STEPS launches free online course on Pathways to Sustainability

The ESRC STEPS Centre has launched a new online learning website for self-study and use in teaching.

The STEPS Learning site features a course on Pathways to Sustainability with video lectures, reading lists and questions, and a guide to linking research & activism.

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Course: Pathways to Sustainability

This course introduces the STEPS Centre's core conceptual approach, the Pathways Approach to sustainability, and how it can be applied in research and practice.

In six parts, it covers uncertainty and knowledge, policy processes, technology & innovation, planetary boundaries, resource politics and methodologies for sustainability appraisal.

It is fully open access and designed for users to study at their own pace, or as a resource for teachers.

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Guide: Research & Activism

How do scholars and activists understand and address the opportunities and challenges of linking research and activism? What are some of the approaches and platforms that can help? This guide was developed in collaboration with participants at the 2016 Summer School on Pathways to Sustainability.

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Video: About STEPS Learning

Ian Scoones, director of the STEPS Centre, introduces our learning website.

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Creating a new generation of sustainability professionals

The latest in our series of impact stories shows how, since its launch in 2006, STEPS has worked in various ways to connect research, action and training to foster the new skills and alliances needed to address the challenges of sustainability.

Read the story

Confronting authoritarian populism

A new open access paper in the Journal of Peasant Studies explores the rise of 'authoritarian populism' in rural areas, emerging in response to poverty, inequality and marginalisation. The paper also examines the potential for more emancipatory rural politics, based on collaboration, mutualism and solidarity across boundaries and social divides.

Written by Ian Scoones, Marc Edelman, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Wendy Wolford & Ben White, the paper marks the launch of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). This is a new initiative from the STEPS Centre, the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), PLAAS (UWC, Cape Town), Cornell University, City University of New York (CUNY), the Transnational Institute and Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS).

Read the paper

Small grants: call for applications

A small grants call for fieldwork and working papers is currently live, with a closing date of 30 June. Researchers around the world are invited to join ERPI in exploring the current conjuncture, examining how authoritarian populism flourishes in diverse rural settings, and how resistance and alternatives to it are being generated for more emancipatory futures.

Small grants: apply

What drives infectious animal-to-human diseases?

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.

One Health for a Changing World: zoonoses, ecosystems and human well-being is a Special Issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. It is co-edited by Professor Ian Scoones, Director of the STEPS Centre, Professor Andrew Cunningham of ZSL (Zoological Society of London) and Professor James Wood of the University of Cambridge.

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