The next STEPS Summer School will be on 13-24 May 2013 at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

Download the 2013 Summer School brochure and application details:

• 2013 Summer School (pdf, 344 kb)

For full information about the event, see the 2013 STEPS Summer School page.

Innovation has been moving up the strategic agendas of business, government and international agencies working in developing countries.  New markets for innovative goods and services among those at the base of the pyramid, and new technologies – particularly information and communication technologies – are inducing and enabling new actors to become involved in innovation for development.  This is creating new contexts and new locations for innovation.  And, as a result, new models of innovation are emerging.

This two-day workshop aims to share and explore some of these new models for which a variety of labels have emerged: “Pro-poor innovation”, “BoP innovation”, “Inclusive innovation”, “Below-the-radar innovation”, “Grassroots innovation”, “Frugal innovation”, “Jugaad innovation”, and more.

The STEPS Centre’s Grassroots Innovation project will be presenting a paper entitled Renewing inclusive models of innovation: grassroots innovation in historical and comparative perspective at this event, and STEPS Centre member Adrian Ely will  present a new STEPS Centre paper.

Find out more on the event website

Bram Buscher will be talking about the themes covered in his recently published book, Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa (Duke University Press). All welcome.

You can watch a video of Bram introducing his book on his website.

About Bram:
Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University. I also hold appointments as a visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies of the University of Johannesburg and a Research Associate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of Stellenbosch University

About the book:
International peace parks—transnational conservation areas established and managed by two or more countries—have become a popular ways of protecting biodiversity while promoting international cooperation and regional development. In Transforming the Frontier, Bram Büscher shows how cross-border conservation neatly reflects the neoliberal political economy in which it developed.

Drawing on extensive research in Southern Africa with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project, Büscher explains how the successful promotion of transfrontier conservation as a “win-win” solution happens not only in spite of troubling contradictions and problems, but indeed because of them. This is what he refers to as the “politics of neoliberal conservation,” which receives its strength from effectively combining strategies of consensus, anti-politics, and marketing. Drawing on long-term, multi-level ethnographic research, Büscher argues that transfrontier conservation projects are not as concerned with on-the-ground development as they are purported to be. Instead, they are reframing environmental protection and sustainable development to fit an increasingly contradictory world order.