Sustainable development (SD), brought into the spotlight with this week’s UN summit, remains a landmark policy and global development agenda since the 1992 Convention on Environment and Development. Anchored on…
Rethinking Africa’s sustainable development pathways
SDGs: time to rethink energy infrastructure?
As the new Sustainable Development Goals are launched this week, attention will be focused on some of the great global challenges that face our world. They also give us a…
Will the Sustainable Development Goals make a difference?
This week heads of state assemble in New York to launch the Sustainable Development Goals. The agreed text lays out 17 goals and 169 targets. It is an ambitious agenda…
Understanding soils using interdisciplinary methods
Our director Ian Scoones has applied the STEPS pathways approach to understanding soils, for a new article in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. 2015 has been named as the International…
WSSF 2015: What kinds of alliances create transformative knowledge?
In advance of the World Social Science Forum I have been in Durban with an inspiring group of researchers and activists to discuss transformations to sustainability. It has been incredibly…
WSSF 2015: What role can social science play in working towards a just world?
Nearly a thousand delegates from across 84 countries are gathering right now in Durban, South Africa, for the third World Social Science Forum. The first similar forum ‘One Planet –…
Hunger and HIV: have we misread the landscape?
Some of the most important questions we have concern large and extreme events of which we have little experience and few examples. We don’t learn nearly as much as we…
Ebola: identifying the true game-changers
Compared to this time last year, news about Ebola is hugely more encouraging. Although not over, the number of new cases per week tends to be in single figures instead…
New book: Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development
Livelihoods are a vital lens on rural development, but should be examined in the context of wider questions of political economy. A new book by STEPS director Ian Scoones looks…
Who writes international climate change reports?
Guest blog by Esteve Corbera (ICTA-UAB, Spain) This week in the journal Nature Climate Change, colleagues and I published an analysis of who has participated in the latest 5AR mitigation…