Technologies for social inclusion in Latin America are a recent manifestation of grassroots innovation movements whose global activities go back to appropriate technology in the 1970s and earlier. Common to…
Grassroots innovation movements: challenges and contributions
Pandemic Flu Controversies: What have we learned? Reflections from a workshop to discuss lessons, policy implications and future challenges
This report details discussions at the Pandemic Flu Controversies workshop held on 10-11 January 2013, organised by the STEPS Centre and University of Sussex Centre for Global Health Policy. There…
Transforming Innovation for Sustainability
by Melissa Leach, Johan Rockström, Paul Raskin, Ian Scoones, Andy C. Stirling, Adrian Smith, John Thompson, Erik Millstone, Adrian Ely, Elisa Arond, Carl Folke and Per Olsson A radical new…
Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto website
The STEPS Centre hosts a website dedicated to our project Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto. On the website you can find a multimedia version of the New Manifesto, a…
Contested Agronomy: Agricultural Research in a Changing World
Edited by James Sumberg and John Thompson Routledge, 2012 Buy this book This book in our Pathways to Sustainability series looks at the how debates in crop and land science…
Tipping towards sustainability: emerging pathways of transformation
This article explores the links between agency, institutions, and innovation in navigating shifts and large-scale transformations toward global sustainability. Our central question is whether social and technical innovations can reverse…
The Pathways Approach of the STEPS Centre
Rapid environmental and social changes – such as climate change, population explosion, urbanisation and globalised economics – are posing urgent practical, moral and political challenges across the globe. Consequently the…
The Alternative Technology Movement: An Analysis of its Framing and Negotiation of Technology Development
Technology mediates our relations with one another and with nature. Modern environmentalism recognised this from its inception. Alternative Technology (AT) activists called for innovations which would pre-figure ecological society. This…
The governance of sustainable socio-technical transitions
A quasi-evolutionary model of socio-technical transitions is described in which regimes face selection pressures continuously. Differentiated transition contexts determine the form and direction of regime change in response to these…
Sustainability
As a consummately effective ‘boundary term’, able to link disparate groups on the basis of a broad common agenda, ‘sustainability’ has moved a long way from its technical association with…