The term ‘sustainable intensification’ (SI) has entered academic and policy discourse in recent years, including in debates about what to do about agriculture in Zimbabwe. I have been intrigued for…
Sustainable intensification: a new buzzword to feed the world?
GM Crops: Continuing controversy
By Ian Scoones, STEPS Centre Director In 2002, the international press was full of headlines such as ‘Starving Zimbabwe Shuns GM Maize’. This was repeated again in 2010. The context…
Political Ecologies of Carbon project researchers to speak at Green Economy in the South conference in July
Martin Kijazi and others from the STEPS Centre’s Political Ecologies of Carbon in Africa project will be speaking at the international conference “Green Economy in the South – Negotiating Environmental…
Nature Not For Sale: Ian Scoones discusses biodiversity & communities
STEPS Centre Director Ian Scoones is on a panel at Nature Not For Sale: 2nd Forum on Natural Commons today in London. The forum brings together NGOs, academics, activists and…
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…
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? In a new blogpost for Politics@Warwick…
Dams, displacement and development
A dam disaster in Zimbabwe prompts STEPS co-director Ian Scoones to reflect on dams, displacement and development more broadly on the Zimbabweland blog. He points to a new paper in…
Controlling animal-to-human disease in Africa
African trypanosomiasis is a devastating disease, both for humans and animals. Over the last hundred years huge efforts have been made to control it. A working paper by Ian Scoones…
When global climate change politics meets African agriculture
by Joanes Atela, Political Ecologies of Carbon in Africa project As nations debate climate change this week at the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP19), addressing the urgent questions linking…
Building pathways of pro-poor energy access
The misconception that developing countries can plump for either increasing access to energy, or low carbon development, but not both, is exploded in a paper presented by Dr Rob Byrne,…