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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 1141–1152 of 15396 results

Working Paper

Backlash in Action? Or Inaction? Stalled Implementation of the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act 2010 in Bangladesh

IDS Working Paper 590

The Bangladesh government adopted the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act in 2010. While the formulation and enactment of the Act was an achievement for the government and the coalition that championed it (the Citizens’ Initiative Against Domestic Violence, CIDV), its...

14 June 2023

Publication

Mpox in Nigeria – Lessons from Diverse Experiences

In 2022, the virus mpox was declared a public health emergency of international concern. From October 2022 to February 2023, a research team from the UK and Nigeria studied the recent story of mpox in Nigeria, and what it could mean for responses in other countries and across national...

Tim Zocco

14 June 2023

Publication

Photo Story: Views of Mpox in Nigeria

Mpox (previously known as monkeypox) was first ‘discovered’ in 1958, though it’s only in the past year that it’s gained significant international public attention. The disease can have very visible symptoms, with painful lesions that spread all over the body in more severe cases. In...

13 June 2023

Past Event

Backlash against gender justice globally: What does it mean for development?

The IDS-led Countering Backlash programme has organised panel debate where the chair will engage a panel of international experts in a topical discussion on questions for development arising from a swell of anti-gender backlash across the world: ‘What is it?’, ‘How should development...

13 June 2023

Brief

Adaptation of the Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) Protocol During the COVID-19 Response

SLH Learning Brief;15

Before COVID-19, Mozambique’s Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) protocol, introduced in 2008 and referenced in the Strategy of Rural Sanitation 2021-2030, broadly aligned with the original approach proposed by Kar and Chambers in the CLTS Handbook (2008). It included participatory...

12 June 2023

Past Event

Communicating climate complexity: Arts and pedagogy

Climate change is complicated. So are the things we're doing about it. How might the arts help us to address that complexity? As educators and researchers in a university, how do we embed sustainability themes across our activities? As people on a planet, how do we talk and think about...

12 June 2023

Opinion

The global infrastructure of pastoralist systems

If you understand stabilization and expansion of herder outputs and outcomes — in particular household livelihoods — are central to pastoralism, then there are varieties of pastoralism. This is largely because efforts to achieve stable and expanding livelihoods vary with the critical...

9 June 2023

Past Event

Michael Lipton Lecture

The Department of Economics at the University of Sussex Business School and the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) are hosting a public lecture in honour of Professor Michael Lipton. This event celebrates the outstanding contributions that Professor Michael Lipton made to the Department of...

9 June 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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