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.
This blog is based on the fifth chapter of the newly published book Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Development edited by Ian Scoones.
Pastoral producers in Sardinia, Italy face highly volatile markets for their sheep’s milk, resulting in huge uncertainties for production and marketing....
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...
In my second blog on the findings of new research on knowledge translation (KT) in the global South, I want to focus on the implications of our findings for political science and development studies research agendas.
A fragmented field of study
Interest in the theory and practice of research...
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...
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...
As COVID-19 took hold across borders in 2020 and 2021, more than 1.6 billion informal workers were estimated by the United Nations to have been impacted by mobility restrictions and other “lockdown” measures to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
In the Global South, the pandemic has...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
This blog provides a brief overview of the fourth chapter of the newly published book Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Development edited by Ian Scoones.
Through a multi-case ethnographic approach using mixed methods in two pastoral sites in Amdo Tibet, China, this chapter explores emerging...
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).