8 December 2021
13:00 – 15:00 UTC/GMT
Online

This final event of the ESRC STEPS Centre brings together friends, collaborators and networks from around the world. We will explore the major challenges for sustainability in the present moment, reflect on lessons from the past fifteen years, and discuss future possibilities, plans and initiatives.

For full details and registration, see the STEPS Centre website.

Since 2006, the STEPS Centre has focused on multiple challenges around social justice and environmental sustainability, building on long-standing struggles. From epidemics and pandemics to water, energy, food and other resources, and the politics of innovation and technologies, multiple ‘pathways to sustainability’ are always influenced by different kinds of knowledge and forms of power.

As a research centre, STEPS understands that knowledge is not neutral. It not only ‘speaks’ to – but is also partly shaped by – politics and power. Powerful interests not only sideline ‘inconvenient truths’, they also condition what is taken to be true. Through its research programmes and its Pathways Approach, the STEPS Centre has aimed to highlight this shaping of knowledge by power. It has sought to help establish practical ways to properly address the perspectives of marginalised people. It has helped develop diverse methods, options and understandings to underpin action to ‘open up’ the politics of sustainability.

This final event will reflect on what these experiences mean for current challenges, and discuss next steps.

Plenary speakers include:

• Alison Park (ESRC Executive Chair),
• Melissa Leach (Director, IDS),
• Adam Tickell (Vice-Chancellor, University of Sussex),
• Line Gordon (Director, Stockholm Resilience Centre),
• Dipak Gyawali (Pragya, Nepal Academy of Science and Technology),
• Lakshmi Charli-Joseph (LANCIS-IE, UNAM),
• Patricia Pérez-Belmont (Umbela),
• Ritu Priya Mehrotra (JNU, India),
• Joanes Atela and Joel Onyango (Africa Research and Impact Network/ACTS), and
• Anabel Marín (IDS).

Parallel panel sessions will include interventions from STEPS researchers, the Pathways to Sustainability global consortium and other collaborators.

Advance registration is essential.

The Pathways to Sustainability global consortium was part of the first phase of the Transformations to Sustainability programme. Find out more about PATHWAYS here.