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Environmental Change, Development Challenges – Revisited

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journal contribution
posted on 2025-01-30, 11:08 authored by Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones, Robin Mearns

The establishment of the IDS Environment Group in 1990 created a line of research linked to policy that has remained central to the Institute ever since. In highlighting a series of IDS Bulletin issues, led by IDS researchers, this archive issue tracks the development of this work over the last 35 years. It also tells a broader story of the contribution of IDS to key debates on environment and development evolving over this time. During these decades environmental challenges have become ever more acute, with environmental questions being absolutely central to Development and Development Studies in a world of multiple intersecting crises.

So, what then have been the core contributions of this body of work emerging from IDS and partners over the past decades? Some of the themes highlighted by the IDS Bulletins featured here include: key contributions tracking debates over the relationships between environment, development and policy in the early 1990s; the emerging emphases on social dimensions, communities, resources and livelihoods, including work linking environmental research with long-standing gender research at IDS; the politics of environmental knowledge, exploring local knowledges and perspectives and the ways these challenge mainstream science and policy; and uncertain knowledges and the development of the ‘pathways approach’ to sustainability, bringing together understandings of complex, dynamic systems.

Over the years all this has combined with analyses of power and political economy, highlighting of questions of justice, both around the causes and consequences of environmental change and the processes of transformation towards more sustainable futures. All of these themes remain relevant to critical policy-oriented research on environment and development emerging from IDS and beyond that we hope will continue to shape global debates on these most crucial issues of our time.

History

Publisher

Institute of Development Studies

Citation

Leach, M. and Scoones, I. (eds) (2025) ‘Environmental Change, Development Challenges – Revisited’, IDS Bulletin 56.1A, DOI: 10.19088/1968-2025.100

Editors

Melissa Leach Ian Scoones

Series

IDS Bulletin

Volume

56

Issue

1A

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

IDS Item Types

Article

Copyright holder

Institute of Development Studies

Language

en

IDS team

Rural Futures

Pagination

1–157

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    Volume 56. Issue 1A: Environmental Change, Development Challenges – Revisited

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