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…
Stairways to the sky: sustainability & rice in the Philippines
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
‘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.
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…
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…