More from the Blog
Embracing uncertainty: what are the implications for sustainability and development?
Uncertainty is a concept that defines our times. Every media headline seems to assert that things are uncertain, and increasingly so. Whether it’s climate change, disease outbreaks, economic conditions or political settlements, the same narrative exists. Helga Nowotny, in her book The Cunning of Uncertainty, argues that “uncertainty is written into the script of life”….
Cities, Uncertainty and Systems Change
Depending who and where you are in the world, you will be experiencing the effects of climate change differently. Here in the UK, the recent hot-weather days in February might have felt unsettling, even as your body welcomed the warmth and sunshine. Meanwhile, people in some parts of the United States were caught in freezing…
Rediscovering the Water-Food-Energy Nexus
A few months ago, I presented the findings of a new book, The Water-Food-Energy Nexus: Power, Politics and Justice, to an International Water Association conference on the same topic at Salerno. To my great surprise, I was the only social scientist out of 200 participants. Nexus approaches help to bridge the separate domains of water,…
Realising the SDGs: why a sustainable livelihoods approach can help
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched with great fanfare in September 2015. This was an ambitious agenda for the whole world, aiming to transform development towards sustainability, while leaving no-one behind. I was excited by the prospects. Back then, I expressed the hope that this was perhaps the moment when a new politics of…
Poverty traps: a short film about how people in rural Appalachia see poverty
Poverty is often described as a ‘trap’. How does this reflect the perception of people who live with poverty in their everyday lives? Researchers often use the words ‘poverty trap’ for contexts where systems keep feeding back in a way that maintains a cycle of poverty. It’s not just about a lack of money: poverty…
Why politics matters for transformations for sustainability
The Sustainable Development Goals are the focus of global efforts towards better quality of life for all around the world. The 17 goals recognise the need to approach many aspects of development together. Not just change is needed, but transformation. This transformation goes beyond the need to find technical solutions. Changes in policies will come…
‘What if?’ Meeting, making, dreaming, doing
Each week, the System Change Hive is exploring and experimenting with new solutions to societal and environmental problems, through creative arts practice. Artworks created will be exhibited in different locations around the UK and showcased online. The group is comprised of artists, communication experts, activists and STEPS researchers. In week 5, the session began by splitting…
Water crisis’ disproportionate toll on women can no longer be ignored
STEPS member Lyla Mehta has written an article with Ria Basu for the Indian magazine Firstpost about the impacts of ‘water crisis’ on women. Often, access to water is about power and social relations, not just physical scarcity. For most of us, accessing water is as simple as turning the taps on in our kitchens…
Irrigating Africa: can small-scale farmers lead the way?
by Ian Scoones, Felix Murimbarimba and Jacob Mahenehene We often hear that irrigation in Africa is too limited, and that the key to a “green revolution” on the continent is to expand to levels seen in Asia. But what if there is much more small-scale, informal irrigation in Africa than we thought? Could this be…
Five problems with ‘integrated assesment’ models, and what to do about them
What are the most appropriate ways of understanding changes in natural resource change in rural areas, particularly in the context of climate change? How can we make use of data that is patchy and uncertain? How can models help decision-making about future management? These questions are at the heart of three recently published journal articles…
Pastoralist milk is a viable commodity. What enables it to flourish?
Pastoralists’ integration into market dynamics is mostly addressed through the lens of trade in meat products, involving male traders. Pastoral milk, mostly traded by women, is often ignored. But good production of healthy milk is definitely the best way to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of a pastoral system at whatever level. Milk is central…
Could Kenya’s local flour mills be an early warning system for famine?
By Fred Ajwang, Relational Pathways project In the Relational Pathways project, we have been exploring how rural people relate to technology in their everyday lives. This has included fieldwork in a part of Kenya called Machakos. One upshot of rural fieldwork is how easily one can slip in and fit into the community. And so,…
Destruction-prone conservation policies: one pathway to sustainability?
By Niak Sian Koh (Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden) and Amos Ochieng (Department of Forestry, Biodiversity and Tourism, Makerere University, Uganda) In an attempt to address the crucial problem of biodiversity loss, governments, conservation NGOs and the private sector are experimenting with different approaches to increase sources of funding for conservation. On a global level, the…
Learning from crises: state-citizen relations in the time of cholera
The cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe in 2008 was the worst ever recorded in Africa. There were nearly 100,000 infections and some 4,300 deaths. The disease swept through the crowded urban areas in particular, and spilled across the borders to neighbouring countries. The deadly bacterium caused illness and death, but also new forms of politics in…
Towards a more convivial politics of science
This is the last in a series of three blog posts by Andy Stirling about the theme of the STEPS Centre for 2019: Uncertainty. In previous blogposts in this series, I argued that not all is as it seems in the politics of incertitude. Deep intractabilities are papered over with the apparently precise language of…
How politics closes down uncertainty
This is the second in a series of blog posts on uncertainty by Andy Stirling. The first one is here and the third in the series is here. In a previous blog post, I discussed how uncertainty is a subjective state of knowledge, not an objective condition in the world. The example of nuclear accident…
How can knowledge systems in East Africa contribute to sustainable development?
Unpacking Knowledge Systems for sustainable development in East Africa: Practical perspectives from Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania by Joanes Atela, Fiona Marshall, Nora Ndege, Joanna Chataway, Andy Frost and Andy Hall, Knowledge Systems Project Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) is rising up the agenda in East Africa – and it is being embraced as a way…
Reflections on Authoritarian Populism: Democracy, Technology and Ecological Destruction
Using anarchist critique to unearth the ‘roots’ of authoritarian populism can offer a productive gateway for understanding the origins and continuation of socio-ecological and economic crises. The language of ‘authoritarian populism’ creates the potential for a broad spectrum of inquiry, which can ignite timely and much-needed debate on the nature and mechanisms of authoritarian political…
Politics in the language of uncertainty
This is the first in a series of three blog post about uncertainty by Andy Stirling. The second post is here and the third post is here. Uncertainty is not a condition out there in the world. It is a state of knowledge – deeply embedded and shaped in society. The difference may seem abstract….
What can transdisciplinarity give back to communities?
By Simone Omori, Leandro Giatti and Saurabh Arora The water-energy-food and environment nexus (w-e-f-e nexus) is a matter of understanding and acting on interdependent areas of activity. By directing attention to connections that are often overlooked in disciplinary research and siloed policymaking, the w-e-f-e nexus can be used to address the socio-ecological scarcities and vulnerabilities created…
Should political ecology be populist?
By Diego Andreucci Political ecology should take populism seriously, not only because of its authoritarian or regressive manifestations, but also for its transformative potential. The rise of right-wing populism is intimately connected to the failure of what Marxist Feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser dubbed ‘progressive neoliberalism’. For Fraser, the Left should reject the false choice between the…
Art, Uncertainty and System Change
It is becoming increasingly common to see funders, at national and international levels, in the sciences, arts and humanities, encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to various fundamental policy challenges. Initiatives focusing on the interface between art and environment, or art and ecology, mostly have emerged from an arts-based starting point, but the Arts and Environment Network (AEN)…
Views from the coast: uncertainty beyond climate change
Coastal areas are a poster child for climate vulnerability. They are marked and scarred by sea level rise, salinization, warming water, declining fish stocks, storms, changes in currents and weather patterns. But there are other currents and other patterns too. Against the global background of climatic change, a more careful look at places and communities…
Zimbabwe’s fuel riots: why austerity economics and repression won’t solve the problem
A day after the president announced a 150 percent hike in fuel prices, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions and others called for a peaceful three-day shutdown. Their demands were simple: end the economic crisis and hardships, reverse the fuel price increase and pay US$ salaries. By the end of day one, there were several…
Call For Papers: International Research Symposium on Post-Automation
International Research Symposium Post-Automation? Exploring Democratic Alternatives to Industry 4.0 11-13 September 2019 Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, Brighton, UK About the Symposium We are delighted to invite proposals for papers for the International Research Symposium on Post-Automation? Towards Democratic Alternatives to Industry 4.0, taking place at the Science Policy Research Unit,…
Headless populism and the political ecology of alienation
Populism of the kind displayed by the Yellow Vests is a revolt against social and ecological alienation and an affirmation of collective popular power. Since the gilets jaunes (‘Yellow Vests’) erupted onto the French national stage on the 17th of November, erecting blockades and occupying roundabouts ostensibly to protest President Emanuel Macron’s new tax on fuel, the movement…
Skills for Sustainability Research
By Fateme Zare, Victoria Evia and Michael Kriechbaum What skills and dispositions do researchers require for sustainability and transdisciplinary research? In this blog post, we want to provide insights on this question from the final session of the 2018 STEPS Summer School. We attended this two-week course, together with 39 other early-career sustainability researchers from different…
Answers on a postcard: how would you do technology differently?
Picture this… I like picture postcards. I like sending them, and I like receiving them. Despite the instantaneous advantages of Telegram and Twitter, or the range of Instagram and Facebook, my liking for postcards sent from A to B endures. Some I stick on my office wall, including the one above. Stuck above my desk…
Diets not riots: what would massive public dialogue on climate change look like?
The UN’s COP24 climate conference reaches its halfway point this weekend, and carbon emissions are going in the wrong direction worldwide. Debates about the best ways to tackle climate change are spilling out on to the streets and making headlines beyond the conference in Poland. In France, the gilets jaunes have made a violent and…
Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
by Amber Huff and Levi van Sant Based on a number of events convened under the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, we introduce a series of interventions that explore how political ecologies can help us to better understand and confront the emergence of contemporary authoritarian populism. Shaped by the crises of progressive neoliberalism – and its contradictory nexus of elite cosmopolitanism,…
Enabling Innovations
At the launch of STEPS America Latina in 2015, one of the themes that we focused on at our opening event was what we called ‘enabling’ innovations. These are new institutions, policies or technologies that are not only, themselves, a novel way of doing something or of solving a problem, but that also encourage and…
Video: Hilary Wainwright on knowledge, politics and the left
On 31 October 2018 Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper magazine and author of the book ‘A New Politics From The Left’, spoke at a STEPS/IDS seminar at the Institute of Development Studies. The seminar linked to our work with the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative on how people are responding and reacting to a new…
The challenges of open science
On Friday, November 2nd, the Argentine Congress of Open and Citizen Science (CIACIAR) was held at the University of San Martín, organized by CENIT and Cientópolis, and sponsored by STEPS Latin America. It was a meeting attended by more than 200 people among researchers, scientists, disseminators of science and technology, and university students from Buenos…
From digital commons to nurturing social relationships: How to practice open source ideas with seeds?
What happens when you try to transfer open source ideas beyond the digital world? In Argentina we organized a workshop on open hardware and immediately afterward an event on open seeds. Some of the difficulties involved in transferring open source ideas from virtual to more material settings, and from communities of practitioners comfortable with networked, digital culture, to those that are less so, were readily apparent.
Creating bridges in Xochimilco through the “Pathways to Sustainability Game”
By Beatriz Ruizpalacios, Lakshmi Charli-Joseph, Hallie Eakin, J. Mario Siqueiros-García, Rebecca Shelton, Pathways Network The urban wetland in Xochimilco, Mexico City, and the traditional agricultural areas within it, are undergoing rapid change and degradation, driven in part by the lack of regulation of urban growth near and within the wetland ecosystem. Strategizing on the best…
Open and Citizen Science Congress
On November 2nd, starting at 9 a.m. the second edition of the Open and Citizen Science Congress will be held at the University of San Martín, Buenos Aires. The event seeks to bring together different actors involved in open science initiatives. There will be open workshops, posters, debates, talks and an art and science fair….
Transformation Labs: Six stories of change
These six stories are summaries of T-Labs (Transformation Labs) carried out by the Pathways Network between 2016 and 2018. The project worked in Mexico, the UK, India, Argentina, China and Kenya. The text is excerpted from the booklet T-Labs: A Practical Guide, published in October 2018. Researchers from the Pathways Network have contributed to each…
Endings and beginnings: project-based work within wider transformations
by Adrian Ely and Elise Wach Since 2016 we have been involved in a small-scale project, as part of the broader ‘Pathways Network’, that has explored how to move towards more sustainable agri-food systems in Brighton and Hove. The project’s focus has been evolving on the basis of changing circumstances, knowledge and ideas – a…
Hardware y software de código abierto para cambiar el mundo
By Julieta Arancio As part of my doctoral project at CENIT-STEPS Latin America on open hardware, I am working as a mentor at the summer school of the Geneva-Tsinghua Iniciative, part of the University of Geneva. From this experience I will be publishing a series of blog posts on this subject. —- Como parte de…
The Power of a T-Lab: Sharing lessons on water and justice in Gurgaon, India
by Dinesh Abrol, Pravin Kushwaha and Bikramaditya K. Choudhary, South Asia Sustainability Hub & Knowledge Network. As big cities change rapidly, people moving into them can struggle for access to basic services like clean water and sanitation. One such city is Gurgaon, a secondary city that’s experienced rapid urban transition over the last two decades….
How transformative are mobile payments for solar home systems in Kenya?
by Victoria Chengo and Kennedy Mbeva, Africa Sustainability Hub The second Transformation Lab workshop (T-Lab) organised by the Africa Sustainability Hub was held in June in Nairobi, Kenya – one of six study sites in the international Pathways Network. As part of a 3-year process, the workshop discussed what needs to be done to enable…
Open access and open science: A historic opportunity
By Mariano Fressoli In recent years several countries in Latin America managed to develop policies and legislation on open access. For example, Argentina, Peru and Mexico have national legislations. While Colombia, Brazil and Chile have been working for years in the management of national systems for digital repositories. In this regard, Latin America has become…
Who benefits and loses from large developments in Eastern Africa’s rangelands?
The past ten years have seen the spread of large-scale investments in infrastructure, resources and land across pastoral areas of eastern Africa. In the past, these areas were insignificant to states in the region and large capital from beyond – at least, compared to the region’s agrarian highlands and Indian Ocean coast. But the recent…
Bioleft Project in Comunes meeting
On August 15th, Anabel Marin presented the Bioleft project within the Comunes meeting, on behalf of an interdisciplinary team of members from CENIT, the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET. The meeting was held in Buenos Aires, where an audience of 50 people listened attentively, interested in free and collaborative culture. It is the first…
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, but this time we left the conference rather puzzled – with the STEPS Centre’s summer school in the back of our minds. In the summer…
Argentina’s ‘Bioleft’ project shares its first open source seeds
Seeds were transferred from researchers to farmers for the first time under a new kind of open source transfer contract, called Bioleft, .
Open Science Map: Charting the development of Open Science practices in Latin America
Open Science represents a new approach in scientific knowledge based on collaborative work and new ways of spreading information using digital technologies. There are many benefits that come with open science practices such as different forms of participation, a more efficient production of knowledge and alternative trajectories of social and technological development. In Latin America,…
Is the new European ruling on GM techniques ‘anti-science’?
Frontstage rhetorics, backstage forces in current debates around the European Court of Justice ruling on GM crops There has been much commotion in the media over the past week, following the ruling by the European Court of Justice over how to interpret EU laws bearing on the regulation of GM crops. The ruling clarifies an…
In South Africa’s land reform, class matters
In South Africa’s former ‘homelands’ the government is trying to ‘revive’ agriculture. These areas are a legacy of the 1913 and 1936 land acts, which reserved only 13% of the land for black South Africans, and where most victims of forced removals were relocated. One of the pillars of the government’s strategy is to support…
What do we do about the heatwave?
The heatwave has turned deadly. Tinder-dry fields and forests in Europe, most dramatically in Greece, have burst into flames, with catastrophic results. Crops are failing; for some, the health risks of the heat are critical. These events have added urgency and weight to the calls to put the weather in context. A hot day is…
Three projects that explore open and collaborative production
Over the last decade, radically open and collaborative forms of producing knowledge and material artifacts have been gaining ground, accelerated by the advance of new technologies. Researchers from STEPS Latin America and CENIT (Research Center for Transformation), amongst many others, have been analyzing and contributing to initiatives that explore such alternative forms production. So what…
How can the Sustainable Development Goals be transformative?
The theme of this year’s High-level Political Forum on sustainable development is “Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies.” The HLPF meets every year to review progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. This year’s event runs from 9-18 July, with a ministerial meeting on 16-18 July. The Sustainable Development Goals aim to be transformative: they focus…
Democratizing public health and urban sustainability: how can nexus framings be useful?
By Saurabh Arora (SPRU, University of Sussex, UK) and Leandro Giatti (SPH, USP, Brazil) Public health and urban sustainability are inextricably linked. The World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasized this, drawing attention to the critical interdependence of the UN’s third Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) – ‘good health and well-being’ – with ‘sustainable cities and communities’ and…
Living Aulas: What connects ‘undisciplinary’ research on sustainability?
by Almendra Cremaschi and Rebecca Shelton, Pathways Network In the context of climate change and the rise of research about and towards transformations to sustainability, being an early career researcher has huge potential for learning and praxis but at the same time is filled with challenges and questions. New and deeper ways of reflecting and…
Why politics has to be at the heart of any response to zoonoses
World Zoonoses Day, on July 6 every year, is a reminder of the continuing problem of emerging diseases, particularly those originating in animals. Zoonoses have dominated policy debates in the past years – from SARS to avian influenza to Ebola. There have been calls to control ‘at source’ and stamp out such diseases through a…
Are Elsevier corrupting open science in Europe?
Elsevier – one of the largest and most notorious scholarly publishers – are monitoring Open Science in the EU on behalf of the European Commission. Jon Tennant argues that they cannot be trusted. Open Science is all about making science work better so that it can address the world’s challenges. It has been at the…
Report from Rojava: Revolution at a Crossroads
Rojava’s revolution is one of the most promising projects of democratization and social transformation afoot in the current conjuncture in the Middle East. Its context within the ongoing Syrian War – a war entangling local, regional, and global powers – marks it as highly precarious. Those struggling for positive societal transformation require solidarity with those…
Dialogues along Plural Pathways: STEPS researchers and Summer School participants in conversation
Following the STEPS Summer School in May 2018, this blog post is a conversation convened by three participants, Nimisha Agarwal, Ankita Rastogi and Jessica Cockburn. It includes introductions to the STEPS Centre’s ideas on six topics by STEPS researchers, and responses to each by different participants at the Summer School, drawing on their own knowledge…
Should we blame livestock for climate change?
Livestock are essential to rural economies and livelihoods across the world. But are these animals contributing to planetary destruction through greenhouse gas emissions? Estimates suggest that 14.5% of all anthropogenic GHG emissions are from livestock, and nearly all of this is from grazing ruminants. But what to do about it? This is a big debate,…
Uncovering Transgressive Solidarities
By Divya Sharma, Relational Pathways project In the Relational Pathways project, we are trying to understand the pathways in and out of poverty for farmers in India and Kenya. ‘Green Revolutions’ are a prominent way of discussing how farmers can benefit from technology. In Tamil Nadu, India, we have been using a technique called ‘life…
Wilderness for whom? Negotiating the role of livestock in landscapes
Livestock keeping is seen by some as a scourge on ‘natural’ landscapes, creating devastation through grazing and browsing. Reversion to some form of idealised ‘wilderness’ is seen as the solution, with value created through improved aesthetics, tourism and enhanced ecosystem services.This has been a focus by the ‘re-wilding’ debate. This takes on many forms, but…
The vegan craze: what does it mean for pastoralists?
by Ian Scoones There’s a vegan craze in full swing in Brighton in the UK – and it seems more broadly. There was a vegan festival near my house the other weekend, and vegan graffiti (in washable chalk, I hasten to add) appears frequently in our local park. My daughter became a vegan for a…
Narratives of scarcity and the global land rush
by Ian Scoones Narratives of scarcity dominate policy discourses about resources, including land. This was certainly the case during the peak of the global land rush, as we show in a paper recently published online in Geoforum (open access, which is part of a forthcoming special issue on the politics of scarcity) The paper is written with Rebecca…
BioLeft: experimenting with open source seed innovation in Argentina
by Patrick van Zwanenberg and Anabel Marin (Conicet / Cenit / UNSAM) It is sometimes said that plant breeders breed their aspirations about how agricultural production systems ought to function directly into their seed varieties. Over the last three decades there has been a collapse in the diversity of seed breeders (and with it the…
Contextualising life histories in Tamil Nadu
by Divya Sharma and V. Gajendra, Relational Pathways project In the Relational Pathways project we are trying to understand the pathways in and out of poverty for farmers in India and Kenya. ‘Green Revolutions’ are a prominent way of discussing how farmers can benefit from technology. In Tamil Nadu, India, we have been using a…
Mapping a transforming world in the Sierra Huichol, Mexico
by Shiara González, Lakshmi Charli-Joseph, and Beth Tellman The Wixáritari communities, better known as Huichol, are mainly located within the Sierra Madre Occidental, north of Jalisco state, Mexico. These communities, like many others in the world, and particularly in the Americas, are subject to pressures from the ‘Western’ world which are the catalyst for many…
What role does rural people’s agency play in finding pathways out of poverty?
by Saurabh Arora, Divya Sharma, M. Vijaybaskar, Ajit Menon and Joanes Atela This is the inaugural blog post for the project Relational Pathways: Mapping Agency and Poverty Dynamics through Green Revolutions. Based on extensive fieldwork in India and Kenya, we are developing a relational pathways approach, which posits poverty as a process rather than as…
Why killing reindeer is poor science
The Norwegian state has ordered Sami reindeer owners to reduce the size of their herds to the ‘carrying capacity’ deemed acceptable by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, arguing that high stocking rates detrimentally affect the fragile tundra ecosystem. Herder Jovvset Ánte Sara has been battling the state in the courts, resisting the requirement to reduce his…
The many futures of pastoralism in the Horn of Africa
A 2016 article by Andy Catley, Jeremy Lind and Ian Scoones – The futures of pastoralism in the Horn of Africa: pathways of growth and change – outlines the different pathways of change emerging in the Horn of Africa. It is published in the Revue scientifique et technique (International Office of Epizootics) and is part of a special issue edited by…
Just Transitions as a process with communities, not for communities
Societal transitions towards a new energy regime are underway in order to shift society back towards a more sustainable state of functioning. However, this pathway is not without trade-offs and equity challenges, related not only to the future distribution and production of energy from renewable energy sources, but also for communities that have supported the…
Open science hardware across the Andes
After an intense programme of Open Scientific Hardware (OScH) workshops in Argentina and Chile, researchers André Chagas (University of Tübingen) and Ben Paffhausen (Freie Universität, Berlin) go back home with less material in their luggage but with a bunch of future projects, new friends, stories… And empanadas, for sure! The workshops were organised by Fernan…
New insights on navigating complexity in development
by Marina Apgar and Eric Kasper, Institute of Development Studies The challenges of development are complex. Insights about the nature of complexity – coming from various scientific disciplines – lead us to conclude that complex adaptive (social) systems cannot be managed in a formal top-down sense. The best we can do is to find ways…
Governing The Land-Water-Environment Nexus: Grant Awardees 2017-2018
The following researchers have received grants for 2017-2018 for research under the project Governing the Land-Water-Environment Nexus in Southern Africa. Eromose Ebhuoma Eromose Ebhuoma was awarded the degree of a PhD in December 2017, at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His PhD explored the extent to which indigenous farmers in the Delta State of…
Where is the agency of farmers in Africa’s ‘new Green Revolution’?
by Joanes Atela, Charles Tonui, Dominic Glover and Saurabh Arora Hunger and food insecurity have continued to persist in sub-Saharan Africa. To address these problems, during the last decade there has been a renewed thrust for a ‘new Green Revolution’ in Africa. In popular discourse, the Green Revolution (GR) is associated with a technology-led transformation…
Forking the SDGs: How prototypes could transform the new global goals
Sustainable alternatives often come about through prototypes, from DIY electronics repair to ecohousing, agricultural tools to digital knowledge platforms. Prototypes are often small (at least to begin with) and local, but they can yield surprising results – sometimes becoming mainstream technologies like wind turbines, or ways of doing things like car clubs. This makes prototypes…
Pastoralism is changing in the Horn of Africa
A few weeks back, Ian Scoones, representing the PASTRES project, joined Andy Catley and Peter Little in a webinar organised by the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, and chaired by Greg Gottlieb, the Center’s director. The one-hour webinar, aimed at policymakers, donors and field practitioners, can be listened to again here. It gets going about 6 minutes…
The Transformation Labs (T-Labs) approach to change
The PATHWAYS Network is exploring solutions to problems in six sites (in Argentina, China, Kenya, India, Mexico and the UK) where socio-ecological systems are transforming. To intervene in these transformations, the project is convening multi-stakeholder processes called ‘transformation labs’ (T-Labs) in order to foster change in the systems being studied by each hub.
Protected: Reading list: Summer School on Pathways to Sustainabilility 2018
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GOSH Roadmap: democratizing technology, from a Latin American perspective
As the year begins, also begin the efforts of low-budget university labs to make ends meet. The scene is unfortunately quite familiar to many of us in Latin America. How can we produce scientific knowledge when money is not enough for equipment or materials? And out of the lab, how can communities work on their…
Care or control? Four challenges for transformations to sustainability
This post introduces a series of blog posts on ‘Transformations’, our theme for 2018. Transformation is one of those buzz words that’s everywhere these days, especially in relation to the big issues of our time such as sustainability. But what does it mean, and how do we go about it? Over the last year or…
Things can change: history and transformations to sustainability
by Nathan Oxley, Jonathan Dolley, Shilpi Srivastava and Gordon McGranahan This is one in a series of four blog posts exploring ideas and case studies on ‘transformations’, drawing on research carried out in 2017 and looking forward to the STEPS Centre’s work in 2018. For background and links to the other posts, read the introduction….
Want to transform access to technology? Follow the invisible threads
by Adrian Smith, Rob Byrne, David Ockwell and Ian Scoones This is one in a series of four blog posts exploring ideas and case studies on ‘transformations’, drawing on research carried out in 2017 and looking forward to the STEPS Centre’s work in 2018. For background and links to the other posts, read the introduction….
Green transformations in India and China: who’s in charge?
by Sam Geall, Wei Shen, Lyla Mehta and Peter Newell This is one in a series of four blog posts exploring ideas and case studies on ‘transformations’, drawing on research carried out in 2017 and looking forward to the STEPS Centre’s work in 2018. For background and links to the other posts, read the introduction….
How do we ‘co-produce’ transformative knowledge?
by Andy Stirling, Adrian Ely and Fiona Marshall This is one in a series of four blog posts exploring ideas and case studies on ‘transformations’, drawing on research carried out in 2017 and looking forward to the STEPS Centre’s work in 2018. For background and links to the other posts, read the introduction. There is…
Pastoralism, uncertainty, resilience: introducing the PASTRES project
by Ian Scoones and Michele Nori, PASTRES project This month we are launching a new European Research Council funded project, Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins (PASTRES) led by Ian Scoones (director of the STEPS Centre) and Michele Nori at EUI, Florence. We are asking: What lessons can we learn for global…
What ‘agency’ do researchers have in transformative research projects?
by Hallie Eakin, Lakshmi Charli-Joseph and J. Mario Siqueiros In our PATHWAYS network case in Xochimilco, Mexico City, we are exploring whether people can have ‘agency’ to make a difference to very complex socio-ecological problems. Xochimilco is a degraded but very culturally, ecologically and economically meaningful wetland system in the south of Mexico City. In…
Seeding ideas: knowledge brokering and recombination for agricultural transformations
by Adrian Ely, Paddy Van Zwanenberg, Elise Wach, Martin Obaya and Almendra Cremaschi Straight after the ‘Transformations 2017’ conference, the ‘Pathways’ network gathered at the mid-point in our three year project to take stock. This included discussions in ‘pairs’ of hubs, including reflecting on our ‘theories of change’. In our case, the UK and Argentina…
Transformations from Beijing to Nairobi and back: what can we learn from each other?
by Yang Lichao, Kennedy Liti Mbeva and Jiang Chulin This blog post summarises discussions between the Africa and China hubs at the project-wide meeting of the PATHWAYS Network in Dundee in August 2017. The Africa and China hubs in the project are both working on ‘Transformation Lab’ (T-Lab) processes related to energy, climate change and…
Degradation Neutrality and the Faustian bargain of conservation finance
A critical assessment of ‘degradation neutrality’, the latest idea to emerge in global conservation efforts, is at the heart of a new article for the Antipode Foundation by Amber Huff (STEPS Centre/IDS) and Andrea Brock (University of Sussex). The article picks up on previous work by STEPS & Sussex University on ‘green grabbing’ and other…
What does transformative research for sustainability look like?
by Patrick van Zwanenberg, Hallie Eakin, Ethemcan Turhan, Mutizwa Mukute and Fiona Marshall Efforts to nurture more sustainable, just futures are happening all around us, albeit in the context of a rapidly changing and highly unequal world that is on the brink of irrevocably dismantling the ecological foundations that sustain human life. The researchers and…
One Health Day: why tackling human health isn’t enough
One Health Day, on Friday 3 November 2017, draws attention to the interconnectedness of human, animal and environmental health. More than 60 per cent of emerging infectious diseases affecting people are zoonoses – originating in wildlife or livestock. Their spread is driven by climate change, land-use change and the massive expansion of towns and cities,…
How to embrace the darkness
In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit offers a view of uncertainty that may seem surprising. Uncertainty might seem to go hand in hand with fear and even despair – the state of hopelessness which the book guards us against. But for Solnit, uncertainty isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it’s more…
Why agrarian studies should confront the rise of authoritarian, populist movements
Last week I was in Russia at the fascinating fifth BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies conference. Throughout the event we heard about the emergence of particular styles of authoritarian populist regimes, including in the BRICS countries, but elsewhere too. Based on my remarks at the final plenary, I want to ask what the challenges are for…
NEW PAPER: People, patches and parasites
Just out in Human Ecology is a new paper – People, patches and parasites: the case of trypanosomiasis in Zimbabwe. It’s open access, so do have a look! It presents the results of a project looking at the socio-ecology of disease in Africa – part of the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium –…
Why Mumbai’s floods are an urban planning disaster
by Hans Nicolai Adam, Lyla Mehta and D. Parthasarathy, Climate Change, Uncertainty and Transformation project As Houston was inundated by ‘biblical’ rainfall and grapples with extreme flooding and its aftermath, another coastal megacity on the other side of the globe also experienced destructive flooding, albeit on a lesser scale. Within the span of a couple…
How do we ensure values are at the heart of resilience science?
We live and work now perhaps more than ever before in the time of science for transformation. This was the central theme of discussions in Stockholm during the Resilience 2017 and Sustainability Science conferences held back to back from 21-26 August. The transformative intention of these events is particularly relevant at this time of increasing…
Coming to terms with messiness: What is a ‘Transformation Lab’?
In this blog post, Laura Pereira explains the idea of a ‘Transformation Lab’ (T-lab). T-labs are being used in our Pathways Network project in 6 countries to try to enable socio-ecological transformations. In the post, Laura uses an example of a completed T-lab from the GRAID research project in South Africa. For a short summary…
The global food system still benefits the rich at the expense of the poor
Ramen noodles in Sweden, wheat bread in Tanzania and Chilean wines in China. The cross-Atlantic transit of the potato and the tomato from the Andes to Europe, and back again as French fries and pasta sauce. We think of the world as globalised and sophisticated in its food tastes, and our palettes as curious and…
Can open and collaborative approaches change the world?
by Patrick van Zwanenberg, Mariano Fressoli, Valeria Arza and Adrian Smith Around the world, people are changing how things are made and how knowledge is produced, by involving more people, opening up data, and sharing skills and insights with these activities across communities, countries or continents. Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing…
Why will no one listen to the pig farmers of Yangon?
Sitting in a pig farmer’s house in the Yangon region of Myanmar, I heard a question I’d heard many times before from backyard farmers: “What will your project provide us with?” It was my last month of a year in Myanmar, undertaking fieldwork for the social science component of the Myanmar Pig Partnership, a project looking…
Brexit and food: there is no plan, so what is the UK going to put on the table?
by Tim Lang, City, University of London; Erik P Millstone, University of Sussex, and Terry Marsden, Cardiff University Even the British eat. But one might be forgiven for thinking that the UK government does not know this for all the attention it has paid to the implications of Brexit for UK consumers and the nation’s…
A day in the Chinampas
In the wetlands of Xochimilco in Mexico, farming is carried out in a system going back to Mesoamerican times, in chinampas – rectangular floating fields growing crops on a shallow lake. The area is changing rapidly with competing pressures from farming, urbanization and pollution, and we’ve been exploring how local people can respond to this…
How Kerala is making the transition towards healthy, home-grown food
In Kerala, agri-food systems are in transition towards self-reliance and sustainability. Through bringing traditional gardening into the mainstream food agenda, and adopting technologies and practices like agroecology, growers and consumers in Kerala are trying to overcome the impacts of external food dependency and related vulnerabilities. Debates on sustainable food systems are still largely trapped in…
Unpacking sustainabilities in diverse transitions contexts: Four key lessons from empirical research
In the late 18th century, an Indian philosopher and religious leader offered a piece of knowledge to his followers. Taking into account the diverse religious faiths that exist in societies, he proclaimed that there are as many ways [to God] as there are faiths. The plurality of perspectives and interpretations in sustainability debates astonishingly reminds…
Confronting authoritarian populism: a new initiative and a new paper
A few weeks back, I highlighted the launch of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the availability of small grants for doing research on both the contours of the current conjuncture, and how authoritarian populism emerges and is sustained in rural areas, as well as the forms of resistance and diversity of alternatives being…
Results of four-year zoonoses research showcased in One Health ‘Special Issue’
Infectious diseases traceable to animals are driven by climate change, land-use change and the massive expansion of towns and cities, according to contributors to a paper in a major new output from the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium, a STEPS Centre led project.
Research, convening and bridging: sharing insights from the ISSC’s Transformative Knowledge Networks
by Adrian Ely (co-lead, ‘Pathways’ Network), with contributions from Joanes Atela, Mirna Inturias, Dylan McGarry, Iokiñe Rodríguez & Patrick Van Zwanenberg Working with the World Social Science Council’s ‘Transformations to Sustainability’ programme brings the privilege of engaging with an incredible range of scholars and practitioners from across the globe. The programme’s three transformative knowledge networks…
Can China be a global climate leader?
President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement has sparked off another round of intense global discussion on China’s potential as a global leader on climate. Since last week, there appears to be a widespread desire for China and Europe to forge a stronger alliance to lead global efforts…
Using a “farmers’ jury” to see Nicaragua’s food system from rural perspectives
Jorge Irán Vásquez Zeledón, a participant in the project on Transitions to Agroecological Food Systems based in Nicaragua, has written a blog post (in Spanish) about a “Farmers’ Jury” organised in connection to the project. The event aimed to investigate farmers’ views on the state of agroecological systems in Nicaragua, and what challenges need to…
How can open and collaborative knowledge help to build communities?
by Adrian Smith, STEPS Centre and Patrick van Zwanenberg, STEPS America Latina Experimentation with open and collaborative ways of creating knowledge is flourishing. How might the increasing interest in initiatives such as open science, open hardware and open data lead to a transformation in knowledge production? And could this enable more inclusive and sustainable approaches…
Putting research to use in addressing complex development challenges: are we ready?
by Marina Apgar and Boru Douthwaite The Sustainable Development Goals provide a framework that may open up space to move beyond the siloes of disciplines and sectors. Those of us inclined to see development as systemic and who, through our research practice, engage with stakeholders in the messiness of uncovering solutions to seemingly intractable problems…
Rethinking transformative pathways to equitable growth in Kenya: key research options for the Kenya’s Newton Utafiti Fund
Kenya has witnessed a proliferation of research interventions on both international and national fronts. The country is a host to renowned research and development agencies such as the CGIAR, UN bodies plus several regional research, advocacy and policy bodies all of which are working to fix Kenya’s and wider Africa’s sustainability challenges. Through these interventions,…
Learning across continents on sustainable transformations: a visit from China to Africa
In early April I visited Nairobi for a four-day exchange visit to the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), as part of a project on Transformative Pathways to Sustainability funded by the World Social Science Council (ISSC). The project explores different sustainability challenges in 6 countries (Kenya, China, UK, Mexico, Argentina and India). The China…
Beyond policy statements: how politics and ecology combine in land, water and forests
Governing land, water and forests (so-called ‘nexus’ resources) is critical for sustaining livelihoods, especially in the face of emerging shocks such as climate change. This also means that the effectiveness of interventions aimed at addressing climate change and other livelihood issues will heavily depend on how these resources are governed – including how they are…
Introducing the new STEPS Centre and Global Consortium website
You might have noticed that the STEPS Centre has a new website. As the final step to our online facelift, we have just launched a new global section of the website. It highlights the exciting work of the Pathways to Sustainability Global Consortium hubs in Africa, China, South Asia, North America, Latin America and Europe….
How rethinking local people’s agency could help navigate Xochimilco’s troubled waters
Xochimilco, Mexico City is the last remnant of the complex lacustrine system of wetlands that was the basis for agriculture and livelihoods (the chinampa system) in pre-Columbian times. However, the water is no longer provided by natural springs, but is reliant on the discharge of treated wastewater from the neighboring, densely populated and impoverished borough…
Could new alliances for seeds in Argentina be a way to nurture agricultural diversity?
Over the last three decades there has been an unprecedented process of concentration in world and regional seed markets. Seed R&D has shifted from being widely distributed over hundreds of medium and large seed firms and public sector institution to being heavily concentrated in just five or six multinational agro-chemical firms.
Why rapid transitions are more possible than you might think
In the face of climate change and social inequality, changing to a greener and fairer society might feel impossible – but rapid, radical transitions may be more possible than you might think, according to a new booklet published by the STEPS Centre and the New Weather Institute.
To combat neglected tropical diseases, we need more than just drugs and vaccines
Neglected tropical diseases have been in the news this week. A big meeting at the World Health Organisation in Geneva has resulted in big pledges from the UK aid progamme and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to banish the scourge affecting around a billion people worldwide. This is good news, and to be commended….
Is Trident Influencing UK Energy Policy?
What explains the UK government’s enthusiasm for nuclear power, despite its various problems – including technical difficulties and cost? Could one hidden factor be the pressure to support the infrastructure needed for military programmes such as Trident? SPRU researcher Philip Johnstone and our co-director Andy Stirling have been researching this question, and explore their findings…
Facts vs truth: Brexit and sustainability in turbulent times
Today the UK’s Article 50 letter will be delivered, formally marking the UK’s intention to leave the European Union. Two weeks ago a conference on ‘Sustainability in Turbulent Times’ was held in London to discuss the uncertainties around Brexit and other momentous political developments in the global North, which seem to be driven by a…
How can solar power be part of transformations to sustainability in Kenya?
Transforming pro-poor energy access is a priority goal for many countries in Africa. Many poorer households are not connected to the grid, so use kerosene, paraffin or batteries, or have to travel to charge mobile phones. In Kenya, solar home systems (SHS) via mobile payment systems are tackling this problem by giving access to renewable…
Just another drop in the bucket on World Water Day?
Each year, the United Nations uses World Water Day as an opportunity to raise awareness and demand action around the global water crisis. Each year, there is a theme. This year’s theme is wastewater, framed as a ‘grossly undervalued as a potentially affordable and sustainable source of water, energy, nutrients and other recoverable materials’ (pdf)….
Exploring the social impacts of green transformations in China
pA transformation lab (T-Lab) focused on China’s green transformation policy and its impacts was held in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province on October 22, 2016. The T-lab intended to identify problems created through the implementation of local “green transformation” policies and sustainable pathways for the future. It was entitled “Transformative pathways to sustainability: Exploring the social…
Protected: Reading list: Summer School on Pathways to Sustainabilility 2017
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Impact story #2: From land grabs to the Anthropocene
A new impact story, From land grabs to the Anthropocene: exploring the politics of resources is the second in our series looking back at a decade of STEPS Centre research and engagement. This story looks at how STEPS intervened in debates on land grabbing following the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, and how our…
How understanding politics and science can help create resilient cities
A new article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) explores how urban resilience can be strengthened by considering social and political norms, values and behaviours alongside engineering and environmental science approaches. The article, Urban resilience efforts must consider social and political forces, is written by colleagues at Arizona State University and UNAM…
How open science practices in evaluation systems can make research socially relevant for developing countries
Researchers’ choices are inevitably affected by assessment systems. This often means pursuing publication in a high-impact journal and topics that appeal to the international scientific community. For researchers from developing countries, this often also means focusing on other countries or choosing one aspect of their own country that has such international appeal. Consequently, researchers’ activities…
One Health: are we doing it wrong?
International scientific meetings are great for many reasons. But I also found myself profoundly frustrated and disappointed when I attended the 4th International One Health Congress, One Health EcoHealth 2016, in Melbourne recently.
From remunicipalisation to reprivatisation of water? The case of Mozambique
After widespread privatisation in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, many water services around the world began to be transferred back into public control. This ‘remunicipalisation’ has been welcomed by the Transnational Institute and like-minded organisations, who suggest that ‘remunicipalisation is here to stay’ (Lobina et al., 2014). While I am sympathetic to this work on…
Why local land matters for sustainable food systems
Land presents both challenges and opportunities for establishing sustainable food systems. That is one of the learning points from a workshop in Brighton on 7 December 2016. Stakeholders joining the discussions included local small-scale producers, retailers of sustainable produce, non-governmental organisations (Food Matters and The Gaia Foundation), and researchers from the University of Sussex and…
The social life of infectious diseases: a new impact story from STEPS
A new multimedia story, ‘The social life of infectious diseases’ is the first in a new series of impact stories from the STEPS Centre. It traces how our thinking on avian flu, Ebola and other infectious diseases has evolved over the last ten years, and how we have engaged with debates, policy-making and practical action….
Livelihoods on the edge: contested mangroves in Kachchh
There is a real buzz about Mundra village on the Gulf of Kachchh coast, one of the fastest growing industrial hubs in India. A sprawling port, two of India’s biggest thermal power plants, and a special economic zone with growing export industries jostle for space in what once used to be western India’s biggest stretch…
Livelihoods and the political economy of dairy in India and South Africa
This is the second of two blog posts comparing the dairy sector in India and South Africa, as part of research from the Governing the Land-Water-Environment Nexus in Southern Africa project. Read the first post, exploring the reasons behind the different pathways taken by the two countries. The dairy sectors in both South Africa…
Divergent Dairy: comparing pathways in India and South Africa
As a significant agricultural commodity in both India and South Africa, what role can dairy play in spurring development?
How water became a casualty of Mozambique’s debt crisis
One interesting aspect of doing fieldwork is that you get to understand some theoretical premises better. One such premise related to my PhD research is that the water/development nexus can only be properly understood when situated in the broader (national and global) political economy. This became clear when in April of this year, I set…
Power to the people: making & politics at the Science Museum
by Cian O’Donovan and Adrian Smith The maker movement in the UK, and globally, has grown rapidly over recent years. Hundreds of maker spaces, equipped with 3D printers, laser cutters, design software, as well as old-fashioned hand tools, have popped up in cities, towns and on university campuses, potentially promising new forms of re-distributed and…
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 – Brexit and the US elections. Who would have believed our world would have been radically reshaped in the space of a few short months?…
COP22: Climate change and innovation
The 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties (COP22) to the UNFCCC took place from 7-18 November 2016. Read research and opinion from STEPS on what happens next. This year’s COP comes shortly after the Paris Agreement enters into force. The agreement aims to keep global temperature rise this century to under 2 degrees….
Winners and losers of China’s green transformation
The willow trees and pagodas lining the shore of the canal in a newly-built park in Jishuitan, Beijing are all meant to evoke the sights and smells of the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China for over three centuries. A park placard quotes a poem written during the reign of Emperor Qianlong, which evokes the fragrant…
Governing the Land-Water-Environment Nexus: grant awardees 2015-2016
The following researchers have received grants for 2015-2016 for research under the project Governing the Land-Water-Environment Nexus in Southern Africa. Joanes Atela: Implications of governing the nexus on REDD+ implementation: a case study for Kenya Dr Joanes Atela is a Senior Research Fellow at the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) and a researcher in…
Farming in the UK: can we nourish ourselves from this land?
The recent dispute over food prices between the UK’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco, and the UK’s biggest food and grocery manufacturer, Unilever shines a light on a deeper problem in the global food system: our reliance on food that is grown elsewhere. This is compounded by a drive for healthy eating in the UK which…
What does the future hold for Delhi’s urban farmers?
A new digital story and photo book show the dilemmas facing urban farmers at the edge of Delhi and Ghaziabad in India. Surrounded on all sides by rapid urbanisation, industry and even new tourist attractions, the farmers find their access to land increasingly constrained. Their crops, and their health, are affected by rising pollution.
The New Urban Agenda and its 47 inclusions
Inclusion can be a powerful term, particularly when applied to cities and urbanisation. It focuses attention on the means through which exclusion and inequality are produced and reproduced, and on achieving a more just ‘inclusion’. This is lost, however, when inclusion becomes a catch-all for social aspirations. Other aspirational terms, including sustainability and resilience,…
Learning from Nepal about aid, technology and development
A new book Aid, Technology and Development: The Lessons from Nepal will be published by Routledge in November. It is co-edited by Dipak Gyawali, who has had long-term links with the STEPS Centre and is a member of the STEPS Advisory Committee (the other editors are Michael Thompson and Marco Verweij). From the description: Over…
Hot debate about biogas: lessons from Italy
A new STEPS working paper by Bianca Cavicchi and Adrian Ely examines the history of biogas as a source of energy in the region of Emilia Romagna, Northern Italy. Over the last few decades, the potential of biogas in Emilia Romagna has been explored and debated by different agencies and people. But it has not…
What can we learn from digital transformations?
by Nathan Oxley and Adrian Smith With climate change, inequality, and injustice putting pressure on societies around the world, it often seems that incremental change towards sustainable development is not enough. A growing number and variety of alliances between organisations across civil society, business, politicians and states are calling for something more transformational. So are…
The sugar rush in southern Africa
In a new post on his Zimbabweland blog, STEPS director Ian Scoones discusses a new special issue looking at sugar in South Africa. “It is a good moment to review the political economy of sugar in southern Africa. This is what a new open access special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies does….
Agricultural revolutions then and now
I’m writing from a village 70km north of Yangon in Myanmar. A group of women farmers are talking about their experiences raising pigs. They have small herds, five to 30 head. Probably for all of them, this is their first experience of a focus group discussion and they are eager to have their say. The…
Hinkley C: why is the UK building a new nuclear power plant?
Today the UK government approved Britain’s first new nuclear power plant in 20 years at Hinkley Point C. Many of the reactions to the decision have been critical for a number of reasons, including cost, the role of foreign investment and the way that the decision has been made. STEPS co-director Andy Stirling is quoted…
Learning from Rojava: exploring democracy in the midst of the Syrian war and beyond
Ahead of two events on democratic transformations in Northern Syria on 3 and 4 November, Patrick Huff (Birkbeck, University of London) blogs on the extraordinary changes going on in the region and how they came about. Few outside observers would expect to see democracy sprout from the wreckage of the Syrian Civil War – perhaps…
What we talk about when we talk about technology
In casual conversation ‘technology’ usually means something like a device, gadget or machine. Your smartphone for instance, or the satellite navigation system in your car; maybe the car itself, why not? But this conception of technology soon collapses if you subject it to a few quick tests. For example, try asking: Where is the technology?…
Empowering chickens?
In his latest Zimbabweland blog, STEPS director Ian Scoones looks at the latest scheme from Bill Gates to distribute chickens to help poor rural women.
Six grassroots innovation movements, and why they matter
Innovation is increasingly said to be vital for responding to global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. A new STEPS book, Grassroots Innovation Movements (Routledge, 2016) examines six such movements…
Beyond two-dimensional perspectives: Sustainable energy access as adaptation and mitigation?
Earlier this year, the Institute of Development Studies convened a one day meeting of scholars to discuss the emerging field of the politics of climate change adaptation. I study sustainable energy access, which doesn’t conventionally get counted as adaptation, so I wondered to what extent the politics of adaptation extends to the framing of sustainable…
Responsibility and geoengineering in the Anthropocene
As the Anthropocene Working Group debate the start date of a new geological era, Jack Stilgoe asks what the Anthropocene means for how science takes responsibility for the climate. In this excerpt from his book, Experiment Earth, Jack looks at the relationship between the identification of the Anthropocene and the arrival of proposals for geoengineering,…
Digital fabrication. Whose industrial revolution?
As the Society for Social Studies of Science & EASST build up to their annual meeting in Barcelona next month, the 4S blog is featuring preview pieces by participants. One is by Johan Söderberg, Maxigas, and Adrian Smith, with a taste of their paper about democratizing the tools of scientific-technical expertise. The last wave of…
How China’s social care providers are experimenting to meet the changing needs of citizens
Welfare provision in China, including social care for older people, is being stretched and challenged by economic, social and demographic changes in the country. The rise in people’s expectations is creating pressure on government and service providers to deliver more and/or different services.
Recipe for a Green Economy
Why aren’t the media talking more about climate change and population growth? asked Nigel Chapman, the Director of the BBC World Service and Trust from 2004 to 2009, speaking at the Green Economy Coalition (GEC) Global meeting in London this week, on how to connect better with audiences about a Green Economy. He quoted a…
Landmarks: how to get up close and personal with nature
I’ve just finished reading Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane, and it’s a must-read for anyone interested in sustainability and language. Each chapter focuses on one or two authors who’ve made deep impressions on Macfarlane through their writing about the natural world – including Nan Shepherd’s deep explorations of the Cairngorms, Roger Deakin’s explorations of wild swimming,…
How to move beyond technology in ‘Sustainable Intensification’
by Saurabh Arora and Ravic Nijbroek Sustainable Intensification (SI) promises more food from the same amount of land, while minimizing pressure on the environment. In Sub-Saharan Africa, considerable research and effort has been put into achieving it – but without the expected success. So why has Sustainable Intensification (SI) not made as much progress as…
Why we should stop talking about ‘desertification’
A great new book has just been published called ‘The End of Desertification? Disputing Environmental Change in the Drylands’, available at a shocking price from Springer. It is edited by two people who know a thing or two about these issues – Roy Behnke and Mike Mortimore – and it has 20 top quality chapters…
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 current woes of British democracy are grim and momentous. This is no time for gratuitous piggy-backing of other issues. The early indications of ‘Brexit’ specifically…
How are the LDCs defining a new sustainable development agenda?
In June 2016, the Least Developed Countries Independent Expert Group, the International Institute for Environment and Development and the STEPS Centre hosted a dialogue for Least Developed Country (LDC) experts to discuss how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) could help to define a new agenda for development. Our colleagues at IIED interviewed participants at the meeting…
Why Britain’s decision to leave the EU is bad news for Africa
The fallout from the UK referendum that ended in victory for those wanting the country to exit from the European Union (EU) is still reverberating around the world. But what does it mean for Africa? The decision will fundamentally affect the continent’s relationship with Britain. It will have an impact on trade, aid and diplomacy….
Brexit and development
As Britain faces the prospect of leaving the European Union, here’s a couple of blog posts on what the referendum result might mean for the UK’s role in international development. Ian Scoones on Brexit and Africa: Why Britain’s Decision to leave the EU is bad news for Africa “The decision will fundamentally affect the continent’s…
Civilising Hypocrisies and Fundamental Questions: on “emancipating transformations”
This week Manchester Tyndall Centre hosted a provocative and highly interesting seminar. Professor Andy Stirling, who spent the 80s in the trenches for Greenpeace, had schlepped up to deliver a seminar on “Emancipating Transformations.” What they? Read on for an (almost) blow by blow account. [My multiple two centses are in square brackets like these.]
5 challenges for Least Developed Countries in the post-2015 era
2016 has been a big year for international agreements on development. New Sustainable Development Goals and targets were agreed. The Paris Agreement, the strongest statement for some time on climate change action, was signed. But if the aspirations in them are to be fulfilled, hard work is needed. This hard work should benefit the poorest…
Understanding the Anthropocene: blog series
We now live in an era where humankind has become the dominant force behind global environmental change. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer introduced the term “Anthropocene” to reflect the growing impacts of human activities on the earth and the atmosphere. Sixteen years on from its introduction, it’s clear that the concept has gained traction in…
How can African countries really provide sustainable energy for poor people?
Last month, delegates drawn from across the world gathered at the UNEP headquarters in Nairobi for the second session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-2) to discuss the theme ‘Delivering on the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’. I was privileged to be a panelist at a side event on ‘Sustainable…
Landesque Capital and the Political Ecology of the Anthropocene
In many areas of South East Asia rice terraces which are centuries old cover the mountainsides, while paddy field farming in South East Asia goes back hundreds of years. In South America recent discoveries of raised field systems which cover hundreds of square miles are rewriting our understanding of land use in that region. These…
Makerspaces: Creating inclusive spaces for sustainable innovations
Making stuff is all the rage these days. But how does sustainable development fit into this enthusiasm? The White House is celebrating a Week of Making from June 16-23 2016 after hosting its first Maker Faire in 2014 to spark a “grassroots renaissance in American making and manufacturing”. The hope is that by exposing people…
Painting a new picture of development
Can the Sustainable Development Goals trigger a new approach to development in the world’s Least Developed Countries? On Monday, Least Developed Country experts from around the world gathered in London for a dialogue event to discuss how the world’s poorest countries relate to the new global goals. Organised by the Least Developed Countries Independent Expert…
How do we reform fossil fuel subsidies?
The idea of reforming fossil fuel subsidies is attracting attention in both academic and policy circles. The environmental and economic aspects of subsidies and their reform have been much debated, but the political aspects are less prominent in the discussion. STEPS member Peter Newell gave a keynote talk at ‘The Politics of Fossil Fuel Subsidies…
Four Scenarios of future urban E-mobility in China
What will it be like to live in Chinese cities as e-mobility takes hold? This is the question that has been investigated by a team at CeMoRe, Lancaster University and the Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, since 2013 in a major project funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). With China…
The financialisation of nature
Financialization describes an economic system or process that aims to reduce all values into a financial instrument. As part of this process, nature is treated as a private resource or financial asset with neo-liberal, market-based approaches increasingly being adopted to protect the environment, such as payments for ecosystems processes. The School of Global Studies (through…
How the Sustainable Development Goals create a political space to reimagine development
When the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were agreed last September, there was much expectation about how they could help get sustainability back on the development agenda, and push the international community to develop new approaches to development. A declaration, covering both north and south, sought to identify a new era for development that was universal,…
Yukon: Sustainability Lessons from self-governing First Nations
The Yukon is a vast territory in northwest Canada with a small population and a rich complement of natural resources, from minerals to fossil fuels, wildlife to water. It is also a fascinating case study for Indigenous self-government and sustainable resource management. In 2014, I undertook research to learn about Indigenous self-government in the Yukon….
In the world’s poorest countries, cities could be the test for the Sustainable Development Goals
Ahead of a dialogue event on 13 June, STEPS member Gordon McGranahan discusses how the Sustainable Development Goals present challenges and opportunities for urbanisation in the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The UN’s 2030 Agenda presents a dazzling array of Sustainable Development Goals, claims they are integrated and indivisible, and pledges that no one will…
Explainer: Sustainable Development Goals and Least Developed Countries
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) could provide an opportunity for radical transformation in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). But with hundreds of targets, attempts to implement the goals could be mired in bureaucracy. Could the SDGs, instead, open up a political space to rethink current patterns of development? Ahead of a dialogue event in London…
Learning from the past about rapid transition
What can history teach us for the task of rapid transition in the face of climate change and corrosive inequality? Historian Molly Conisbee, a speaker at this week’s Transformations events at the Hay Festival, has written about how communities adapted during Britain’s dramatic urban growth and upheaval in the 18th and 19th centuries. In a…
Report: Transforming global food systems from uniformity to diversity
A report published today written by food security and nutrition experts proposes that input-intensive crop monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots must be consigned to the past in order to put global food systems onto a sustainable footing. Prof Melissa Leach, former STEPS Director and now Director of the Institute of Development Studies, was a member of…
From social networks to robot scarecrows: Agroecology meets Open Source technologies
Agroecology has been traditionally based on co-producing knowledge with farmers, scientists, indigenous communities and technicians. As such, it could be regarded as an “open and collaborative” practice. But does this mean that it is ready to meet open source technologies?
Iran’s environmental crisis: why we should be mindful of depicting a dystopian future
In our age of computers and satellites, our sense of both urgency and fear has become central to the process of addressing environmental challenges. This sense of necessity for urgent action can be seen in calls to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss and extinctions, ocean acidification, etc. It comes as no surprise that addressing them…
Needs of the poorest must be central to tackling antibiotic resistance
by Gerry Bloom and Annie Wilkinson, IDS / STEPS Centre Launched this week is a major report on tackling the growing resistance to antibiotics, published by the UK Government and the Wellcome Trust. We fully support its call for the G20 and the UN to take the lead in building a global coalition for action…
Why we need to reveal the hidden connections at the heart of cities
By Fiona Marshall and Ritu Priya, STEPS Urbanisation theme Urban areas are intense meeting points of people and cultures, but they’re also places where more or less visible interactions happen: between the infrastructures and systems of water, energy, food and other resources. These connections pose a big challenge for how researchers understand cities – but…
The Wicked Foundations of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene describes how human society has now become the dominant force on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. The notion of the Anthropocene highlights a confounding contradiction: we have an unprecedented ability to control the world around us, yet we are using this power to destroy the preconditions for our own existence, and we seem strangely…
Making visible the hidden cogs of the urban nexus
On the steep hills on the outskirts of Lima, slums like San Juan de Lurigancho are ever expanding. As roads and shacks are built on steep slopes, residents face the constant risk of rock slides and landslides. Often there is no infrastructure – no water, few roads and no electricity – to service these areas….
Call for papers: Transformations 2017
A call for papers has been issued for the Transformations 2017 conference in Dundee, UK. Transformations 2017 is the third in a biennial series of international interdisciplinary conferences that focuses on transformations towards sustainability: addressing contemporary challenges and creating conditions for enhancing people’s wellbeing, today and in the future, while strengthening the Earth’s support system.
Next steps to strengthen global land governance
by Ruth Hall and Ian Scoones Four years ago voluntary guidelines on the governance of land and land tenure were agreed at the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome. This was a response to growing concerns about the impacts of “land grabbing” driven by the global rush for investment in the wake…
How can the STEPS pathways approach help us understand the Anthropocene?
by Mathew Bukhi Mabele (Department of Geography, University of Zurich) and Jacob Weger (Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia) It has been sixteen years since Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer first introduced the term ‘Anthropocene’ to signify that the ‘growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere’ had reached planetary proportions. Their central argument is…
Seeking sustainable transformations around the world
The new ‘Pathways’ Network, which explores transformations to sustainability in 6 cases around the world, had its opening workshop in Buenos Aires on 24-27 April 2016. At the workshop, participants from Sweden, South Africa, and ‘hubs’ in Kenya, the UK, Argentina, USA/Mexico, India and China discussed research questions and how best to share learning.
Earth Day: are we astronauts or toads?
It’s 50 years since the first image of the Earth from space was beamed back home from Lunar Orbiter 1. It’s hard for us now to imagine, or remember, what it meant back then. For the first time, humans could see a real image of their home as a whole. The picture, and others that…
How do we link research and action for sustainability?
In March, researchers, knowledge brokers and funders gathered in Pretoria, South Africa to share lessons and experiences on how a decade of ESRC-DFID research support has impacted on poverty reduction. The Conference came just a few months after the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These goals articulate the value of research and capacity…
Research collaboration for global challenges: why it’s really hard
On 17-18 March at London Zoo was the final conference of a project I have been involved in over the past four years on zoonoses, ecosystems and wellbeing in Africa. The conference highlighted the idea of ‘One Health’, a movement aimed at linking human, livestock and ecosystem health. The focus was on how to make…
Puzzling questions on tackling antibiotic resistance
Last week’s conference on One Health for the Real World was an enriching experience. All the participants agreed that One Health means linking together our understandings of, and responses to, human, livestock and ecosystem health. See for example, this blog by Ian Scoones. There was also widespread agreement that doing so was important, although in…
Chinese engagement in African agriculture is not what it seems
In December 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping flew into South Africa for the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation with great fanfare. There were lots of announcements about prospective investments across Africa. Agriculture featured prominently. But what is the real story of China in Africa on the ground, beyond the hype? As Deborah Brautigam’s investigative research has…
Discussing low carbon urban mobility in China
On Sunday 13th March, the ‘Low Carbon Innovation in China: Prospects, Politics and Practice’ project held the closing workshop of its research package on urban e-mobilities at the Shenzhen Graduate School of Tsinghua University. The event involved over 50 delegates including senior government officials, automotive companies, mobility entrepreneurs, leading academics, NGOs and students to discuss…
Beyond risk factors: the all-too-human world of zoonotic pandemics
Human relationships are the unquantifiable that must be accounted for in global health according to the editor of a new STEPS book on One Health.
One Health for the Real World symposium
Welcome to the web page for our international symposium, ‘One Health for the Real World: zoonoses, ecosystems and wellbeing’, which took place at the Zoological Society of London, 17-18 March 2016.
Uncertainty and Climate Change in India
Harbouring one of the largest mangrove forest tracks in the world, the Sunderbans cover a sizeable area in southern Bangladesh and east India. Formed by the confluence of three major rivers, the deltaic region which the Sunderbans are part of, is famed for its tiger habitats and dynamic ecology. Researchers from a Norwegian Research Council-funded and Noragric-led project…
Are China and Brazil transforming African agriculture?
A new Open Access Special Issue in World Development based on our work on the changing role of China and Brazil in Africa’s agriculture is now available (links to individual articles are below, and also via here).
Contested Agronomy: Imagining different futures for food and farmers
The question of how to improve farming to feed and sustain people in developing countries is as important as ever, and there are no easy solutions. One route to finding answers is through the science of agronomy – testing and evaluating how crops and farming techniques perform under different conditions. But, as with any science,…
Is more inclusive urbanisation essential to the 2030 Agenda?
The 2030 Agenda promises Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are “integrated and indivisible” and “leave no-one behind”. Yet goals listed have historically been pursued in ways that bring them into conflict with each other. In a newly released paper in Environment & Urbanization, Daniel Schensul, Gayatri Singh and I argue that inclusive urbanisation is central to bringing…
Nexus, resource conflict and social justice: are we speaking the same language?
Nexus network meetings are a bit like a bar scene in Star Wars, joked Professor Mike Bradshaw, from the University of Warwick: “What we need is a universal translator to make sense of the different languages and topics covered.” The nexus which, to a newcomer at least, might sound like a potent ial name for…
Why we need Degrowth
In this post, Giorgos Kallis responds to a three-part critique by Andy Stirling of his ideas on the ‘Degrowth Hypothesis’. You can read Andy’s blog posts here: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 Andy Stirling’s three-part blog intervention on the occasion of my lecture at Sussex is much appreciated. I am particularly thankful…
Outgrowing the twin simplifications of Growth and Degrowth: part 3
This is the third of a series of 3 blogs by STEPS co-director Andy Stirling, responding to the ideas of Giorgos Kallis on the ‘degrowth hypothesis’. Read Part 1 and Part 2, and see also Giorgos Kallis’ response. Part Three: Outgrowing the Growth/Degrowth Trap Giorgos Kalllis’s wonderful lecture, reviewed in these blog posts, extended much…
Contested Agronomy: Four big questions to debate
We have just finished a fantastic conference co-hosted by the STEPS Centre on ‘Contested Agronomy’ with 80 participants and a vibrant discussion. I was asked to give some comments at the end. Here are some of these thoughts. Throughout the conference it was clear that ‘agronomy’ had to be understood both as a technology and…
Exporting China and Brazil’s agricultural know-how to Africa
Can China and Brazil use their home grown agricultural knowledge, which has driven phenomenal agricultural productivity at home, to transform agriculture in Africa? That was one of many questions discussed at the Contested Agronomy conference. When Lidia Cabral interviewed a Brazilian agronomist from Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural research corporation in Mozambique, he talked to her about…
Outgrowing the twin simplifications of Growth and Degrowth: part 2
This is the second of a series of 3 blogs by STEPS co-director Andy Stirling, responding to the ideas of Giorgos Kallis on the ‘degrowth hypothesis’. Read Part 1 and Part 3, and see also Giorgos Kallis’ response. Pluralities of Growings It is odd that the thrust of Giorgos Kallis’s excellent lecture should have concentrated…
To struggle against and to build with: what does student activism in Delhi mean for pathways to justice?
At the weekend, Umar Khalid, one of the six student activists accused in Delhi’s ‘anti-nationalism scandal’ unfolded by the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Modi, returned to the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). In a rousing speech on Sunday night, he made a persuasive case for “anti-nationals of the world [to] unite”. Echoing…
Outgrowing the twin simplifications of Growth and Degrowth: part 1
This is the first of a series of 3 blogs by STEPS co-director Andy Stirling, responding to the ideas of Giorgos Kallis on the ‘degrowth hypothesis’. Read part 2 and part 3, and see also Giorgos Kallis’ response. What’s at Stake Between Growth and Degrowth? I recently had the privilege of hearing a great talk…
The challenges of creating new visions for sustainable urbanisation in India
by Poonam Pandey, from the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University. A two-day conference organised at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in collaboration with the STEPS centre, raised questions about how to bring about critical new thinking on sustainable urbanisation in India. For the creation of new visions for a sustainable city the foremost questions to be…
First Ebola, now Zika: inconvenient truths about emerging diseases
In the second time in as many years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a new Global Public Health Emergency: the Zika virus crisis has been born. A new disease with another exotic name, Zika virus is predicted to infect millions in the next few months as it sweeps across the globe. Just as…
Contested Agronomy 2016: Whose agronomy counts?
Contested Agronomy 2016 is a conference about the battlefields in agricultural research, past and present. Date and venue 23 – 25 February 2016 Institute of Development Studies University of Sussex, UK For more information, see the dedicated conference website.
Contested Agronomy: more heat than light?
by Jim Sumberg, John Thompson, Ken Giller and Jens Andersson Agriculture, and the agronomic research that supports it, will be critical in making sustainable, equitable and secure development a reality. Surprisingly however, there seems to be increasing contestation around the priorities and methods used by agronomists, and the technologies that they develop and promote. Why…
Solidarity with JNU
We in the STEPS Centre stand in full solidarity and support for our colleagues at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India. We were distressed to hear of the circumstances leading to the arrests and raids carried out on the JNU campus in the last few days, and the subsequent events, including violent assaults on faculty and students. Universities…
Video: Dominic Glover on agricultural biotech and smallholder farmers
STEPS member Dominic Glover spoke yesterday at the FAO’s International Symposium on “The Role of Agricultural Biotechnologies in Sustainable Food Systems and Nutrition”. Dominic’s presentation focused on the need to ensure that agricultural biotechnology policies benefit smallholders. You can watch his presentation on the FAO website (skip to 2 hours and 7 minutes in).
Symposium: animal-to-human diseases
Leading scientists, One Health practitioners and international policymakers are speaking this week at the One Health for the Real World: zoonoses, ecosystems and wellbeing symposium, co-organised by the STEPS-led Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium.
Protected: STEPS Summer School 2016: Reading list
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Why India’s urban researchers need to move beyond megacities
Guest post by Aviram Sharma The launch of the South Asia Sustainability Hub and Knowledge Network (SAH&KN) provides a much needed platform to the academic, policy and civil society groups working in South Asia around sustainability challenges. During the launch and afterwards for the next two days in the International Conference on Pathways to Sustainable…
Rethinking ‘smart’ in India: The city as an ecology of practices
Last week, the government of India announced the names of the first 20 cities slated to become ‘smart’. These are the winners of the recently concluded ‘Smart City Challenge’. The government claims that smartening the cities will make them inclusive and sustainable, through the adoption of ‘smart solutions’. In one city, plans include a digital…
STEPS researchers among winners of China-Africa research fellowships
The China Africa Research Initiative has announced the Fall 2015 winners of its SAIS-CARI Fellowship Programme. Research projects will start between January 2016 and April 2016, and two researchers associated with STEPS are among the winners. They are Lucy Baker of SPRU and the Energy Research Centre, University of Cape Town; and Wei Shen of the Institute…
What would a sustainable city look like?
On Thursday, India announced the first 20 cities to receive funding to become ‘Smart Cities’. It’s a high profile mission to modernise and transform urban infrastructure, especially using digital technologies like sensor networks and data centres. Smart cities are one response to the huge challenges facing urban India. The conference on pathways to sustainable urbanisation,…
From Dragon Heads to Farm Drops, Chinese agriculture has many faces
In Beijing last week, STEPS member Adrian Ely hosted a roundtable with social enterprises, NGOs and firms involved in food and agriculture to discuss the findings of the Low Carbon Innovation in China: Prospects, Politics and Practice project. Based on fieldwork by Sam Geall (SPRU), and support from Yiching Song (Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy,…
South Asia Sustainability Hub launched in Delhi
The economist Nitin Desai, the environmentalist Sunita Narain and the writer P. Sainath spoke at the South Asia Sustainability Hub & Knowledge Network launch event on 28 January in Delhi. The new hub joins five other hubs around the world in the Pathways to Sustainability Global Consortium, which the STEPS Centre convened to link up…
India’s seed sector is flourishing. Could African farmers benefit?
Africa’s farmers need quality seeds but the seed sector in Africa has often struggled to meet this need. The continent’s share in the global seed trade is very low, seed markets often aren’t supported, and the supply of quality seeds and improved crop varieties is weak. Poor seed supply threatens agriculture’s ability to play its…
How do we end the dominance of rich countries over sustainability science?
by Patrick van Zwanenberg, Anabel Marin & Adrian Ely With the new Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN last year, SciDev.Net has published a timely report on the global status of sustainability science. Sustainability science (defined as ‘research that supports and drives sustainable development’) is growing significantly as a proportion of world scientific output,…
Four neglected challenges for China’s low carbon future
Last year ended with a momentous political step forward on climate change. The Paris Agreement, signed at the COP21 climate conference in December, requires countries to work together to meet and surpass their ‘intended nationally determined contributions’ (INDCs) with an objective of limiting global average temperature change to 2⁰C, and an aspiration of keeping within…
Workshop: Climate Change and Uncertainty from Above and Below
27-28 January 2016 New Delhi, India Presentation slides and photos from this workshop are now available. Presentation slides Photos Blog: Uncertainty and Climate Change in India by Hans Nicolai Adam, 26 February 2016 (NMBU) Video: views on uncertainty and climate change Participants at the workshop share their views on the relationships between experts and local…
International Conference: Pathways to Sustainable Urbanisation
29-30 January 2016 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Cities in India and other South Asian nations are in the midst of experiencing rapid urbanization. In this time of growth, safeguarding environmental integrity and social justice will be decisive for the health and livelihoods of citizens. This conference focused on the possibilities for sustainable urban…
Bats, people and a complex web of disease transmission
By Kate Jones and Liam Brierley It might seem strange that after millennia of human history, outbreaks of new, ’emerging’ diseases that we’ve never seen before still regularly occur around the world, some of which go on to become pandemic. However, this may not be so surprising considering how quickly and how intensively the world…
In search of transformations at COP21
The International Social Science Council has published interviews from the COP21 climate conference with three researchers who are part of their ‘Transformations to Sustainability programme’. The interviewees include STEPS researcher Adrian Ely, and Cosmas Ochieng, director of ACTS, one of the institutions in the STEPS Africa Sustainability Hub. The Africa hub was an important partner…
Call for papers: EASST/4S session on makers, manufacturers and politics of digital fabrication
STEPS member Adrian Smith is one of the organisers of a session at this year’s EASST/4S conference. The session title is ‘Digital fabrications amongst hackers, makers and manufacturers: whose “industrial revolution”?’ The conference itself (title: ‘Science and technology by other means: exploring collectives, spaces and futures’) is on 31 August until 3 September in Barcelona,…
Was COP21 a failure or a success?
In the aftermath of the COP21 climate change conference, the debate over whether the Paris Agreement is a success or a failure is going full blast. Among other things, the deal sets a high aspirational goal to limit warming below 2C and strive to keep temperatures at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. This is a far…
‘This hope is real’: how COP21 frames the future
Who would have bet any meaningful amount of money, a month ago, that most of the world would sign up to 1.5 degrees at COP21? Of course there were celebrations on Saturday when Laurent Fabius banged his little green gavel down to mark the agreement. Most of those in the room had toiled for long…
Video: Andy Stirling on research methods and policy
In this video, STEPS Co-director Andy Stirling talks about the need to fully understand what qualitative and quantitative methods are before evaluating their role in science policy making. Andy’s presentation was part of the National Centre for Research Methods seminar held in British Academy, London on 27 October 2015. More on Methods Browse our Methods…
How to prevent epidemics: an optimist’s blog
“The optimist is someone who believes the future is uncertain.” Leo Szilard When I first studied epidemiology several decades ago, a story made the rounds that was supposed to make us feel that we were smart. If an old man came into a medical clinic with diarrhoea, the doctor would treat it. If…
China’s largest wind farm and the politics of renewable energy
by Wei Shen and Sam Geall As negotiators enter the crucial final week of the UN-led Paris climate-change conference, much of the cautious optimism is pinned on big changes in China’s real economy. A strong climate change agreement is now in China’s self-interest, runs the prevailing argument – in large part, thanks to its aggressive…
Carbon forestry in Africa: who wins?
2015 is a crucial moment for sustainability and climate change, with the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Paris following hard on the heels of the UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals. What to do about carbon, forests, and forest management are crucial questions in reaching global agreements. But as recent research in Africa’s forest landscapes…
‘All eyes on Paris’: climate talks in a heightened security context
For the past few weeks, all eyes have been on Paris because of two major events. The first is the seven coordinated terrorist attacks that hit the French capital on 13 November, killing 130 ordinary citizens, left many in shock, and led to an outpouring of messages of solidarity from around the world. Second, Paris…
Escaping the frames of war
The world is now witnessing yet one further bout in a perennial tragedy. As so often before, organised violence is being used as an instrument of politics. This is no less obscene for being so familiar. And the pathology is all the more distressing, for being so pervasive. A diversity of political perspectives are implicated….
Africa’s land rush
There is a rush on for African farmland – a phenomenon unmatched since colonial times. Africa’s land rush, and the implications for rural livelihoods and agrarian change, is the subject of a new book that I have edited together with Ruth Hall (from PLAAS at UWC, South Africa) and Dzodzi Tsikata (ISSER, University of Ghana at Legon)….
COP21: How can climate-friendly innovation flourish in developing countries?
For low carbon development to work well, innovation is crucial. Both technological hardware like solar panels and grids, and social and institutional structures, need to change as the world looks towards a lower-carbon future. At a side event at the COP21 climate conference on Tuesday, Dr Rob Byrne (STEPS Centre/Sussex Energy Group) talked about how…
How the Water-Energy-Food ‘Nexus’ in Asia affects real lives
By Carl Middleton, Center for Social Development Studies, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University In Asia and globally, the water-energy-food nexus has received growing attention from policy makers, researchers, and practitioners. A key premise of ‘the nexus’ is that water use is interdependent with energy and food production. Thus, from a nexus viewpoint, the relationship between…
COP21: how can Southern Africa cope with El Niño?
Today COP 21 opens in Paris. Over two weeks a new climate deal will hopefully be agreed. It is a critical juncture for humanity. As high level officials discuss options in these negotiations, many people around the world are already living with climate change and uncertainty. In Southern Africa, the effects of what is expected…
How to ensure governments stick to their Paris climate commitments
More than 146 countries covering 87% of global greenhouse gas emissions have now submitted their national pledges to tackle climate change in advance of the major climate summit in Paris. These are known as Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions. Note the language: these aren’t commitments and are only “intended”. Since collectively these INDCs would still leave us…
Why climate negotiations should tackle ‘technology injustice’
Climate change is already causing harm to vulnerable people and will continue to do so. If we accept that mitigation and adaptation alone cannot avoid all the adverse impacts of climate change, this means that there will be some unavoidable consequences. This has led to the concept of ‘loss and damage’ appearing in global climate…
Opening up democratic politics for sustainable development: reflections from STEPS America Latina
The event that launched STEPS América Latina earlier this month, ‘Opening up the development agenda’, was a great workshop. It’s rare for a meeting of this kind to be so diverse yet so coherent. And this is especially so, on a topic as challenging as the transforming of development. Despite many differences in terms of…
Spectacular cynicism: Seeing Indonesia’s fire and haze from the margins
Guest post by Zachary Anderson, University of Toronto Recently Indonesia was hit by massive forest fires, which were largely ignored by the Western media, despite their severe scale and impact. I feel moved to respond to George Monbiot’s recent opinion piece in the Guardian about the disaster, as well as comments on social media asking…
Why are some people so keen to link climate change and terrorism?
Friday’s murderous attacks in Paris came just over two weeks before the start of the COP21 conference on climate change. A crisis meeting was held on Saturday morning to determine whether the event should go ahead, with a swift resolution to continue, under heightened security. Christiana Figueres, the UNFCCC’s Executive Secretary, tweeted “Of course #COP21…
What are we doing when we do open science and inclusive innovation?
Last week I participated in the ‘launch’ event of STEPS América Latina, as part of ongoing work with researchers in the region. There, as elsewhere, we are exploring the politics of technology and science in society that support pathways to sustainable development. The event was by turns a fantastically rich, stimulating, humbling, troubling, and inspiring…
Sharing the Open Source Seed Initiative at STEPS América Latina
by Claire Luby, Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) Claire Luby presented her work at the STEPS América Latina launch event in November 2015, as part of a panel on ‘horizontal innovations towards sustainability’. In this blogpost, Claire reflects on the impacts of property regimes on plant diversity, and what OSSI is doing to promote a…
Call for proposals: SPRU 50th Anniversary Conference
As part of the Science Policy Research Unit’s 50th anniversary in 2016, it will be hosting a major conference from 7-9 September 2016 at the University of Sussex. The conference will also be complemented by a full programme of activities to celebrate 50 years of SPRU. Over three days, based on the overarching theme of ‘Transforming…
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. Among the speakers will be STEPS Centre director Ian Scoones. The colloquium is organised by the Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS), a community of…
Opening up science and development in Latin America
STEPS América Latina is the latest regional hub of the Pathways to Sustainability global consortium to be launched. The launch event, which took place on 5-6 November in Buenos Aires, brought together diverse perspectives on how pathways to sustainability can be identified, analysed and nurtured. The first day brought together two highly connected topics: ‘inclusive…
What is Ecological Civilisation?
The Chinese Communist Party last week held its annual plenum in Beijing at which details of the country’s 13th Five Year Plan, from 2016 to 2020, were set out for the first time. The plan, say commentators, will be notably green, with an emphasis on an economic transition to slower, innovation-led growth, and more stringent…
‘Reigning back’ the Anthropocene is hard – but Earth’s worth it
I am very grateful to Laura Pereira, Victor Galaz and Johan Rockström for taking precious time to respond to the points I raise in my earlier blog. It is a huge privilege to benefit from such thoughtful and substantive reflections. This is all the more the case, since we agree that the issues at stake…
Making new worlds together
How could we end up in this world nobody ever wanted? This question, posed by Justyna Swat from POC21 during her talk at Monday’s event on makerspaces and sustainability, has no short answer. It also implies a further question: if you could shape the world you wanted, what would it look like? Shared workshops –…
The Anthropocene, control and responsibility: a reply to Andy Stirling
By Johan Rockström (Director, Stockholm Resilience Centre). This post is a slightly edited version of an email response and follows a blogpost by Andy Stirling on the Anthropocene, and Laura Pereira’s comments on Prof Stirling’s post. I tend to place myself in between the two of you, Andy and Laura. The Anthropocene is nothing more…
Reflections on “Time to Rei(g)n Back the Anthropocene”
By Victor Galaz, Stockholm Resilience Centre. This post was first published on the Resilience Science blog and is reposted here with kind permission of the author. This is a short reflection to Andy Stirling’s recent post “Time to Rei(g)n Back the Anthropocene?” about the Anthropocene, “planetary boundaries” and politics. First of all, I would like to…
Seeing the Anthropocene as a responsibility: to act with care for each other and for our planet
by Laura Pereira, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa This post is my contribution to the debate on the Anthropocene initiated by Andy Stirling in his blog. His comments were sparked from a panel discussion at the Transformations conference where we were honoured to find ourselves on a panel together with Marcela D’Souza and…
The political economy of small-scale mining in Zimbabwe
There was much discussion about small-scale and artisanal mining at the STEPS Centre’s Resource Politics conference last month. This is where resources and politics come together; perhaps especially so in Zimbabwe. Ever since the enactment of Zimbabwe’s Mines and Minerals Act, which gives the state rights over mineral resources wherever they are found, mining has been controversial. In the colonial period,…
Making and Sustainability
At an event at the Machines Room in London on 26 October, we discussed the roles that maker communities and the places where they interact can play in sustainable development. Update (13 June 2017): Adrian Smith and Ann Light have written an article arising from their learning from this event (see below). The event was…
Borders and resources: “Across this line, you do not…”
Borders and maps are such a defining feature of modern civilisation that we can’t live without them. At the same time, many of us are subject to the mischievous urge to test, push and redefine them. It’s no coincidence that religious language plays on this tension: sins used to be commonly referred to as ‘transgressions’…
Open Access and Open Science in Argentina
In this OCSDNet blogpost for Open Access Week 2015, Mariano Fressoli and Valeria Arza write about Open Access digital repositories and the culture of Open Science in Argentina. It’s not uncommon to hear that scientific knowledge is “universal” and “beneficial to us all.” However, accessing this knowledge is often complicated, particularly in countries that are…
What can China teach India about dealing with waste?
by Bharati Chaturvedi and Ashish Chaturvedi Just past the first anniversary of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, as we ruminate about the achievements of the Modi government’s much-vaunted programme, it might also be worthwhile to take a look at what our next-door competitor and inspiration China has done about waste. Especially, other people’s waste. China’s rise as…
Exploring ‘dynamic sustainabilities’ in the Anthropocene
In this post, STEPS Summer School alumnus Mathew Bukhi Mabele explains plans for a session on ‘Exploring ‘dynamic sustainabilities’ in the Anthropocene’, which will feature at the 6th Annual Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference at the University of Kentucky, on February 26 – 27, 2016. Jacob Weger and myself were very lucky to participate at the 2015…
Time to rei(g)n back the Anthropocene?
I was very lucky to be able to participate in last week’s Stockholm Resilience Centre conference on ‘Transformations 2015: People and Planet in the Anthropocene‘. Involving a dynamic and highly policy-influential global interdisciplinary community, this was a large, friendly and very interactive meeting. It more-than-fully lived up to the very high standards set by earlier…
Why livelihoods perspectives still matter
Livelihoods perspectives have become increasingly central to discussions of rural development over the past few decades. They have offered a way of integrating sectoral concerns and rooting development in the specifics of different settings. Central to livelihoods perspectives is an understanding of what people do to make a living in diverse circumstances and social contexts….
What lies behind the UK’s strange policy on nuclear power?
The UK chancellor George Osborne has recently made further commitments to support massive new investment in nuclear infrastructure, including the much-criticised Hinkley C power station. Why is the UK determined to press ahead, in the face of much criticism? SPRU researcher Philip Johnstone and STEPS co-director Andy Stirling have written a new article for The…
How can African agriculture adapt to an uncertain climate?
By Stephen Whitfield, Lecturer: Climate Change & Food Security, University of Leeds Often operating at the margins of sustainability, for smallholder farming systems in Africa the challenge of adapting to uncertain climatic change is particularly acute. Across international research and development programmes, a variety of technologies, agronomic innovations, and cropping systems are advocated as the means to a green revolution; a future…
El Niño predictions signal urgent need to prepare for Rift Valley fever epidemics in eastern Africa
Recent climate predictions suggest East Africa may be in line for an epidemic of Rift Valley fever (RVF) – an infectious disease which can hit people, their livestock and livelihoods, and national economies hard.
Politics of Integrated Water Resources Management in southern Africa
For the past two decades, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been the dominant paradigm in water resources. It is the flagship project of global bodies such as the Global Water Partnership (GWP). It has also been actively promoted by a range of multilateral and bilateral donors which consider it to be the path to address water governance…
Bringing vehicle sharing to China
by Dr Dennis Zuev (Research Associate, Lancaster University) & Dr David Tyfield (Reader, Lancaster University) Car-sharing is the fastest growing urban mobility innovation worldwide but is yet to take off in Chinese cities. According to a recent Roland Berger report, the Chinese car sharing market is still developing, but it has very high potential. It is expected to grow around 80% per year until 2018. There are…
Moving beyond products to material culture
Prototyping or debating sustainable developments in makerspaces? In the previous blog I introduced some of the diverse ways that makerspaces are helping cultivate sustainable developments. Admittedly, these initiatives do not represent the totality of makerspaces, where many projects and activities are oblivious to demands for sustainable developments. In this blog I discuss some of the challenges…
Why should we seek sustainable developments in makerspaces?
Community-based workshops like hackerspaces, fablabs and makerspaces, equipped with design, prototyping and fabrication tools have spread rapidly in recent years. Interest in the social, economic and environmental possibilities of these spaces has grown too. Amidst the claims and aims people bring to this collaborative flourishing of tool-based creativity is an argument that makerspaces can become experimental sites for the pursuit of…
Sustainability: the next 50 years
Accelerating sustainability is a challenge that defines our era. A new Institute of Development Studies (IDS) paper by Hubert Schmitz and Ian Scoones, Accelerating Sustainability: Why Political Economy Matters (pdf), brings together what we can learn from development studies and from sustainability studies to understand this challenge and move forward. Their starting point is that…
BEAM Exchange Research: Call for proposals
BEAM Exchange is investing in a significant research programme to develop new knowledge that is authoritative and accessible around critical questions about market systems approaches. A call for proposals has been issued for phase two of the research programme. BEAM is seeking research that builds stronger bridges between theory and practice.
Centre for Bionetworking symposium: have we become too ethical?
The Centre for Bionetworking is running a symposium on research ethics, to be held at the University of Sussex in November. Have We Become Too Ethical? – Managing vulnerability in human subject research The University of Sussex Conference Centre Bramber House (Level 4) Refectory Road, University of Sussex Falmer, Brighton 9 November 2015, 10:00 am…
What does systems thinking for rabies control mean for rabies research?
Rabies, in many ways, is an atypical zoonosis. It continues to feature as a priority disease by multiple national as well as international agencies. There is substantial research evidence regarding its burden and transmission dynamics as well as intervention efficacy. In addition, rabies is one of the few diseases for which well-structured and scientifically sound…
In defence of ethics
Michael Hauskeller writes in defence of ethics: “We are not sitting in an evolutionary elevator that has only two directions: up and down. Instead, there are many different ways of going up and going forward, many different ways of going down and backwards, and many different ways of going sideways, or around in circles, or…
Ramaswamy Iyer: remembering a water justice fighter
An obituary of the Indian water policy expert Ramaswamy Iyer has been published in the magazine Seminar. The author is Dipak Gyawali, a member of the STEPS advisory committee, who worked with Iyer over many years. Iyer served as Secretary of Water Resources in the central government and was instrumental in drafting India’s first National…
Giving flesh to the science and innovation we need to see
by Ben Ramalingam, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies Science, technology and innovation have been integral in successful development and poverty-reduction efforts, whether in Europe, Latin America, Asia or Africa. But time and time again, the real lessons of how this contribution actually worked — the genuine pathways of development change — have been lost…
Rethinking Africa’s sustainable development pathways
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 the Brutland Commission report ‘Our Common Future’, sustainable development articulates the urge to harmonise the temporal and spatial redistribution of development with a natural resource…
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 chance to think about how to do things differently. One of the big questions is how processes of industralization and innovation can really create the…
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 for all of humanity. But will they make any difference? We have had the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were launched with similar fanfare in…
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 Year of Soils by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
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 useful to share insights and perspectives over the past three days. The workshop was organised by the International Social Science Council. With seven other groups,…
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 – World Apart’, was held in 2009 in Bergen, Norway. The 2013 forum, ‘Social Transformations and the Digital Age’, took place in Montreal, Canada. The current…
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 could from those examples: interrogate them as experiments-at-scale, look for variation in exposure and outcomes; test hypotheses against them. The number of people in the…
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 of the hundreds. Out of the tragedy there have been some awe-inspiring achievements, such as the recent news that a vaccine had proven 100% effective…
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 at the relationships between livelihoods and sustainability, and proposes four elements of a new politics of livelihoods: interests, individuals, knowledge and ecology. Sustainable Livelihoods and…
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 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We analyse North-South representation, institutional pathways, co-authorship patterns and disciplinary backgrounds, using Social Network Analysis of…
Achieving sustainable development means no goal leaving gender behind
This article is part of a series on the Sustainable Development Goals. Feminists and their allies fought strongly for a stand-alone Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on gender equality and empowerment of women and girls. Goal 5 now offers the potential to embed gender equality into transformative approaches to sustainable development. For this promise to be…
Why Germany is dumping nuclear power – and Britain isn’t
by Philip Johnstone and Andy Stirling The starkly differing nuclear policies of Germany and the UK present perhaps the clearest divergence in developed world energy strategies. Under the current major Energy Transition (Energiewende), Germany is seeking to entirely phase out nuclear power by 2022. Yet the UK has for many years advocated a “nuclear renaissance”,…
Resource politics: living in the Anthropocene
By Ian Scoones, Director of the STEPS Centre This week we are hosting a major conference at the STEPS Centre at Sussex on resource politics. There are panels looking at everything from mining to wildlife to carbon to water, with big themes cross-cutting on: Scarcity, politics and securitization; Resource grabbing; Governance, elites, citizenship and democracy;…
Conference: Resource Politics 2015
This year’s STEPS Centre conference, Resource Politics: transforming pathways to sustainability, took place from 7-9 September 2015 at the Institute of Development Studies. Plenary speakers include Rohan D’Souza, Betsy Hartmann, Melissa Leach, Johan Rockström, Michael J. Watts and Myint Zaw. Materials from the conference are now online, including a Storify, graphic panels, photos and blog…
STEPS at the IST2015 Sustainability Transformations conference
This week the International Sustainability Transitions Conference takes place at Sussex University, hosted by the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU). The event kicks off on the afternoon of 25 August and runs till the end of the week. Transitions and transformations are a major component of the STEPS Centre’s work, and are the theme of…
More about the research
Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, Myanmar pig production is expected to grow rapidly over the coming decades. Livestock intensification This growth is being accompanied by an intensification of both pig production (the backyards and farms on which pigs are bred) and the pig supply-chain (the stages pigs pass through from farmer to…
Book: Gender Equality and Sustainable Development
A new book, Gender Equality and Sustainable Development, edited by Melissa Leach, has been published in the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability book series. For pathways to be truly sustainable and advance gender equality and the rights and capabilities of women and girls, those whose lives and well-being are at stake must be involved in…
Are Common Wealth Trusts the way forward for a sustainable and equitable future?
STEPS co-director Andy Stirling responds to a recent article on the Great Transition Initiative website by Peter Barnes, which makes the case for Common Wealth Trusts as a way of reducing the inequality and destruction of nature that result from contemporary capitalism, while keeping the benefits that markets provide. Peter Barnes is absolutely right to…
Debating Science and Technology for Development in Africa
By Ian Scoones, Director of the STEPS Centre At an event today we will be debating the STISA-2024 (Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa) initiative by the African Union (AU), the latest attempt to bring science and technology to the centre of the development debate in Africa. The STISA-2024 document opens with a rousing…
Submerged origins of UK nuclear lock-in?
By Andy Stirling, STEPS Co-Director and Phil Johnstone, Research Fellow at SPRU – Science Policy Research Unit Many legitimately contrasting views are possible on the pros and cons of nuclear power. But when seen in a global context, successive UK Governments are quite striking in their tendencies to adopt partisan positions. Growing evidence is persistently…
Cecil the Lion and Zimbabwe’s conservation carve-up
The huge uproar generated by the shooting of Cecil the lion provides a fascinating lens into Zimbabwe’s new elite land politics and the relationship between humans and “wild” nature. The country’s extensive game ranches and conservancies were mostly subject to land reform in the early 2000s. Many of the former owners were evicted, along with…
Does the Anthropocene mean we have to ‘put democracy on hold’?
Our co-director Andy Stirling is at the 2015 conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences in Berlin today, and sent us this abstract of his keynote, ‘Emancipating Transformations: from Anthropocene control to culturing systems’: “Current global environmental governance reverberates with talk of a new ‘Anthropocene epoch’ defined by ‘human domination’, in which a…
Unpacking multiple “shades of green” to make hope possible
Sandra Pointel, Associate Tutor, SPRU This year will see the culmination of two major global agreements for climate change and development. From 30 November to 11 December, worldwide negotiators will gather in Paris at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to hammer out a…
Tackling climate change: the contested politics of forest carbon projects in Africa
Tackling climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our age. And this year is a crucial moment with the Conference of the Parties meeting in Paris in December 2015 hopefully to forge a new climate agreement. Forests, carbon and their management are high on the agenda, and a new book has just…
Sussex Sustainability Research Programme seeks new Director
The University of Sussex is recruiting a Director for its Sussex Sustainability Research Programme. Initiated this year, SSRP spans four of the University’s Schools and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), aiming to develop a world-leading programme in sustainability research. The members of SSRP include the School of Life Sciences, SPRU, the School of Business,…
Does social science suffer from ‘physics envy’?
Many social scientists and some humanities scholars suffer from a condition that I like to refer to as ‘physics envy’. The term resonates with Freud’s theory of ‘penis envy’, as he applied it to girls and sometimes even to women. The use of the phrase ‘physics envy’ is appropriate whenever scholars presume that the closer…
From COP21 to antibiotics: all the latest news from STEPS
Resources to help make sense of climate change in the run up to COP21 feature in our latest newsletter, packed with new projects, publications and events. Read all about it: Summer 2015 Newsletter
Pollution in the Hindon River
This month, the Hindustan Times featured a short series of articles about the Hindon river and its tributaries. The Hindon runs through Ghaziabad, one of the study sites in our project on Risks and Responses to Urban Futures. The paper reports that the waters of the Hindon are severely depleted after groundwater extraction, and pollution…
STISA-2024: Debating Africa’s “Blueprint” for Science, Technology & Innovation
The desire to enhance the strategic use of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI), and public policies in achieving Africa’s socio-economic and development aspirations started decades ago. We know that as early as in the 1970s efforts to build relevant science and technology (S&T) capabilities in Africa (pdf) were well underway, both supported from within Africa…
Welcoming the medics to the One Health movement
The Ebola epidemic alerted many to the interconnectedness of human, animal and environmental health. The medical community has traditionally lagged behind animal health and ecosystem experts in embracing One Health, the predominant movement espousing this approach, but now a report from a Lancet and Rockefeller Foundation co-convened Commission on Planetary Health appears to do so enthusiastically…
Partners
The Myanmar Pig Partnership comprises a multidisciplinary team including vets, microbiologists and social anthropologists from across the UK, Myanmar and Vietnam. There are four partners: The University of Cambridge (lead) The STEPS Centre Myanmar Livestock Breeding and Veterinary Department University of Oxford Clinical Research Unit, Vietnam There are also two official collaborating institutions: The Food…
Global lessons for agricultural sustainability from GM crops
Governing Agricultural Sustainability: Global lessons from GM crops is the latest title in the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability book series. Editor Phil Macnaghten introduces its reframing of the GM debate explored in the book. By Phil Macnaghten, Professor of Technology and International Development, Wageningen University ‘Can GM crops help to feed the world?’ It…
What Greece can learn from Africa about the effects of austerity after a debt crisis
Ian Scoones, republished from The Conversation Some have asked what can Africa learn from Greece. I argue that Greece (and others) can learn a lot from the African experience. Debt is on the rise again not just in Greece, but across the world. A decline in commodity prices with a strengthening of the US…
What can development learn from China’s approach to reform?
By Lewis Husain and Adrian Ely At the launch of the STEPS China hub in Beijing this year, there was much talk of learning from China’s development experiences. A key question was how the Chinese government has been able to manage such massive change at a national level, whilst at the same time catering for…
Multicriteria Mapping meets Operational Research for Development
By Bipashyee Ghosh and Josie Coburn On Thursday (9 July), we facilitated a Multicriteria Mapping workshop as part of a two-day Operational Research for Development workshop, OR: Uplifting Living Conditions, a pre-conference workshop for EURO 2015 at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Bipashyee introduced the background and guiding principles of MCM, followed by the…
For or against GM crops? Other positions are available
Academic cheerleaders for biotechnology corporations need better arguments if they want to persuade the public, write Erik Millstone, Andy Stirling and Dominic Glover, introducing their article in a forthcoming edition of Issues in Science and Technology (PDF). Companies involved in crop genetic engineering (GE) see themselves as principled heroes in a struggle against opportunistic reactionaries….
Our Common Future day 1: Climate science & climate politics in Paris
STEPS member Adrian Ely is at the Our Common Future conference in Paris, and has sent this blogpost looking back on Day 1. The conference runs until Friday. Read our feature on climate, COP21 and sustainability here. The opening plenary of the ‘Our Common Future under Climate Change’ conference – the biggest international meeting of…
A market without trading: China’s ambition to create a nationwide Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) and its challenges
It is 10 years since the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) launched. Now China is working on its own equivalent scheme, with a huge potential impact. But China’s businesses – key to its success or failure – haven’t fully embraced the scheme. In a new paper in Climate Policy, incoming STEPS member Wei Shen examines…
Restart Podcast: Adrian Smith on grassroots innovation
The London-based Restart project, which promotes community repair for electronics, interviewed STEPS researcher Adrian Smith for their latest podcast, ‘Searching for the roots of grassroots innovation’. In it, Adrian discusses our historical and comparative project on ‘grassroots innovation’, including the Lucas Plan, the origins of 1980s tech networks in London, and the wider context of community…
STEPS Director Ian Scoones wins ESRC Impact Award
STEPS Director Ian Scoones was a winner of the Outstanding International Impact Award at the ESRC’s 50th anniversary Celebrating Impact Award ceremony, for his work on rural livelihoods in Zimbabwe. ESRC Blog: Building impact over time: experiences from Zimbabwe by Ian Scoones The awards recognise and reward the successes of ESRC-funded researchers who are achieving…
Reports on climate change and health forecast gloomy future but ‘no-regret’ options may save the day
Ever since climate change became an issue of concern there have been questions about the possible impacts on health. This month, two landmark reports have been released, both of which emphasise that a warmer, wetter world may well be a sicker one. Together with Victor Galaz, professor of politics at the Stockholm Resilience Institute and…
Could changes in beef market regulations open opportunities in southern Africa?
Last month at the OIE (World Animal Health Organisation) Assembly in Paris, changes to international regulatory standards around Foot and Mouth Disease were adopted. This has long been argued for, and will make a big difference to livestock producers across southern Africa. The updated OIE Terrestrial Animal Health Code makes it possible for African countries with wild…
Africa Sustainability Hub will promote low-carbon opportunities
A new African sustainability research hub will make a “huge contribution” to promoting low carbon economic development in Kenya, according to a speech on Wednesday 10th June by Hon. Henry Rotich, Cabinet Secretary of the National Treasury. The speech was delivered by Prof Judi Wakhungu, Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Water and Natural Resources, at…
Myint Zaw to join us for Resource Politics 2015
Myint Zaw, winner of one of this year’s ‘Green Nobels’, the Goldman Environmental Prize for Asia, will speak at Resource Politics 2015, the title of this year’s STEPS Centre annual conference. Journalist and social activist Zaw launched a national movement that successfully stopped construction of the hydroelectric Myitsone Dam on Myanmar’s treasured Irrawaddy River, despite…
Stories from STEPS: Float like a Fab Lab, sting like a Honey Bee
The second in a series of digital stories from the STEPS Centre looks at movements and experiences of ‘grassroots innovation’ and ‘inclusive innovation’ around the world, and asks how they might change how people think about making, producing and consuming things. Read the story now on Medium: Float like a Fab Lab, sting like a…
Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical
Today sees the publication of “Laudato Si”, the Pope’s encyclical on the environment. Encyclicals are for Catholics (and there are 1.2 billion of them in the world) but in this one, Pope Francis aims to “address every person who inhabits this planet”. In it, he warns of the impacts of climate change and calls for…
Pro-poor, low carbon energy conversations across the STEPS global consortium
I was in Nairobi last week for the launch of the Africa hub of the STEPS Global Consortium. During the three day event, I learned a great deal about developments in low carbon energy from across the continent. Reflecting on last week’s launch, I’ve felt a growing sense of excitement at the different forms of…
Kenya Treasury Cabinet Secretary Rotich Launches Africa Sustainability Hub
A new African sustainability research hub will make a “huge contribution” to promoting low carbon economic development in Kenya, according to a speech on Wednesday by Hon. Henry Rotich, Cabinet Secretary of the National Treasury. The speech was delivered by Prof Judi Wakhungu, Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Water and Natural Resources, at a workshop…
Why isn’t global renewable energy investment growing faster?
Guest blog by Stephen Spratt, Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies Last Friday I was a discussant at a fascinating seminar given at SPRU by Marianna Mazzucato and Gregor Semieniuk, where we heard details of new research on global renewable energy investment. Despite some shortcomings, the best current source of data is Bloomberg…
Carbon Conflicts: A new book from STEPS
Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa, edited by Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones, examines the management of forests and carbon. Tackling climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our age. And this year is a crucial moment with the Conference of the Parties meeting in Paris in December 2015 to forge…
Kenyan Cabinet Secretary for Finance: STEPS Africa is “a huge contribution”
On behalf of the Cabinet Secretary of the National Treasury on Kenya, Hon. Henry Rotich, Professor Judi Wakhungu, Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Water and Natural Resources formally launched the STEPS Africa Sustainability Hub today in Nairobi. The speech underscored the importance of Low Carbon Economy Development in Africa. “Low carbon development will play an important…
STEPS Africa Sustainability Hub launched in Nairobi
“There is no better time to launch the Africa Sustainability Hub than now,” says Dr Mohamed Kyari from the Human Resources, Science and Technology Department of the African Union. The AU strategy science and technology and innovation was confirmed by Heads of State last June. The vision of the African Union is to develop a…
Why access to energy is crucial for economic growth and poverty reduction
This week I am in Nairobi for a conference focused on ‘Low Carbon Africa’, discussing the diverse pathways to low carbon energy. Energy access is a key issue across the continent. Last week Kofi Annan launched the ‘Africa Progress Panel’ report that argued for a massive energy revolution on the continent, with the potential for…
Knowledge is power: towards Low Carbon Energy in Africa
The G7 have promised to phase out fossil fuel emissions by the end of the century. Though a long-term target, it’s the first time a proper date has been set for a decarbonised economy for this group of industrialised nations. It will affect the tone of the negotiations at the UN climate talks in Paris…
Global land grabbing: new papers & special issues
This week 200 delegates assemble in Chiang Mai in Thailand for a major conference on land grabbing, conflict and agrarian-environment transformations in southeast Asia. It is co-organised by the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI), a research network co-founded by the Future Agricultures Consortium. The conference marks the next step in this work, aiming to locate…
Waste(d) laws in India
by Ashish Chaturvedi Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies Last year, I wrote about the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan (Clean India Mission), launched on the anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday. As part of this endeavour, and due to the limited impact of existing regulations, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has taken…
Watch: Mike Hulme on climate science, values and disagreements
At our 2015 STEPS lecture, Mike Hulme spoke on continuing disagreements on climate change, and his thinking on how they could be addressed in ways that take account of diverse cultures, perceptions and goals. You can watch Mike’s lecture and view his slides via the links below. This lecture is part of the 2015 STEPS…
A human rights approach to Water and Food Security connections
A new report on water for food security and nutrition led by Lyla Mehta shows how land, food and water issues are inextricably linked and must be reflected in policymaking In the Red Room of Rome’s Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, a landmark report is being launched this morning, which, in the…
Glyphosate, politics and chemical safety
Glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, hit the headlines in March after the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that it is a “probable human carcinogen”. The IARC, which is responsible for providing an evidence base for the cancer control policies of the World Health Organisation and its members, had completed a…
Nepal: resilience, disasters and development
The doyen among Nepal’s ethnographers, the Janku-blessed Bihari Krishna Shrestha had a valid point. Since his phone had gone dead after the Big Earthquake of 25th April, I had gone to his house in Chakupat to find out if he was OK. Our working together goes back to the Marich Man Singh-constituted “Pokhrel Commission” in…
Stories from STEPS: Waste not, want not
The first of a new series of digital stories from the STEPS Centre looks at the working lives of India’s waste pickers, and reveals the hidden connections within the life and politics of the city. Read the story now on Medium: Waste not, want not The story picks up themes from our ‘Pathways to environmental…
Sustainable urban waste management in India
By Fiona Marshall and Pritpal Randhawa Today in Delhi government officials, representatives of waste pickers associations, NGOs, industries and resident welfare associations will participate in the launch event for our new policy brief on Rethinking urban waste management in India. This is just one of the outputs from a joint venture between the STEPS Centre,…
Water purification and the regulatory vacuum in India
By Aviram Sharma, Centre for Studies in Science Policy, JNU Water purification technologies have witnessed a rapid rise at firm, household and community level in developing countries, especially during the last two decades. Yet they remain as one of the most neglected areas of research. So much so, in fact, that these ‘emerging’ technologies often…
We’re Number One! University of Sussex tops world rankings for development studies
The University of Sussex – home to the ESRC STEPS Centre – has been named as the top university in the world for development studies by Higher Education data specialist QS. Sussex has topped the league table of 100 universities, above Harvard in the number two slot, Oxford at number four and Cambridge at eight….
China Daily covers launch of China Sustainability Hub
Mutual learning across continents is one of the key imperatives behind the launch of our China Sustainability Hub and the focus of a China Daily article about the Hub, which is coordinated by Beijing Normal University School of Social Development and Public Policy (BNU-SSDPP) In Research hub helps China’s sustainable development Cecily Liu today reports…
South-South Cooperation: Voices from Africa and Latin America resonate in China
By Sandra Pointel The launch of the STEPS Centre China Sustainability Hub in Beijing last week provided a useful platform for participants at the Pathways to Sustainability in a Changing China conference and its associated Masterclass to engage with current activities at the soon-to-be-launched Latin America and Africa regional hubs of the emerging Pathways to…
Between ‘greenization’ and ‘citizenization’: Welcome to China’s New Normal
By Sandra Pointel A group of researchers from China, Africa, Latin America and Europe met last week in Beijing to launch the new China Sustainability Hub, in collaboration with the STEPS Centre’s long-term partner Beijing Normal University (BNU) and other institutions. Hosted at BNU School of Social Development and Public Policy (SSDP), the launch was…
Has the ‘impact agenda’ helped agronomy – or harmed it?
Every agronomist or agricultural research institute with an interest in international development, and who has applied for a research grant in the last 15 years, will have had to develop and justify a theory of change, and identify outcomes, anticipated impacts, measurable indicators and impact pathways. These tasks have become an obligatory part of agricultural…
Made in China? Mutual learning in a global development era
This week marks the 60th anniversary of the Bandung conference when Asian and African countries gathered in Indonesia to discuss independence, peace and prosperity. The conference resulted in 10 principles based on friendship, solidarity and cooperation in this newly post-colonial era for many of the states involved, prefiguring what many now term ‘South-South’ cooperation in…
Sustainability in a Changing China
The STEPS Centre is delighted to be working with partners in China to launch a Sustainability Hub for collaborative, interdisciplinary research and learning, launched today at an international conference on Pathways to Sustainability in a Changing China. Beijing Normal University School of Social Development and Public Policy (BNU-SSDPP) and the STEPS Centre are working together…
Addressing Resistance to Antibiotics
There is growing international concern about the threat to public health of the emergence and spread of bacteria resistant to existing antibiotics. An effective response must invest in both the development of new drugs and measures to slow the emergence of resistance. A new Working Paper from the STEPS Centre and Future Health Systems, Addressing…
Displaced by ‘development’: land, water and protest in Modi’s India
In the Narmada valley in western India, displaced people and activists are protesting against displacement, submergence and the violation of their basic rights. 20 activists, including Alok Agarwal, senior activist of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), have been standing or sitting waist-deep in the submergence waters of the Omkareshwar dam in Madhya…
New pathways: learning from China’s ‘greenization’
There is much talk of ‘Rising Powers’ in contemporary worldwide development debates. But my experience is mainly in ‘Failing Powers’. So I will focus my summary on some of the key things I have learned in this conference on Pathways to Sustainability in a Changing China conference, coordinated by Beijing Normal University School of Social Development…
Join us for a Nexus methods workshop
Applications are invited for a Nexus Network workshop on Transdisciplinary Methods for Developing Nexus Capabilities led by STEPS Co-director Andy Stirling. The workshop will take a critical look the research challenge in addressing nexus issues, with interactions based on short panel interactions, with break-out groups and lots of room for discussion. The workshop at the…
45 years of Earth Day: transitions and transformations
It’s 45 years today since the first Earth Day. Plenty has happened since then to explore different pathways to sustainability – from big, high-profile international conferences and governance, to local activism and action, and all scales in between. This year, 2015, is a crunch year for science, environment and development agreements, with the COP21 climate…
STEPS-BNU Conference – Storify
←BACK TO CHINA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE HOMEPAGE The story of the conference as it happens, collating resources and social media to help bring the event’s debates to life. [View the story “Pathways to Sustainability in a Changing China” on Storify]
Water rationing in Taiwan and California is not the start of a ‘global water crisis’
Political leaders and international experts are discussing the future of water resources management at the 7th World Water Forum in Korea, a forum that meets every three years to raise public awareness about water issues. But public awareness about water issues may already be at its high since Taiwan and California have put in place…
Global Soil Week: 5 blogposts on soil by Ian Scoones
This week, the Global Soil Week conference takes place in Berlin. It’s part of a series of activities across the globe in the International Year of Soils. In the past few weeks STEPS Director Ian Scoones has been reflecting on this vital resource in a series on his Zimbabweland blog. The articles look at some…
Greening Agrarian Studies
In honor of this year’s Earth Day, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) is delighted to offer readers free access to a special virtual issue entitled ‘Greening Agrarian Studies’. “As the title suggests, this collection brings together 40 articles on various environmental themes that speak to critical agrarian studies,” said Saturnino (‘Jun’) M. Borras Jr,…
A new tool to prepare for zoonotic surprise
A new website from the STEPS-led Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium illustrates how scenarios modelling can provide a new and vital new tool in the global health community’s toolkit. The site, at www.diseasescenarios.org, explores how this multidisciplinary approach can help shed light on the complex processes at play in determining disease risk – and…
Jeremy Allouche on BBC’s ‘Today’ Programme: Taiwan and global water reserves
STEPS member and IDS fellow Jeremy Allouche discussed global water reserves on this morning’s Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. The discussion comes in the context of Taiwan’s planned restrictions on water supplies to two of its cities. From the Today website: “The public’s water supply in two northern Taiwan cities will be stopped two…
Watch video: ‘India’s Risks’ book launch
You can now watch video of the launch event of the book ‘India’s Risks: Democratizing the Management of Threats to Environment, Health and Values’. The video features contributions from Professor M V Rajeev Gowda, Honorable Member of Parliament and Prof Ian Scoones, STEPS Centre Director. The launch event was held at the British Council in…
Market-based environmentalism under fire
Last week I was lucky enough to attend the fantastic Financialisation of Nature conference, co-hosted by the STEPS Centre, along with the Sussex Centre for Global Political Economy and Sussex Doctoral School. Organised by and run for PhD students and early career researchers, I was invited as a discussant on one of the sessions and…
“Are you Reg?” The strange and mythical reality of ‘carbon’
Last night’s “Nature As Commodity” debate in Brighton discussed what happens when we treat ecosystems as commodities and ‘carbon’ as something to be traded and offset, among other things. I won’t try to summarise the debate (of which an audio recording will shortly be released), but here are some partial and subjective thoughts that emerged…
Seed Laws… Government Advocacy and Grassroots Action
By Adrian Ely, Anabel Marin and Sam Geall Research at the STEPS Centre addresses sustainable development challenges that are felt both globally and locally. Over the last two months three events have reinforced the international linkages within our work, illustrating the interconnectedness and similarity of diverse efforts of researchers and civil society groups across the…
Financialisation of Nature: why we need politics and theory
Guest post by Andrea Brock and Mareike Beck, School of Global Studies, Sussex University In recent years, a broad range of new instruments have been promoted and celebrated to tackle climate change and environmental degradation. One well-known mechanism, hailed by its proponents as the key to saving the climate while also helping to eradicate poverty,…
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, the System of Rice Intensification, Holistic Management (Savory System), integrated pest management, Green Revolution style intensification, genetically modified crops – what do all of these…
Mind your (innovation) language
by Adrian Smith and Saurabh Arora, SPRU At the STEPS Centre, we recently organised a couple of workshops looking at the topic of alternative innovation and its proliferation of innovation prefixes, such as social, inclusive, frugal, and sustainable. Our workshops were prompted by the observation that a variety of interacting cultural, social, economic, and technological…
Grub’s up: great infographic on the future of eating insects
A handy infographic (see below) by Alexandra Sexton outlines some of the case for insects as part of human and animal diets – as well as the key uncertainties and questions for the future. Advocates of more insect-eating have sold it as a more eco-friendly and low-carbon option – but questions over commercialisation, production methods…
How to redefine innovation & development: an African perspective
This guest post is by Gillian M. Marcelle, STI policy and management scholar, writing in a personal capacity. Too often public policy debates on global issues get framed and defined in the global North, and the rest of the world is expected to fall in line and follow suit. In July 2014, the African Union…
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 the plenary speakers are: Rohan D’Souza, Betsy Hartmann, Melissa Leach, Johan Rockström and Michael Watts with those among the panel speakers including Tor Benjaminsen, Esteve…
‘Green Transformations’, Leonard Cohen and the Elephant
Guest blog by Marc Hudson, University of Manchester A lively debate about the near and long-term future of western civilisation took place [on Tuesday] in central London, at the launch of the book “The Politics of Green Transformations”. The edited volume based on work of the STEPS centre, was the centrepiece of an event at…
GM report: Some nice recommendations, shame about the spin
The UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology has today released its long-awaited report on ‘Advanced genetic techniques for crop improvement: regulation, risk and precaution’. The ESRC STEPS Centre welcomes the moves made by the Committee – as reflected in the report title – to somewhat broaden out the original narrow terms of the…
Storify: The Politics of Green Transformations book launch
←BACK TO GREEN TRANSFORMATIONS HOMEPAGE We’ve captured some of the lively debate at the Politics of Green Transformations book launch in the Storify below, featuring tweets, images & links to further commentary on the book. [View the story “The Politics of Green Transformations” on Storify]
The Politics of Green Transformations
It’s a crunch year for science, environment and development agreements – COP21, the Sustainable Development Goals – but will 2015 be the transformative moment it is being hyped as? (Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato, Camilla Toulmin and Andrew Simms debate at the book launch. Photo credit: Lance Bellers) Overview | Book | Launch debate | Video | Blogs…
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 financial and ecological crises have drawn attention to the ecological, social and economic sustainability of the global economy. This has prompted calls for a new…
Green Transformations: Video
←BACK TO GREEN TRANSFORMATIONS HOMEPAGE Book launch debate The Politics of Green Transformations was launched on 24 February 2015 with a high-profile debate at the National Liberal Club in London, chaired by co-editor Peter Newell (University of Sussex). Michael Jacobs (IDDRI), Mariana Mazzucato (SPRU), Andrew Simms (NEF) and Camilla Toulmin (IIED) discussed what it takes to create the multiple ‘green transformations’…
Is it time to refocus the Water-Energy-Food nexus?
The water-energy-food nexus is the ‘new kid on the block’ in development thinking since 2008, and is a key concept within the UN post-2015 development agenda. The current framing of the nexus, however, needs to refocus onto the big issues of inequality and local access rights to resources, according to a new Special Issue of…
Anne Glover speaks out on scientific advice in Brussels
Prof Anne Glover, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission, has written a revealing article on the Guardian’s ‘Political Science’ blog about her three years in the post. The article reveals her successes, as well as some of the difficulties and suspicions she faced in a new post within the large…
From Knowledge Economy to Innovation Democracy
The ESRC STEPS Centre’s Co-Director Professor Andy Stirling recently gave a keynote speech at the European Commission’s ‘FTA 2014: future oriented technology analysis’ conference. Prof. Stirling’s address, From Knowledge Economy to Innovation Democracy: collective action in the shaping of scientific and technological futures, was based on his extensive work on technocratic transitions and opening up…
Climate innovation systems: new STEPS working paper
A new STEPS working paper discusses the academic evidence for a promising idea for supporting climate change technology in developing countries. The paper, CRIBs (Climate Relevant Innovation-system Builders): An effective way forward for international climate technology policy by David Ockwell and Rob Byrne follows a shorter policy-focused paper and summary briefing on the same subject…
Researchers pick ‘breakthrough’ technologies for growth
Dr Adrian Ely, STEPS Centre head of impact and engagement was interviewed for a story about ‘breakthrough’ technologies by Aamna Mohdin for SciDev.net Desalination using renewable energy, vaccines to help eradicate HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and electronic textbooks that adapt to readers’ skills are among the 50 development-boosting technologies identified in a report published last…
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 the paper, I was struck by the prominence, alongside the various statistics and methodology, of something quite different: the authors spend some effort to define…
Stairways to the sky: sustainability & rice in the Philippines
The rice terraces of central Luzon’s Cordillera mountain range in the Philippines climb up the steep valley-sides like bleachers designed for an audience of giants. This remarkable human-made landscape was inscribed on the UNESCO list of World Heritage monuments in 1995. The neat ranks of flat-topped pond-fields have also been called ‘a stairway to the…
Davos, development and delivering progress
As the money men and women of the world gather in the Swiss ski resort of Davos for annual The World Economic Forum (WEF), the challenges of addressing inequality, mitigating against climate change and living sustainably on this fragile planet are at the forefront of their minds. Actually, I lie. Those things do not appear…
Resource Politics 2015: Call for panels and posters
We are delighted to announce our annual conference, Resource Politics: transforming pathways to sustainability, to be held at the Institute of Development Studies on 7-9 September 2015. Among the plenary speakers are: Rohan D’Souza, Betsy Hartmann, Melissa Leach, Johan Rockström and Michael Watts with those among the panel speakers including Tor Benjaminsen, Esteve Corbera, Wendy Harcourt…
‘Thousands of models’: Planetary boundaries, values & power
The role of current patterns of human habitation in earth systems processes is pushing beyond planetary boundaries; which is to say our impacts on climate and biosphere risk tipping our environments into states dangerous to our societies. As Katherine Richardson from Copenhagen University puts it, “Earth is familiar with large environmental changes, but modern human…
STEPS Africa research network to boost development in Africa planned
By Gilbert Nakweya for SciDev.net [NAIROBI] A new research and capacity building hub focusing on sustainable development issues in Africa will be established by mid this year, a meeting has heard. The STEPS Africa Sustainability Hub, which was announced during a meeting held in Kenya last year (6 November), aims to create a network of…
How climate change transformed India’s megacities
By Alankar, researcher at Sarai / STEPS Uncertainty from Below project. The megacities of India like Delhi and Mumbai are exhibiting today what we can call ‘urbanization of poverty’ and ‘urbanization of consumption’. More than half of the populations of both cities survives under acute poverty. At the same time, both these megacities today house…
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 soils need to grow which types of plants the best? How can they be managed, improved or damaged? For archaeologists or paleontologists, digging into the…
Major new research project on animal-to-human disease transmission
The ESRC STEPS Centre has begun work on a major, international research project exploring the factors that drive animal-to-human (‘zoonotic’) disease transmission in Tanzania, with the aim of informing new strategies for disease control and elimination. Anthropologist Dr. Linda Waldman, a member of the STEPS Centre, will be undertaking the social science element, including participatory…
STEPS blog: best of 2014
We can hardly believe it, but it’s nearly the end of 2014. To mark the occasion, the STEPS Centre communications team has picked 12 of our favourite blog posts by STEPS members, one from each month of the year. Choosing them has been a difficult task, as there’s been a lot to write about our…
‘A new way of doing science’: Future Earth in Argentina
By Patrick van Zwanenberg and Mariano Fressoli, STEPS America Latina. Future Earth is a major 10-year international research programme that aims to provide the critical knowledge needed to address challenges of global environmental change, and to accelerate transformations to a sustainable world. Launched in June 2012, at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), it…
What are Climate-Relevant Innovation System Builders (CRIBS)?
Update (1 July 2015): The research described in this blogpost has been written up in an article for the journal Climate Policy: Ockwell D. and Byrne R. (2015) Improving technology transfer through national systems of innovation: climate relevant innovation-system builders (CRIBs), Climate Policy (open access) Other publications: Working Paper 76 (focused on policy recommendations): CRIBs…
Space, markets and employment: 3 films from Zimbabwe
A new series of films explores the links between land reform and economic activity in Zimbabwe, focusing on three commodities: tobacco, beef and horticulture. The films are produced for the ‘Space, Markets and Employment in Agricultural Development’ (SMEAD) project by Pamela Ngwenya, supported by the field team. They are accompanied by an overview film. Zimbabwe is one…
COP20: Research from the edge
The UN Climate Change Conference (COP20) in Lima, Peru (1-12 December 2014) will settle the key elements of a global climate deal to be finalised in Paris next year, when the deadline for a new deal runs out. The ESRC STEPS Centre and its partners around the world have been working on policy-relevant research in…
STEPS America Latina launches new website
The Centro STEPS America Latina – the new Latin American regional hub for our Global Pathways to Sustainability Consortium – has unveiled its own dedicated website. The new website is now live at www.stepsamericalatina.com. The Centro STEPS website is run by a team at the Centro de Investigaciones para la Transformación (CENIT) in Buenos Aires,…
Maker culture and sustainability
What are citizen labs and ‘maker’ culture providing to sustainable development? STEPS researcher Adrian Smith was part of a panel discussing this question at an event on 18 November in Madrid. A recording from the event is now available. >> Listen to the discussion on the Medialab-Prado website (audio in Spanish) The debate explored the…
Innovation choices in the face of uncertainty
Professor Andy Stirling writes chapter accompanying the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser’s inaugural report Sir Mark Walport recently launched his first ever annual report as UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Innovation: Managing risk not avoiding it. The accompanying evidence and case studies includes a chapter written by Professor Andy Stirling, Co-Director of the ESRC-funded STEPS Centre,…
The precautionary principle must be retained, unless we are willing to be reckless with our common future
Guest blog by Rupert Read I recently submitted evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry on GM food and the Precautionary Principle. Unfortunately, as you’ll see intimated at the outset of my remarks there, I have relatively little faith in the inquiry. It seems to me that the inquiry’s terms have…
GM Food and the precautionary principle
“Precaution does not necessarily mean a ban. It simply urges that time and space be found to get things right.” Professor Andy Stirling, writing in the Guardian Overview The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee is carrying out an inquiry into genetically modified (GM) foods and the way in which these are regulated in Europe…
China and the new climate deal
“The joint US-China announcement on tackling climate change has been described as “historic”, a “turning point” and a “positive signal”. It has also been written off as insubstantive or even “hype”. “The reality, perhaps unsurprisingly, lies somewhere in between. What it might represent, however, is a future that pairs economic growth with environmental concerns,” writes…
Informing the UK’s approach to SDGs
A Parliamentary inquiry about the UK’s position and approach to the development targets to replace the millennium development goals has published evidence from the ESRC STEPS Centre. The Environmental Audit Committee’s inquiry is looking at how best the UK can move forward on setting and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Were ‘Technology Networks’ the Fab Labs of the 1980s?
A new article by Adrian Smith in the Journal of Peer Production looks at the story of Technology Networks – community based workshops which arose in the UK in the early 1980s. At a time of high unemployment, they provided a space for sharing machine tools, access to technical advice, and prototyping services – anticipating…
ESRC Studentships: study with the STEPS Centre
The STEPS Centre is delighted to offer PhD training in association with the Sussex ESRC Doctoral Training Centre, one of a network of 21 Doctoral Training Centres in the UK, set up by the Economic and Social Research Council to support the development and research training of postgraduate researchers. A grant of more than £3.5million from the ESRC together…
Political Ecology: resources, power and justice
With conceptual roots in political economy and cultural ecology, as well as close relationships with development studies and science and technology studies, the multidisciplinary field of political ecology shares a number of theoretical and methodological complementarities with the STEPS Centre’s pathways approach. In early September 2014, the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University hosted an…
STEPS América Latina at the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network
By Mariano Fressoli, STEPS America Latina Between 13 and 15 October the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network held its first workshop in Nairobi. The objective of the workshop, organized and funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre, and supported by the University of Toronto and Kenya iHUB, was to kick-start the construction…
Call for abstracts: Critical Perspectives on the Financialisation of Nature
A Call for Abstracts has been issued for a workshop in March 2015 on the financialisation of nature. Update (12 December 2014): The call for abstracts has now closed. Successful applicants will be informed by 31 December 2014. Update (28 November 2014): Added a list of speakers (confirmed and tbc) – scroll down for details….
Business for peace?
It is difficult to avoid being swept up in the current tide of optimism about Africa and resource development. For once, Africa is not only portrayed by outsiders as a continent of poor people suffering and fighting over civil wars and dependent on good will and aid. At the same time, the new, positive single…
Journal of Peasant Studies new special issue: critical perspectives on Food Sovereignty
A new special issue on ‘Critical perspectives on food sovereignty’ from the Journal of Peasant Studies has been released, with free articles available for a limited period. The guest editors are Marc Edelman, James C. Scott, Amita Baviskar, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Deniz Kandiyoti, Eric Holt-Gimenez, Tony Weis and Wendy Wolford. View/download the issue: Critical perspectives…
Melissa Leach on Ebola & inequality – lecture text & audio
Some materials are now available from the recent Sussex Development Lecture on Equality, Sustainability, Security: Interlaced challenges in a global development era by former STEPS Director Melissa Leach. The text is available to download below as a PDF, and you can listen to Melissa’s lecture online, courtesy of the Institute of Development Studies. In the…
Gender equality and Sustainability: STEPS members contribute to new UN Women report
STEPS Centre members have contributed to a major United Nations report that highlights the deep connections between gender equality and sustainable development, as the world moves towards a post-2015 framework. Edit (21 Oct 2014): The video from the launch event in New York is now available to watch on the UN website. The World Survey…
Why gender equality and sustainable development are inextricably linked
by Melissa Leach, Director, Institute of Development Studies As the world moves towards Sustainable Development Goals for the post-2015 era, there is emerging debate about how target-setting and implementation might integrate across the 17 goals proposed by the Open Working Group (OWG) so that the inextricable links between, say, climate change, water and food are…
New Multicriteria Mapping software launched
Multicriteria Mapping (MCM), a new software package to aid decision-making by exploring contrasting perspectives on complex issues, has been launched. MCM was pioneered by STEPS co-director Andy Stirling as a way of ‘opening up’ technical assessment by systematically ‘mapping’ the practical implications of alternative options, knowledge, framings and values. The new software will make MCM…
Ebola: difficult questions for development
As the horrific Ebola crisis unfolds across West Africa, and the international community belatedly responds, there are some bigger questions that arise beyond the immediate challenges on the ground. These are worth raising and discussing, as they challenge our understanding of ‘development’ as framed and practised over the last few decades in fundamental ways. The…
David Ockwell at UNFCCC workshop on innovation systems (live webcast)
On 13–14 October, the Technology Executive Committee (TEC) of the UNFCCC is holding a workshop on Strengthening national systems of innovation in developing countries, covering the entire technology cycle for climate technology. This workshop will be webcast (see link below). The workshop includes a presentation by David Ockwell, convenor of the STEPS Centre’s Energy and…
STEPS wins ISSC Transformations to Sustainability grant
The ESRC STEPS Centre is delighted to have won an International Social Science Council (ISSC) seed grant under the new Transformations to Sustainability Programme. The ISSC programme aims to build the knowledge partnerships needed for longer-term research on the fundamental innovative processes of social transformations towards sustainable and equitable futures. Led by Director Professor Ian Scoones,…
Join us for What Works at the Nexus?
Join us at the first Nexus Network conference: What works at the nexus? New connections in food, energy, water and environment on Thursday 27 November from 9.30 am to 5.30 pm at the Coin Street Conference Centre in London. This is an opportunity for network members to meet, hear high-profile keynote speakers, discuss nexus challenges from a variety…
Get involved! Your views on water and food security wanted by the UN.
Would you like to help inform a report for the UN on food and water security? Now here is your chance. A year ago, the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS) asked the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) to prepare a report on Water and Food Security. Lyla Mehta, convenor of…
Adrian Smith on grassroots prototyping at SCORAI Europe
Adrian Smith, STEPS Grassroots Innovation project convenor, will talk about grassroots prototyping past and present to a SCORAI (Europe) workshop on sustainable consumption at Kingston University today. The flourishing of community-based workshops for prototyping new forms of production and consumption using versatile digital design and fabrication technologies can learn from similar community workshops in the…
Complex Adaptive Systems & health: new resources
In June 2014, Future Health Systems (FHS) and the STEPS Centre co-hosted a workshop exploring Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) approaches to health systems strengthening in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). FHS and STEPS are particularly concerned with policies, programs, and individual level interventions promote and protect people’s health and wellbeing, particularly vulnerable and disadvantaged populations. The…
Complex combinations: climate, poverty and health in the Sundarbans
by Upasona Ghosh, Senior Research Officer at the Indian Institute of Health Management Research, and researcher on the STEPS Centre’s project on Uncertainty from below. My first trip to Sundarbans was as a tourist. I was left mesmerized by the beauty of the natural mangrove trees and crisscrossing creeks. I found it difficult to imagine…
Talking Zimbabwe & Land Reform at ASAUK14 this Wednesday
New research from Zimbabwe will be shared at a double panel session at the UK African Studies Association conference this week. This year’s event is at the University of Sussex, and our session is on Wednesday 10 September from 9 till 10.30 and 11 to 12.30. The session has been organised by Gareth James of…
Why are informal water services overlooked in post-conflict state building?
by Jeremy Allouche & Maria Cooper Resource politics is coming back to the forefront of academic and policy debates around peacebuilding. Environmental peace and state building agendas are dominated by questions concerning informality and hybridity in resources. What kind of role do service providers play in peacebuilding and state building and what can we learn…
‘Innovation histories’: capturing legacy & learning from long-term programmes
By Annie Wilkinson, post doctorate researcher, Institute of Development Studies (This post is part of a series of reflections emerging from a workshop on complex adaptive systems research methods held in Baltimore in June 2014.) At the recent workshop on methods for complex adaptive systems (CAS) research in Baltimore, jointly organised by the STEPS Centre and Future Health Systems (FHS),…
New methods needed: How can complexity science help us to understand pluralistic health systems?
This is the first blogpost in a series of reflections emerging from a workshop on complex adaptive systems research methods held in Baltimore in June 2014. It was first published on the Future Health Systems website. Until recently, the dominant view of a health system was as a combination of building blocks — such as human…
Article roundup: STEPS Latin America monthly debates
As part of the build up to the launch of the STEPS Centre’s Latin American hub in 2015, we have started a series of monthly debates in Buenos Aires on sustainability and development. The debates are an important first step in identifying and discussing themes that the new Centre will explore, and in creating a…
GM Nation or GM Planet? How to involve citizens in decisions about transgenic crops
The UK’s GM Nation? public debate – conducted over a decade ago, tried to include the voices of citizens in decision-making over transgenic crops. With recent decisions by China and India possibly signalling a shift of opinion against GM in these ‘rising powers’, what kinds of institutions are required to enable democratic governance of these…
GM in China: ‘Paranoia’ and public opinion
Biosafety certificates permitting Chinese researchers to grow genetically modified rice and corn expired last week, with little indication that the Ministry of Agriculture will renew them. The certificates, issued in 2009, concerned two types of Bt rice, which express a gene of the bacillus thuringiensis bacterium, conferring pest resistance, and phytase maize, which when used…
A day with Argentina’s ‘street engineers’
They take pride in what they do at the Reciclando Sueños co-operative. Situated in the La Matanza district of greater Buenos Aires, the workers describe themselves as cartoneros profesionales (professional recyclers) and ingenieros callejeros (street engineers). Whilst some in the city see waste picking as a lowly activity, these workers consider themselves to be providing…
Why STEPS is creating a new research hub in Latin America
I am in Buenos Aires for the ESOCITE/4S conference, which is bringing together Latin American scholars in Science & Technology Studies and visitors from the USA, Europe and other regions of the world. It is an exciting moment to convene in Argentina. The government is mired in controversy over payment of debts, vulture funds, nationalisations,…
The road to 2015: experiences and challenges from Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)
by Kamal Kar, Founder of the Community-Led Total Sanitation Foundation I was recently invited to IDS as part of an EPSRC-funded solid waste management project, ‘A Global Solution to Protect Water by Transforming Waste’, a unique initiative that focuses on addressing the problems of safe disposal of human excreta, by using anaerobic digestion technology to…
India’s risks: forging a new multidisciplinary debate
by Raphaelle Moor A prospective superpower, India is grappling with a host of risks that threaten to hamper its progress towards becoming a more economically successful, egalitarian, safe and harmonious society. India’s population routinely deals with the risks from HIV/AIDS, earthquakes, floods, industrial accidents and environmental disasters, and more recently the risks and uncertainties brought…
Recordando el Plan de Lucas: que nos puede decir el movimiento para producción social útil sobre la innovación inclusiva hoy?
This post is a translated and edited version of an article first published in English on the Guardian’s Political Science blog En enero de 1976 los trabajadores de Lucas Aerospace publicaron un plan alternativo para el futuro de su empresa manufacturera. Fue una respuesta novedosa a los anuncios que miles de despidos porrazones de reestructuración…
Livelihood pathways after land reform in Zimbabwe
Understanding livelihood pathways requires sustained fieldwork in particular sites in order to understand what changes and why. Systematic longitudinal studies are sadly rare in many developing country settings. Project grants for a few years are insufficient to sustain the research effort required. Long term studies are especially important when major changes have occurred. We cannot…
Sustainable Development Goals: lessons from the ‘nexus’
As part of our engagement with the ‘nexus’ of food, water, energy and the environment, STEPS members will be participating in an Overseas Development Institute event on 11 September 2014. The event Tackling trade-offs in the food-water-energy nexus: lessons for the SDGs features contributions former STEPS Director Melissa Leach and includes a contribution from our…
Urban Futures: Case studies and comparator sites
This page is about case studies and locations in the project ‘Risks and Responses to Urban Futures’. For an overview, see the project homepage. The project is working in two sites to the south and east of Delhi: Karhera Village in Ghaziabad District, and Yamuna Pushta, a flood plain on the banks of the river…
Urban Futures: Background and research questions
This page provides detail of the background and research questions of the project ‘Risks and Responses to Urban Futures’. For a shorter overview, see the project homepage. Urbanisation creates of new opportunities for many, while also resulting in a dramatic increase in the concentration of poverty and environmental degradation in peri-urban zones. Peri-urban areas, at…
Global health meets genomics: inequality and politics
Scientific advances in the understanding of genetics and genomics have the potential to generate major improvements for human health in the near future. However, from a global health perspective, the translation of this technology into new medical treatments raises profound international and local issues around inequality, identity and insecurity. On 18th July 2014, we attended…
Same meat, different gravy? The new Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA)
By David Ockwell, STEPS Centre Deputy Director, Research On 2 July African Union Heads of State and Government adopted the new Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2024 (STISA-2024)[i]. This replaces the previous African Science and Technology Consolidated Plan of Action (CPA) that was adopted by the AU back in 2006. STISA-2024 sets…
Building low carbon, high growth futures in Africa
An article in New Scientist magazine pubished today sets out one of the most hotly-contestated questions about increasing energy access in the global south: can low carbon techology deliver meaningful opportunities for economic growth? Author Fred Pearce, who sits on the STEPS Centre’s Advisory Committee, in unconvinced that those on either side of the low carbon argument have made a strong enough…
Community-based Micro Grids: Experiences in Rural Kenya
By Lorenz Gollwitzer I am standing in Olosho-Oibor, a small village three-hours from Nairobi, at the bottom of the Ngong Hills (famous as the place where Denys Finch Hatton crashed his plane and died in Karen Blixen’s autobiography Out of Africa). Beeping in my pocket, my smartphone has just received an email, yet the nearest connection to the national grid…
Technology & democracy: the story of Brazil’s Social Technology Network
A new STEPS working paper tells the story of a recent experiment in grassroots innovation – the Social Technology Network (STN) in Brazil. The paper, by Mariano Fressoli and Rafael Dias, is linked to our project on historical and comparative perspectives on grassroots innovation. Formed in 2004, the STN was a ‘hybrid’, involving social movements,…
Ebola: failures, flashpoints and focus
By Annie Wilkinson, post doctorate researcher, Institute of Development Studies As the worst Ebola epidemic on record shows no signs of abating in West Africa, fear and ignorance are increasingly said to be playing a role in its continued spread. Meanwhile, local practices such as the consumption of bushmeat and deforestation are the go-to explanations…
Missionary discourses: can the green economy bring climate justice to the South?
by Joanes Atela, researcher, political ecology of carbon in Africa project The green economy has become one of the most powerful political and social agendas in the era of climate change. This week, researchers have met in Dodoma, Tanzania at the Green Economy in the South conference – the first meeting of its kind. Central…
Mission-Oriented Finance for Innovation: top-down missions or bottom-up causes?
Andy Stirling, co-director of STEPS, will be a speaker at the conference Mission-Oriented Finance for Innovation on 22-24 July in London, which examines the important role of public sector agencies in tackling societal challenges through innovation. The conference is organised by Prof Mariana Mazzucato of SPRU with Prof L. Randall Wray (UMKC & Levy Institute,…
Antibiotics: Avoiding a return to the dark ages of medicine
By Annie Wilkinson, post doctorate researcher, Institute of Development Studies Listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme woke up yesterday to Prime Minister David Cameron’s prediction of a return to the “dark ages of medicine” if the problem of growing antibiotic resistance is left unchecked. This doomsday scenario is one where routine infections which we have come to think…
Ghana,’Brazil of Africa’: Keeping lights on for the World Cup
By Sandra Pointel in Accra Over recent years, concerns to “keep the lights on” have featured high on energy policy agendas and in media headlines, especially in the developed world. Competing concerns to ensure energy security – including geopolitical turbulence associated with oil and gas supply, potential terrorist attacks and attempts to mitigate climate change and transition…
The nexus – politics, practice and disciplinary dilemmas
STEPS researchers have written a series of blogposts for the Guardian and the Nexus Platform website addressing the challenges of the water-food-energy-environment ‘nexus’. Andy Stirling addresses the challenges of working across disciplines, Jeremy Allouche looks at nexus politics while James Wilsdon and Rose Cairns discuss joining research, policy and practice. The Guardian Nexus blogpost series launches the Nexus Network,…
GM crops: what people in the global South really think
Durham University has just published an important new research report on the governance of transgenic crops in three of the world’s ‘rising powers’ – Brazil, Mexico and India – looking at how different groups in those countries have reacted to GM crops. The document, A new approach to governing GM crops? Global lessons from the…
Andy Stirling at events on well-being and research methods
STEPS director Andy Stirling was a speaker at “Let’s Talk Happiness – beyond GDP”, a conference organised by the Various Interests Group of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) last week. The event assessed the state of affairs, democratic challenges and political commitment to developing indicators on well-being and social progress in the context…
Sustainable intensification: a new buzzword to feed the world?
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 some while to find out what it actually means. Is this yet another contradictory hyphenation of two words for political ends, or does it have…
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 was the refusal to import whole-grain GM maize from South Africa, as regulatory approval had not been granted, and there were fears that the food…
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 of outrage and debates across the globe. Among them is the critical issue of women’s vulnerability and safety. In particular, as the girls were heading…
‘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 of the authors is STEPS Centre member Lyla Mehta.
‘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 been released as an e-book, with chapters available in digital form from Edward Elgar Publishing. The book includes an opening chapter by the editors, as…
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 have left me excited, and intellectually invigorated. I was fortunate to take part in this year’s STEPS Centre Summer School on Pathways to Sustainability, held from…
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 Governance, Prosperity and Development” in July. The conference takes place from 8-10 July 2014 at the University of Dodoma, Tanzania. More information can be found…
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 the general public to respond to concerns about biodiversity offsetting, which the event organisers see as a flawed policy to allow wildlife to be destroyed…
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 studies, innovation and policy studies, and across agricultural, health, water or energy issues. There is a premium on interdisciplinary approaches and on interests and orientations…
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 could more unruly modes of change, inspired by other ongoing radical social transformations – release from colonialism, racism and patriarchy, for example – offer more…
Latin American STEPS Centre Hub starts with debate series on sustainability
by Valeria Arza, Mariano Fressoli, Anabel Marin and Patrick van Zwanenberg, STEPS Centre Latin American hub A new series of Debates on Sustainability and Development in Latin America has kicked off in Argentina with a discussion on the social utility of publicly funded research for transgenic crops. Organised by two of the STEPS Centre’s partner…
The Wonders of Walkshops
By Melissa Leach, IDS Director The STEPS Centre Summer School has been running here at IDS over the last two weeks – 38 fantastic PhD students and early career researchers from 25 countries. As ever we’ve all been enriched, enlightened and challenged by presentations, discussion and searching debate around building pathways to sustainability and social…
Learning from Great Transformations Past and Present
Reflecting on Karl Polanyi at the Resilience 2014 Conference By John Thompson, STEPS Centre Food and Agriculture Convenor In June 2013, I served on the Scientific Steering Committee of the international conference on Transformation in a Changing Climate, which was held at the University of Oslo. One of my duties for that event was to…
The power and politics around ‘objective’ performance monitoring
Performance monitoring, most prominently exemplified in the Millennium Development Goals, is often perceived as providing objective results. Using the case of access to rural water supplies in Ethiopia, a new journal article (£) by STEPS alumna Katharina Welle explores the power and political dynamics inherent in sector performance monitoring. Welle, K. (2014) Monitoring performance or…
Mariana Mazzucato on ‘The Green Entrepreneurial State’: video, audio & slides
Mariana Mazzucato gave a public lecture on ‘The Green Entrepreneurial State’ as part of this year’s STEPS Summer School. Audio, video and slides from her talk are now available (see below). Prof Mazzucato is the author of the book ‘The Entrepreneurial State: public vs private sector myths’. She holds the prestigious RM Phillips chair in…
Grassroots fabrication in makerspaces: the importance of culture, context & relationships
On Thursday 10th April 2014, the Grassroots Innovations project organised a half-day World Café workshop in Copenhagen on the topic of grassroots fabrication in makerspaces. It formed one session within a wider conference exploring an ‘Innovative Civil Society’ and hosted by the international Living Knowledge network of science shops. Makerspaces are one of the case…
On the benefits of walking and talking
Our Summer School kicked off today, with 38 students from 25 countries meeting at IDS for two weeks of intensive debate and discussion. On Wednesday, after a short lecture on ‘uncertainty’, they’ll take a long walk over the South Downs, talking to each other around a set of guiding questions. This builds on a strong…
STEPS Centre Summer School 2014
Our Summer School brought together an exceptional group of people who are exploring and developing ideas on building pathways to sustainability. This year 38 participants from 25 countries challenged the STEPS team and each other on questions of science, society and development through a mix of lectures, walks, discussions and public events. Storify: The story…
Public lecture, 12 May: ‘The Green Entrepreneurial State’
We’re delighted to announce that Prof Mariana Mazzucato will be the speaker for our annual public lecture at Sussex University, which takes place as part of the STEPS Centre Summer School. Mariana Mazzucato: ‘The Green Entrepreneurial State’ 12 May 2014 at 5.30-7pm Followed by drinks reception Fulton A Lecture Theatre, University of Sussex Falmer, Brighton,…
Resilience 2014: Limits revisited? Planetary boundaries, justice and power
By Melissa Leach, IDS Director In 1972 Meadows et al’s Limits to Growth made scientific and policy waves, as its ‘World3’ model predicted the end of growth and prosperity as rising, consuming populations ran up against resource limits. In critique, SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research) at the University of Sussex offered alternative models predicting…
Resilience 2014: Planetary boundaries, politics and pathways
How can we build development pathways that enhance sustainability and resilience, integrating ecological integrity, social equality, human rights, well-being and security? That was the tough question at the centre of Professor Melissa Leach’s presentation at the Resilience 2014 conference in Montpellier, France, this morning. Prof. Leach, former STEPS Centre Director and new IDS Director, opened the second day of the conference in…
New leadership for the ESRC STEPS Centre
A new leadership team has been announced at the ESRC STEPS Centre today. The two founding Co-Directors, Prof. Ian Scoones and Prof. Andy Stirling remain at the helm of STEPS, with Prof. Scoones (right) taking over as Director and Prof. Stirling retaining his Co-Director role. This follows the appointment of the former Director, Prof. Melissa Leach, as…
Mike Hulme to chair ESRC STEPS Centre International Advisory Committee
The ESRC STEPS Centre is delighted to announce Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate and Culture at King’s College London, is taking over as chair of the Centre’s International Advisory Committee. Professor Hulme takes over the role of chair from Judi Wakhungu, Cabinet Secretary (Minister) for Environment, Water and Natural Resources of Kenya. Prof. Wakhungu was…
Ebola in Guinea – people, patterns and puzzles
By Melissa Leach, Principal Investigator of Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium The francophone West African country of Guinea doesn’t often make international headlines, but has this week for the nastiest of reasons. An outbreak of Ebola, first identified in the forested south-east of the country in mid-March, has now spread across the country…
Understanding water for food security
Lyla Mehta, STEPS Centre water & sanitation theme convenor, is heading a team writing the report on Water and Food Security to the Committee of World Food Security (CFS). Water for all, provided in an equitable and sustainable way, is central to global justice for poor women and men. It has a particularly important role…
Guest blogpost: Andrew Barnett on low carbon development trade offs
Andrew Barnett, Director of The Policy Practice, inspired by the discussion at The Royal Society on Monday 31 March 2014 to discuss the policy implications of research on low carbon development and sustainable energy access in low-income countries, writes for the STEPS Centre blog. I very much enjoyed meeting the teams from Science and Technology Policy…
IPCC: should climate change debates be more political?
The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, focusing on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, makes sobering reading. But it also situates climate change among a range of other challenges and uncertainties faced by society, especially poor people. IPCC reports always provoke a discussion about trust in climate science. But they should also make…
Inclusive innovation: learning to listen to the excluded
Last week I spent a fascinating couple of days at the OECD Symposium on Innovation and Inclusive Growth, where discussion kept returning to the challenge of scaling-up inclusive innovation. Unsurprisingly, given the venue, and with most of the participants coming from economics and business schools, talk has tended to focus on getting the incentives right,…
Future Earth launches new website
Future Earth, the international hub for research on sustainability, has launched a new website to share news of its events and projects. Future Earth was launched in June 2012 and aims to bring together research on global environmental change from across disciplines, with input from governments, civil society, business and others. STEPS Director Melissa Leach…
World Water Day: Time to consider a low water economy
The theme of this year’s World Water Day on 22 March is ‘water and energy’ – giving a chance to reflect on how these two vital resources are linked. In the water sector, the food-energy-water nexus is slowly replacing the concept of Integrated Water Resources Management. The idea of the nexus essentially gained momentum in the…
Scaling-up inclusive innovation: asking the right questions?
This post is based on a contribution I’ll be making in a session on ‘scaling up’ at the OECD Symposium on Innovation and Inclusive Growth in Paris on 20-21 March 2014. There has always existed an insistent undercurrent of grassroots innovation activity in societies. Whether born of material or economic necessity, or motivated by social…
Sustainable energy for whom?
How can we move from “sustainable energy for some” towards “sustainable energy for all”, whilst promoting economic development in some of the world’s poorest nations?