Are alternative visions missing from the debates about sustainability transitions?

by Kasper Ampe, Michael Kriechbaum and Sofie Sandin In June 2018 we attended the IST (International Sustainability Transitions) conference in Manchester. It was a repeat visit for all of us,…

Trump and Brexit: what’s the alternative?

Sometimes when you suffer trauma, you have to look elsewhere to seek out radically new ways of framing things in order to recover. This year we’ve suffered two major traumas…

Science, Brexit and ‘post-truth’ politics

STEPS co-director Andy Stirling is one of six researchers writing in the Guardian on ‘science after Brexit’. A longer version of his part of the Guardian article is below. The…

Call for papers: 2016 Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS) colloquium

A call for papers has been issued for the international colloquium on Global governance/politics, climate justice & agrarian/social justice: linkages and challenges on 4-5 February 2016 in The Hague, Netherlands….

Why we should argue about agronomy

“The real problem is that too many people are playing politics with agriculture, and poor people are suffering – agronomists should stick to the facts!” Organic agriculture, agroecology, Conservation Agriculture,…

Join us for Resource Politics 2015

The ESRC STEPS Centre’s annual conference, Resource Politics: transforming pathways to sustainability will be held at the Institute of Development Studies on 7-9 September 2015. Registration is now closed. Among…

Green Transformations: Whose Politics and which Green?

By Professor Peter Newell, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex Talk of transformation is back in vogue. This time the call is for a green transformation. Recent and recurrent…

Warning tape and turning points: how we talk about planetary boundaries

Last week, updated research on ‘planetary boundaries’ was published, with new analysis of what humanity is doing to various natural processes and the risks we face as a species. Reading…

Soil and politics

What do you think of when you think about soil? There are radically different ways to answer the question. For some scientists, it’s a subject of investigation – what do…