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…
How can African countries really provide sustainable energy for poor people?
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…