Publications in the Governance & Policy category:

Researching Land Reform in Zimbabwe

edited by Ian Scoones This book is a compilation of 20 articles emerging from researching Zimbabwe’s land reform since 2000. The book is organised into six themes: ‘experiences of land…

The governance of sociotechnical transformations to sustainability

This article was produced as part of the Governance of Sociotechnical Transformations (GoST) project. The contribution makes use of a sociotechnical imaginaries (STI) framework to expose crucial but neglected governance…

Response to DEFRA Consultation on ‘The regulation of genetic technologies’

by Adrian Ely, Erik Millstone, Dominic Glover, Alice Livingston Ortolani, Andy Stirling, Sung Kyu Kim, Michael Hopkins, David Eggleton, Ruth Segal, Katerina Psikaridou and Divya Sharma Response to the Defra…

Three ways of understanding social transformations to sustainability

This knowledge brief was published by the International Science Council’s Transformations to Sustainability programme. Download this briefing The enormity, complexity and urgency of the global targets enshrined in the 2030…

The Green Revolution and Poverty in Northern Tamil Nadu: a Brief Synthesis of Village-Level Research in the Last Half-Century

In this paper, a corpus of research is revisited to reinterpret how poverty in Northern Tamil Nadu was theorised and analysed, and to synthesise and compare the findings. The extensive scope of poverty concepts and processes studied over the decades constitutes the appendix.

The Politics of Uncertainty: Challenges of Transformation

Edited by Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling Routledge, 2020 Open access This book is available as an Open Access e-book. Individual chapters can also be downloaded free of charge. Read…

A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure

This paper proposes that pastoralist systems are better treated, in aggregate, as a global critical infrastructure. The policy and management implications that follow are significant and differ importantly from current pastoralist policies and recommendations. A multi-typology framework is presented, identifying the conditions under which pastoralists can be considered real-time reliability professionals in systems with mandates preventing or otherwise avoiding key events from happening. The framework leads to a different policy-relevant counternarrative to pastoralism as understood today. Some features of the counternarrative are already known or have been researched. The paper’s aim is to provoke further work (including case research and interactions with decision-makers) on how robust the counternarrative is as a policy narrative for recasting today’s pastoralist policy and management interventions.

Sustainability transformations in complex systems: a political economy perspective

By Hubert Schmitz and Ian Scoones Chapter in Global Challenges, Governance, and Complexity: Applications and Frontiers, edited by Victor Galaz Read this chapter Making the world more sustainable is the…

Transforming Access to Clean Technology: Learning From Lighting Africa

The working paper analyses the case of Lighting Africa, which successfully transformed access to solar lighting in Kenya and, as far as we are aware, conceptualises and illustrates for the first time Lighting Africa’s approach. This builds on past STEPS research that focusses on building sociotechnical innovation systems.