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.
Variability and volatility have become the new normal of our climate system. As global attention turns towards climate extremes, researchers with the ANTICIPATE project are examining how local communities experience the ‘extreme’ variability as droughts and floods coincide. Using visual...
MUVA is a social incubator dedicated to developing innovative approaches to the economic empowerment of women in Mozambique. This paper documents experiences from two MUVA projects supporting women’s economic empowerment through entrepreneurship, and draws out broader insights and principles...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In this blog we return to the theme of the ‘hidden middle’; those activities that exist between the very small-scale and informal and the larger, more organised formal operations. As we discussed in relation to maize, these activities are vital for the new agrarian economy post land...
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...
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...
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...
En Afrique de l'Est et de l'Ouest, la création artistique collaborative peut renforcer les relations entre des groupes peu habitués à s'engager ensemble directement, dans des contextes où le dialogue politique est déjà empreint d'émotion et fondé sur des valeurs.
Méthodes...
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).