The term ‘sustainable intensification’ (SI) has entered academic and policy discourse in recent years, including in debates about what to do about agriculture in Zimbabwe. I have been intrigued for…
Sustainable intensification: a new buzzword to feed the world?
GM Crops: Continuing controversy
By Ian Scoones, STEPS Centre Director In 2002, the international press was full of headlines such as ‘Starving Zimbabwe Shuns GM Maize’. This was repeated again in 2010. The context…
The Badaun murder: violence, vulnerability and safer sanitation
by Shilpi Srivastava, DPhil Student, Institute of Development Studies The heinous rape and murder of two teenaged girls in the Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh (India) has provoked a mix…
‘Resilience’ and the peri-urban: limitations & potential
A new IDS Briefing looks at the potentials and pitfalls of the use of the ‘resilience agenda’ in talking about the role of the peri-urban space in urban expansion. One…
‘Negotiating Environmental Change’ now available as an e-book
The 2003 book Negotiating Environmental Change: New Perspectives on Social Science, edited by STEPS director Ian Scoones, Melissa Leach (former director) and Frans Berkhout (Interim Director of Future Earth), has…
STEPS Summer School 2014 – Elsie Khakasa’s review
Guest post by Elsie Khakasa, STEPS Summer School 2014 participant. This post is reposted from Elsie’s blog with kind permission. Two weeks of a thought provoking and intense summer school…
Political Ecologies of Carbon project researchers to speak at Green Economy in the South conference in July
Martin Kijazi and others from the STEPS Centre’s Political Ecologies of Carbon in Africa project will be speaking at the international conference “Green Economy in the South – Negotiating Environmental…
Nature Not For Sale: Ian Scoones discusses biodiversity & communities
STEPS Centre Director Ian Scoones is on a panel at Nature Not For Sale: 2nd Forum on Natural Commons today in London. The forum brings together NGOs, academics, activists and…
STEPS Summer School 2015: apply
Applications for the STEPS Summer School 2015 are now closed. Who should apply? Applications are invited from highly-motivated doctoral and postdoctoral researchers,working in fields around development studies, science and technology…
Against authoritarianism: Why we shouldn’t ‘put democracy on hold’ to achieve sustainability
Does the human response to global environmental challenges need to be channelled through authoritarian, controlled ‘transitions’? Threatened by climate change, should we ‘put democracy on hold for a while’? Or…