A new era of digital citizenship in Africa

A new open access book “Digital Citizenship in Africa: Technologies of Agency and Repression” explores African citizens’ use of tech tools to freely participate in social, economic, and political life despite a wider context of growing repression and digital authoritarianism. This is the...

27 July 2023

Book

Digital Citizenship in Africa: Technologies of Agency and Repression

Since the so-called Arab Spring, citizens of African countries have continued to use digital tools in creative ways to ensure that marginalised voices are heard, and to demand for the rights they are entitled to in law: to freely associate, to form opinions, and to express them online without...

27 July 2023

Working Paper

Shock-Responsive Social Protection in the Sahel: Niger, Mauritania, and Senegal

Working Paper

In the face of shocks that are recurrent, predictable, interrelated, and multi-annual, governments and the international community are increasingly looking to the potential of shock-responsive and adaptive social protection to address multidimensional risk in a sustainable and integrated manner....

26 July 2023

Opinion

Commercialising horticulture in Zimbabwe: some case studies

Last week the blog offered an overview of horticulture growing across our research sites in Zimbabwe. The blog emphasised the importance of a ‘hidden middle’ connecting growers to a range of other activities, all generating employment. This blog focuses on a number of case studies of...

26 July 2023

News

Nature-based Solutions projects must make justice their first priority

Globally, conservation projects to expand carbon sinks are seen as critical in the fight against climate change. As these ‘Nature-based Solutions’ (NbS) projects expand in number and scale, understanding their social dimensions and how to achieve just outcomes is crucial for people and the...

25 July 2023

Impact Story

Evidencing the case for equitable, locally-based pandemic responses

Ahead of next year’s WHO-led treaty on pandemics, our Pandemic Preparedness project and Covid Collective initiative - both examples of what can be achieved through agile partnering and collaboration - have underlined the need to make responses equitable, ethical and...

24 July 2023

Opinion

How the World Bank is restricting farmer’s rights to own, save and sell seeds

Seeds are the starting point for food production but the age old farmer seed system across Africa is being severely restricted by the actions of the World Bank. Guest author Graham Gordon explains how this is criminalising small-scale farms in Kenya, damaging the livelihoods of millions of...

Graham Gordon, Head of Public Policy at CAFOD

24 July 2023

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).

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