Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones
With the creation of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Environment Group in 1990, a line of research linked to policy was established that has remained central to the Institute ever since. Through highlighting a series of IDS Bulletin issues led by IDS researchers, including the authors of this article, this archive issue tracks the development of this work over 35 years. In doing this, it also tells a broader story of key debates on environment and development and how they have evolved during a period in which environmental challenges have become ever more acute and central to development studies. Key IDS Bulletin contributions track debates over the relationships between environment, development, and policy in the early 1990s; emerging emphases on social dimensions, communities, resources, and livelihoods; with a focus on the politics of environmental knowledge and narratives and work on uncertain knowledges and pathways to sustainability, combined with power and political economy analyses. Now, in a world of multiple intersecting crises, the central challenge is for people and non-human nature to thrive together on the planet, and to address the social and political imperatives of transformation and justice.
Environment, sustainability, climate change, just transitions, sustainable development, community, power, knowledge, narrative, transformation.
It is 1990 and the world is gearing up for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The idea of sustainable development had been highlighted since the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and was picked up by the Brundtland Commission’s report Our Common Future in 1987 (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). UNCED focused global attention on climate change, biodiversity loss, and desertification, and launched Agenda 21 aimed at galvanising local action.
Amidst this lead-up, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) took the belated decision to strengthen explicitly a focus on environment across its work. With the creation of the Environment Group within what was then the ‘Rural Development’ programme area in 1990, a line of research linked to policy was established, which has remained central to the Institute ever since. Through highlighting a series of IDS Bulletin issues led by IDS researchers, including the authors of this article, this archive issue tracks the development of this work over 35 years. In doing this, it also tells a broader story of key debates on environment and development and how they have evolved over time – albeit a partial story, through the lens of one research group (with different names over the years) amongst many around the world in an increasingly plural field.
During these decades environmental challenges have become ever more central and ever more acute. And environmental questions are now absolutely central to Development and Development Studies, and the contestations over power, knowledge, and positioning that are rightly part of these wider fields. In a world of multiple intersecting crises, the central challenge is for people and non-human nature to thrive together on the planet, and to address the social and political imperatives of transformation and justice at the centre of development.
The first issue of the IDS Bulletin with a focus on environment emerged out of a seminar series held in Autumn 1990 and an internal IDS retreat. The seminars included contributions by leading UK-based researchers on environment and development, notably with only one on climate change – ‘The Greenhouse Effect: Implications for Development’ – by Gerald Leach. Edited by newly arrived Fellows, Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, it was titled ‘Environmental Change, Development Challenges’ (Leach and Mearns 1991a, this archive issue). They adopted a ‘deliberately materialist’ interpretation of environmental problems, arguing that many environmental issues are at root economic and could be dealt with through shifting incentives and policy measures. Institutions were also critical, and picking up on the long-standing work at IDS on common property resources, livelihoods, poverty, and local institutions, several articles looked at the role of local institutional dynamics in environmental change and policy (Swift 1991; Chambers 1991; Lipton 1991; see also, Wade 1989).
An end piece laid out challenges for social science research. This included a reflection on the influential report Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism from the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi (Agarwal and Narain 1991), a prescient analysis of global inequalities around historical climate impacts raising key questions of justice. Looking ahead, the end piece noted that questions of global environmental change were dominating policy discussions, but – following the work of Robert Chambers and others on participatory imperatives – a case was made to focus on questions of local people’s livelihoods and concerns. As was argued,
It is vital that such reforms do not compromise basic poverty alleviation goals, either by drawing attention away from them, by trading them off against environmental protection objectives, or by assuming on to poor people 'environmental' problems that they do not really have and then proposing cumbersome solutions to them.
(Leach and Mearns 1991a: 51).
Going beyond the mainstream frameworks of environmental economics that were dominant at the time, the end piece argued for a political economy approach, asking ‘who gains and who loses?’. A focus on institutions, as embedded in a wider set of economic and social relations, was advocated, along with emphases on social difference, the diversity of rural livelihoods, and the requirement for an interdisciplinary problem-solving approach, encompassing qualitative, participatory, and case-based approaches.
This line of work emerged from long-standing research foci at IDS, including the work of Robert Chambers, Susanna Davies, Martin Greeley, Jeremy Swift, and others. The emergence and early growth of the IDS Environment Group drew on a close association with the London-based International Institute for Environment Development (IIED), with inspiration from and collaborations with Gordon Conway, Gerald Leach, Richard Sandbrook, and Camilla Toulmin in particular.
Many of these themes were taken forward in the IDS Environment Group over the following decade. Initially outlined in a report for the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Global Environmental Change Programme (Leach and Mearns 1991b), we developed the concept of ‘environmental entitlements’, drawing on the wider entitlement theory of Amartya Sen, in a major collaborative project. This was summarised in the IDS Bulletin issue, ‘Challenges to Community-Based Sustainable Development: Dynamics, Entitlements, Institutions’ (Leach, Mearns and Scoones 1997, this archive issue), and further elaborated in a World Development article (Leach, Mearns and Scoones 1999).
This project involved case study work in Ghana, India, and South Africa with field findings reported in the 1997 IDS Bulletin (Afikorah-Danquah 1997; Ahluwalia 1997; Kepe 1997). Many donors in the 1990s were supporting ‘community-based’ approaches in natural resource management and development. While recognising their value, the project questioned the often static, homogeneous assumptions about ‘communities’ in the design of such projects. The environmental entitlements approach emphasised questions of access and control over resources, and how this was socially differentiated and mediated by multiple, overlapping institutions. Through a focus on institutions, this work challenged the framing of environmental issues in terms of availability of resources in aggregate terms, focusing instead on how wellbeing and capabilities depended on the politics of access, just as Amartya Sen had elaborated in relation to food and famine (Sen 1981).
The connections between food security and environment had also been addressed more directly in terms of the conflicts and complementarities between these two policy agendas at a time not only of rapid environmental change but also heightened concern with food security and famine. A 1991 IDS Bulletin, ’Food Security and the Environment’, brought together the established IDS work on food security, famine, and rural vulnerabilities (Davies 1996: Maxwell 1990; Chambers 1989) with the emerging work on environment, drawing on a series of workshops and an IDS Discussion Paper (Davies, Leach and David 1991).
The concluding article (Davies and Leach 1991, this archive issue) of this 1991 IDS Bulletin addressed the trade-offs and conflicts that arise between both global and local framings of food and environment issues and the perceived trade-offs between the long timeframes of environmental and ‘global warming’ issues versus the immediate imperatives of addressing food insecurity. With hindsight, the idea that environmental concerns were not immediate seems incongruous given their pressing nature today. And yet the locally focused articles showed clearly that people were managing resources in ways that combined the short and long term and integrated the food and natural resource concerns that their livelihoods depended on (Lockwood 1991; Roche 1991; Toulmin 1991).
In parallel, a stream of work on gender relations and environmental change emerged at IDS linking the Environment Group with long-standing gender research at the Institute (Leach, Joekes and Green 1995, this archive issue). In particular, this work critiqued the dominant focus on ‘women, environment and development’ (WED) in donor and policy debates. This translated ‘women in development’ (WID) approaches to environmental concerns. This work was worried by assumptions that women have a unique and special relationship with the environment, emergent in certain strands of ‘ecofeminist’ thinking of the time, and the dangers this implied for instrumentalising women’s labour in environmental care.
Instead, approaches to ‘gender, environment and development’ (GED) and ‘feminist political ecology’ were highlighted, with a stronger focus on gender relations, institutions, and questions of rights, access, and control. Case studies in this 1995 IDS Bulletin elaborated this kind of approach in settings ranging from northern Pakistan (Joekes 1995) to Guinea (Leach and Fairhead 1995), Kenya (Mackenzie 1995; Oniang’o 1995; Rocheleau 1995), India (Shah and Shah 1995), Malaysia (Heyzer 1995), Morocco (El Mdaghri 1995), the Sahel (Ruthven and David 1995), and Zimbabwe (Jackson 1995). This particular IDS Bulletin was foundational to much further work at IDS, including the leadership of UN Women’s 2014 World Survey report on gender relations and sustainable development that followed the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), or Rio+20, in 2012 (Leach 2016a).
Many of these perspectives on the integration of environment and development in rural settings had come together in work on ‘sustainable rural livelihoods’ going back to the contributions of Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway (Chambers and Conway 1991). This led to the elaboration of the ‘sustainable livelihoods framework’ (Scoones 1998) as part of IDS research coordinated by Jeremy Swift in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Mali, which proved highly influential in donor and non-governmental organisation policies in subsequent years (Solesbury 2003).
Livelihoods-focused work at IDS continued in southern Africa with a collaborative research programme in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. This was brought together in an IDS Bulletin in 2003, ‘Livelihoods in Crisis: Challenges for Rural Development in Southern Africa’, which highlighted questions of land and resource rights, governance, and politics in a context where wider development debates were focusing on questions of citizenship and decentralisation (Scoones and Wolmer 2003, this archive issue). The work on sustainable livelihoods in turn provided a route connecting work on environment with core development debates at the time concerning states, markets, and the role of civil society, and emerging critiques of ‘neoliberalism’ (Crook and Manor 1998; Colclough and Manor 1991). By the time IDS revisited the ‘states and markets’ debate at the time of its 50th anniversary in 2016, it was almost taken for granted that environment and climate questions were central (Leach 2016b; Narain 2016).
A central strand of the work of the Environment Group always explored local knowledges and perspectives and the ways these often challenged mainstream science and policy framings. An IDS conference led to the book The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment (Leach and Mearns 1996), which brought together cases from different contexts – from rangelands to soils, forest, and highlands – and challenged powerful but ill-founded assumptions about population and environment, deforestation, desertification, rangeland degradation, soil erosion, and more. This work not only showed these framings to be wanting, but also to have negative consequences for people and environments. It exposed the political, scientific, and policy processes through which they arose and persisted even in the face of counter-evidence.
These received wisdoms often took the form of ‘narratives’ – formulaic stories that underpinned decision-making (Roe 1991). IDS work theorised how flawed ideas and practices persist in policy and define policy processes, focusing on soils and land in Africa (Keeley and Scoones 2003). An IDS Bulletin on science-policy processes further explored these ideas based on a collaborative project around forests and biodiversity in West Africa and the Caribbean (Leach and Fairhead 2002, this archive issue; see also Fairhead and Leach 2003). It looked at how global discourses around biodiversity, parks and protected areas, and ‘sustainable forest management’ were shaped by different actors, often contradicting local experience and ignoring the historical dynamics of forest landscapes.
A deeper understanding of historical environmental processes and underlying social-ecological dynamics was central to earlier work on forests, particularly in West Africa (Fairhead and Leach 1996, 1998). This chimed with work on ‘non-equilibrium’ ecology and rangelands (Behnke, Scoones and Kerven 1993; Scoones 1994), and more broadly the challenge to linear models of environmental change that were so central to policy, and indeed much social science framing (Scoones 1999). This was, for instance, true of much work on climate change and development, as argued in the article, ‘Climate Change and the Challenge of Non-equilibrium Thinking’ (Scoones 2004, this archive issue). This was a contribution to a wide-ranging IDS Bulletin on ‘Climate Change and Development’, edited by Farhana Yamin (2004), on issues from global to local, mitigation to adaptation (see, for example, Huq and Reid 2004; Newell 2004; Leach and Leach 2004), and in turn signalled a new commitment by IDS to work on climate change.
In 2006, a group of us at IDS connected up with colleagues at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex, with funding from ESRC and established the STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre. Over the following 16 years, the Centre and its partners, later becoming the STEPS Global Consortium, collaborated to develop and apply a ‘pathways approach’ to sustainable development challenges (Leach, Stirling and Scoones 2010). At its heart, the Centre was a coming together of development studies with science-policy and innovation studies, working across multiple domains (food/agriculture, health/disease, water/sanitation, climate/energy) and in locations across the global North and South. The ‘pathways approach’ it developed brought together understandings of complex, dynamic systems with a social constructivist perspective on the way system framings, narratives and so pathways of change were constituted.
The STEPS Centre elaborated on themes explored in earlier issues of the IDS Bulletin, including work on science-policy processes, social differences and relations, linked now more firmly to questions of social justice, and institutions and governance. Threaded across all of this was the politics of knowledge, especially under conditions of uncertainty (Scoones 2024; Scoones and Stirling 2020; Stirling 1999). In the build-up to the establishment of the STEPS Centre, IDS research had explored questions of uncertainty in relation to environmental governance in a partnership with the Ford Foundation (Mehta et al. 1999). The IDS Bulletin that emerged from this work, ‘Environmental Governance in an Uncertain World’ (Mehta, Leach and Scoones 2001, this archive issue), explored the implications for resource management, engaging critically with dominant debates at the time around ‘common property resource management’ and institutional design, arguing for a more grounded, ethnographic approach to understanding local responses under uncertainty and engaging with concepts such as ‘institutional bricolage’ (Cleaver 2001), ‘relational webs’ (Rocheleau 2001), ‘ambiguity’ (Lund 2001), ‘legal pluralism’ (Meinzen-Dick and Pradhan 2001), and ‘actor-networks’ (Steins 2001).
Work in the STEPS Centre around the politics of sustainability and social justice also built on approaches developed within the Citizenship Development Research Centre (Citizenship DRC) led by John Gaventa (2002). The challenge of ‘making rights real’ is centrally about articulations of power by citizens and, as we went on to explore in the STEPS Centre, this focuses attention not just on material rights and accountability, but also on cognitive justice and questions of citizenship and knowledge politics (Leach, Scoones and Thompson 2002; Leach, Scoones and Wynne 2005).
Linking STEPS Centre work with fundamental questions of power and inequality – central themes across IDS more broadly – a number of IDS Bulletin articles in the 2010s took a diversity of power analytics to environmental questions. For instance, Lyla Mehta drew on her substantial body of work on water politics to show how structural violence intersects with less visible forms of power to create deep inequalities in water access, with power imbalances naturalising such inequalities around the world. She argues that policymakers, activists, and development practitioners must take the intersections of invisible and structural power seriously if the wider Sustainable Development Goals are to be realised (Mehta 2016, this archive issue).
Others developed an analysis of power centred on a political economy perspective. For example, with the rise of the climate agenda, a whole array of policy and financing instruments were being proposed to address mitigation and adaptation challenges. An IDS Bulletin in 2011, ‘Towards a New Political Economy of Climate Change and Development’, explored such initiatives through a political economy lens, asking about their drivers and consequences and, critically, who gains and who loses (Tanner and Allouche 2011, this archive issue). The articles explored, for example, the global Clean Development Mechanism (Newell, Phillips and Purohit 2011), forest-based ‘Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation’ (REDD+) (Hiraldo and Tanner 2011; Shankland and Hasenclever 2011), and the Green Climate (Klein and Möhner 2011) and Adaptation Funds (Harmeling and Kaloga 2011) and many pilots and programmes.
Political economy perspectives, rooted more firmly in critical agrarian studies, were elaborated in debates about ‘land grabbing’, which came to a head in the wake of the 2007–08 financial, food, and fuel crises (Borras et al. 2011). Coupled with a focus on climate and environmental initiatives and an emerging ‘ecology of repair’, this led to a new wave of ‘green grabbing’, the ‘appropriation of nature for environmental ends’ (Fairhead, Leach and Scoones 2012). In critical debate around Rio+20, which focused strongly on the ‘green economy’, the consequences of resource enclosures and financialised, market-based approaches were explored; for example, in the context of forest-based carbon offsetting projects (Leach and Scoones 2015) and water grabbing (Mehta, Veldwisch and Franco 2012).
With the extension of climate and nature-based ‘solutions’ to the so-called twin crises of climate and biodiversity, concerns around ‘grabbing’ have intensified to the present. More recent IDS Bulletin articles have explored this theme, including a focus on the disputes around frontiers such as the Cerrado in Brazil (Cabral, Sauer and Shankland 2023, this archive issue).
Given the limitations and indeed damage caused by many climate and environmental ‘solutions’, whether through policy, regulation, or market-based approaches, how can sustainability be fully integrated with long-standing concerns with development as a matter of wellbeing, rights, and justice?
In recent years, the notion of ‘transitions’ has come to the fore, with an argument for re-gearing institutions, incentives, economies, and policies in more sustainable directions. Arguments for ‘just transitions’, originally emerging from a concern with labour rights, have highlighted the need to consider how losers in this transition process (such as those who might lose jobs in the low-carbon economy) can be included or compensated.
However, too often the notion of ‘transition’ is limited to a more instrumental, policy-orientated shift, including incremental changes in incentives, without attending to the more fundamental, structural factors that cause the problems in the first place. Here a focus on ‘transformation’ becomes central, as highlighted in work by the STEPS Centre (Stirling 2015; Scoones, Leach and Newell 2015; Scoones et al. 2020). Transformations emerge from multiple sites and involve coalitions and alliances from diverse actors. Usually in combination, the processes ‘structural’, ‘systemic’ and ‘enabling’ change are involved. ‘Enabling’ transformations are centred on the core themes of IDS work around questioning direction of change, whose knowledge counts, bottom-up interests, and control and attention to knowledge and power relations. Rather than singular, instrumental ‘solutions’, there is an emphasis on plural values and multiple pathways that emerge in different contexts and on the fostering of inclusive deliberation and debate. Yet an emphasis on the bottom-up is insufficient, unless deeper structural changes in politics, economies, and society are also addressed.
Recent issues of the IDS Bulletin have also engaged with notions of justice in these discussions. Responding to debates about climate and environment, the IDS Bulletin, ‘Reframing Climate and Environmental Justice’ (Huff and Naess 2022, this archive issue), identified a series of ‘blind spots’ that allow for going beyond a one-size-fits-all ‘solutionism’ and towards a more critical engagement with climate and environmental justice. Blind spots include the failure to recognise diverse knowledges and contexts and the lack of acknowledgement of fundamental contestations around climate and environmental justice, for example. Alternatives require challenging dominant framings – such as those associated with environmental ‘recovery’ or ‘emergency’ – and so questioning powerful forms of expertise, the aforementioned 2022 IDS Bulletin argues.
Justice is therefore not just distributional (about who gets what) or procedural (about who gets to decide), it is also about recognition, repair, and epistemic and ontological justices. Srivastava et al. (2022, this archive issue) highlight how conceptions of justice must relate to vernacular experiences and conceptualisation of climate change and action ‘from below’.
While this archive IDS Bulletin has highlighted the introductions, overviews, and editorials of different issues of the IDS Bulletin, each has contained contributions from many research partners and colleagues from around the world. These, and the perspectives and positions that they bring, have been crucial in shaping the trajectory of ideas charted in this Introduction. As long ago as 1991, IDS was arguing that ‘building and strengthening partnerships is also vital if environmental research is not to become intellectual colonialism’ (Leach and Mearns 1991a: 52). This remains just as true today. Across the decades covered by this archive IDS Bulletin we see intensifying concerns with climate and environment, with such issues moving from the margins to the mainstream, both in development studies and more widely in policy and practice. This is highlighted by Robin Mearns in his reflections on how the ideas in many of the articles in this archive IDS Bulletin have growing resonance within the World Bank, as seen through the lens of his own experience since moving to the Bank from IDS in 1997 (Mearns, this archive issue).
What, then, have been the core contributions of this body of work emerging from IDS and its partners over the past decades? There have been some recurrent themes highlighted by the various issues of the IDS Bulletin featured here. These include a focus on place-based, historical, and context-specific analyses, linking the local to the global; the foregrounding of social difference and inequality in analyses of environmental change; a focus on knowledge politics and the framing of policies and interventions; an emphasis on power and political economy and the structural constraints on change; and a highlighting of questions of justice, both around the causes and consequences of environmental change and in processes of transformation towards more sustainable futures. All of these themes will surely continue to remain relevant to critical, grounded, and 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.
Afikorah-Danquah, S. (1997) ‘Local Resource Management in the Forest-Savanna Transition Zone: The Case of Wenchi District, Ghana’, IDS Bulletin 28.4: 36–46 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Agarwal, A. and Narain, S. (1991) Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism, New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment
Ahluwalia, M. (1997) ‘Representing Communities: The Case of a Community-Based Watershed Management Project in Rajasthan, India’, IDS Bulletin 28.4: 23–35 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Behnke Jr, R.H.; Scoones, I. and Kerven, C. (eds) (1993) Range Ecology at Disequilibrium: New Models of Natural Variability and Pastoral Adaptation in African Savannas, London: Overseas Development Institute
Borras Jr, S.M.; Hall, R.; Scoones, I.; White, B. and Wolford, W. (2011) ‘Towards a Better Understanding of Global Land Grabbing: An Editorial Introduction’, Journal of Peasant Studies 38.2: 209–16, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2011.559005 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Cabral, L.; Sauer, S. and Shankland, A. (2023) ‘Frontier Territories: Countering the Green Revolution Legacy in the Brazilian Cerrado’, IDS Bulletin 54.1 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Chambers, R. (1991) ‘In Search of Professionalism, Bureaucracy, and Sustainable Livelihoods for the 21st Century’, IDS Bulletin 22.4: 5–11 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Chambers, R. (1989) ‘Editorial Introduction: Vulnerability, Coping and Policy’, IDS Bulletin 20.2: 1–7 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Chambers, R. and Conway, G. (1991) Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century, IDS Discussion Paper 296, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (accessed 12 December 2024)
Cleaver, F. (2001) ‘Institutional Bricolage, Conflict and Cooperation in Usangu, Tanzania’, IDS Bulletin 32.4: 26–35 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Colclough, C. and Manor, J. (eds) (1991) States or Markets?: Neo-liberalism and the Development Policy Debate, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Crook, R.C. and Manor, J. (1998) Democracy and Decentralisation in South Asia and West Africa: Participation, Accountability and Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Davies, S. (1996) Adaptable Livelihoods: Coping with Food Insecurity in the Malian Sahel , London: Palgrave Macmillan
Davies, S. and Leach, M. (1991) ‘Globalism Versus Villagism: Food Security and Environment at National and International Levels’, IDS Bulletin 22.3: 43–50 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Davies, S.; Leach, M. and David, R. (1991) Food Security and the Environment: Conflict or Complementarity? , IDS Discussion Paper 285, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies
El Mdaghri, C.A. (1995) ‘Women, Environment and Population: A Moroccan Case Study’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 61–5 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Fairhead, J. and Leach, M. (2003) Science, Society and Power: Environmental Knowledge and Policy in West Africa and the Caribbean , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Fairhead, J. and Leach, M. (1998) Reframing Deforestation: Global Analyses and Local Realities: Studies in West Africa , London: Routledge
Fairhead, J. and Leach, M. (1996) Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Fairhead, J.; Leach, M. and Scoones, I. (2012) ‘Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?’, Journal of Peasant Studies 39.2: 237–61 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Gaventa, J. (2002) ‘Exploring Citizenship, Participation and Accountability’, IDS Bulletin 33.2: 1–11 (accessed 12 December 2024)
Harmeling, S. and Kaloga, A. (2011) ‘Understanding the Political Economy of the Adaptation Fund’, IDS Bulletin 42.3: 23–32 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Heyzer, N. (1995) ‘Gender, Population and Environment in the Context of Deforestation: A Malaysian Case Study’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 40–6 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Hiraldo, R. and Tanner, T. (2011) ‘Forest Voices: Competing Narratives over REDD+’, IDS Bulletin 42.3: 42–51 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Huff, A. and Naess, L.O. (2022) ‘Reframing Climate and Environmental Justice’, IDS Bulletin 53.4 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Huq, S. and Reid, H. (2004) ‘Mainstreaming Adaptation in Development’, IDS Bulletin 35.3: 15–21 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Jackson, C. (1995) ‘From Conjugal Contracts to Environmental Relations: Some Thoughts on Labour and Technology’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 33–9 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Joekes, S. (1995) ‘Gender and Livelihoods in Northern Pakistan’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 66–74 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Keeley, J. and Scoones, I. (2003) Understanding Environmental Policy Processes: Cases from Africa , London: Routledge
Kepe, T. (1997) ‘Communities, Entitlements and Nature Reserves: The Case of the Wild Coast, South Africa’, IDS Bulletin 28.4: 47–58 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Klein, R. and Möhner, A. (2011) ‘The Political Dimension of Vulnerability: Implications for the Green Climate Fund’, IDS Bulletin 42.3: 15–22 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Leach, G. and Leach, M. (2004) ‘Carbonising Forest Landscapes? Linking Climate Change Mitigation and Rural Livelihoods’, IDS Bulletin 35.3: 76–83 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Leach, M. (ed.) (2016a) Gender Equality and Sustainable Development , London: Routledge
Leach, M. (2016b) ‘Introduction: States, Markets and Society – Looking Back to Look Forward’, IDS Bulletin 47.2A: 1–18 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Leach, M. and Fairhead, J. (2002) ‘Changing Perspectives on Forests: Science/Policy Processes in Wider Society’, IDS Bulletin 33.1: 1–12 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Leach, M. and Fairhead, J. (1995) ‘Ruined Settlements and New Gardens: Gender and Soil-Ripening Among Kuranko Farmers in the Forest-Savanna Transition Zone’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 24–32 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Leach, M. and Mearns, R. (1991a) ‘End Piece: Challenges for Social Science Research’, IDS Bulletin 22.4: 50–2 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Leach, M. and Mearns, R. (1991b) ‘Poverty and Environment in Developing Countries: An Overview Study’, Report to ESRC Global Environmental Change Initiative/Overseas Development Administration , Swindon: Economic and Social Research Council, Global Environmental Change
Leach, M. and Mearns, R. (eds) (1996) The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment , Oxford: James Currey
Leach, M. and Scoones, I. (eds) (2015) Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa , London: Routledge
Leach, M.; Joekes, S. and Green, C. (1995) ‘Editorial: Gender Relations and Environmental Change’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 1–8 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Leach, M.; Mearns, R. and Scoones, I. (1999) ‘Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics and Institutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management’, World Development 27.2: 225–47 (accessed 12 December 2024)
Leach, M.; Mearns, R. and Scoones, I. (1997) ‘Challenges to Community-Based Sustainable Development: Dynamics, Entitlements, Institutions’, IDS Bulletin 28.4: 4–14 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Leach, M.; Scoones, I. and Thompson, L. (2002) ‘Citizenship, Science and Risk’, IDS Bulletin 33.2: 1–12 (accessed 12 December 2024)
Leach, M.; Scoones, I. and Wynne, B. (eds) (2005) Science and Citizens: Globalization and the Challenge of Engagement , London: Zed Books
Leach, M.; Stirling, A.C. and Scoones, I. (2010) Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice, London: Routledge (accessed 12 December 2024)
Lipton, M. (1991) ‘A Note on Poverty and Sustainability’, IDS Bulletin 22.4: 5–11 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Lockwood, M. (1991) ‘Food Security and Environmental Degradation in Northern Nigeria: Demographic Perspectives’, IDS Bulletin 22.3: 12–21 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Lund, C. (2001) ‘Seeking Certainty and Aggravating Ambiguity’, IDS Bulletin 32.4: 47–53 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Mackenzie, F. (1995) ‘A Farm is Like a Child who Cannot be Left Unguarded: Gender, Land and Labour in Central Province, Kenya’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 17–23 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Maxwell, S. (1990) ‘Food Security in Developing Countries: Issues and Options for the 1990s’, IDS Bulletin 21.3: 2–13 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Mehta, L. (2016) ‘Why Invisible Power and Structural Violence Persist in the Water Domain’, IDS Bulletin 47.5: 31–42 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Mehta, L.; Leach, M. and Scoones, I. (2001) ‘Editorial: Environmental Governance in an Uncertain World’, IDS Bulletin 32.4: 1–9 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Mehta, L.; Veldwisch, G.J. and Franco, J. (2012) ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: Water Grabbing? Focus on the (Re)Appropriation of Finite Water Resources’, Water Alternatives 5.2: 193–207 (accessed 12 December 2024)
Mehta, L. et al. (1999) Exploring Understandings of Institutions and Uncertainty: New Directions in Natural Resource Management, IDS Discussion Paper 372, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (accessed 12 December 2024)
Meinzen-Dick, R. and Pradhan, R. (2001) ‘Implications of Legal Pluralism for Natural Resource Management’, IDS Bulletin 32.4: 10–7 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Narain, S. (2016) ‘Consequences of Inequality for Sustainability’, IDS Bulletin 47.2A: 113–6 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Newell, P. (2004) ‘Climate Change and Development: A Tale of Two Crises’, IDS Bulletin 35.3: 120–6 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Newell, P.; Phillips, J. and Purohit, P. (2011) ‘The Political Economy of Clean Development in India: CDM and Beyond’, IDS Bulletin 42.3: 89–96 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Oniang’o, R. (1995) ‘The Impact of Out-Migration on Household Livelihoods and the Management of Natural Resources: A Kenyan Case Study’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 54–60 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Roche, C. (1991) ‘An NGO Perspective on Food Security and the Environment: Acord in the Sahel and Horn of Africa’, IDS Bulletin 22.3: 31–4 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Rocheleau, D. (2001) ‘Complex Communities and Relational Webs’, IDS Bulletin 32.4: 78–87 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Rocheleau, D. (1995) ‘Gender and Biodiversity: A Feminist Political Ecology Perspective’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 9–16 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Roe, E.M. (1991) ‘Development Narratives, or Making the Best of Blueprint Development’, World Development 19.4: 287–300
Ruthven, O. and David, R. (1995) ‘Benefits and Burdens: Researching the Consequences of Migration in the Sahel’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 47–53 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Scoones, I. (2024) Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World, Cambridge: Polity Books (accessed 12 December 2024)
Scoones, I. (2004) ‘Climate Change and the Challenge of Non-Equilibrium Thinking’, IDS Bulletin 35.3: 114–9 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Scoones, I. (1999) ‘New Ecology and the Social Sciences: What Prospects for a Fruitful Engagement?’, Annual Review of Anthropology 28.1: 479–507, DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.479 (accessed 12 December 2024)
Scoones, I. (1998) Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis, IDS Working Paper 72, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (accessed 12 December 2024)
Scoones, I. (ed.) (1994) Living with Uncertainty: New Directions in Pastoral Development in Africa, Rugby: IT Publications/Practical Action Publishing (accessed 12 December 2024)
Scoones, I. and Stirling, A. (eds) (2020) The Politics of Uncertainty: Challenges of Transformation, London: Routledge (accessed 12 December 2024)
Scoones, I. and Wolmer, W. (2003) ‘Introduction: Livelihoods in Crisis’, IDS Bulletin 34.3: 1–14 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Scoones, I.; Leach, M. and Newell, P. (eds) (2015) The Politics of Green Transformations, London: Routledge (accessed 12 December 2024)
Scoones, I. et al. (2020) ‘Transformations to Sustainability: Combining Structural, Systemic and Enabling Approaches’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 42: 65–75 (accessed 12 December 2024)
Sen, A. (1981) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation , Oxford: Oxford University Press
Shah, M. and Shah, P. (1995) ‘Gender, Environment and Livelihoods Security: An Alternative Viewpoint from India’, IDS Bulletin 26.1: 74–82 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Shankland, A. and Hasenclever, L. (2011) ‘Indigenous Peoples and the Regulation of REDD+ in Brazil: Beyond the War of the Worlds?’, IDS Bulletin 42.3: 80–8 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Solesbury, W. (2003) Sustainable Livelihoods: A Case Study of the Evolution of DFID Policy , ODI Working Paper 217, London: Overseas Development Institute
Srivastava, S. et al. (2022) ‘Climate Justice for Whom? Understanding the Vernaculars of Climate Action and Justice in Marginal Environments of India’, IDS Bulletin 53.4: 101–24 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Steins, N. (2001) ‘New Directions in Natural Resource Management’, IDS Bulletin 32.4: 18–25 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Stirling, A. (2015) ‘Emancipating Transformations: From Controlling “the Transition” to Culturing Plural Radical Progress’, in M. Leach et al . (eds), The Politics of Green Transformations, London: Routledge (accessed 12 December 2024)
Stirling, A. (1999) ‘On “Precautionary” and “Science-Based” Approaches to Risk Assessment and Environmental Appraisal’, in A. Klinke et al. (eds), On Science and Precaution in the Management of Technological Risk. Vol. II, Case Studies , Seville: European Science and Technology Observatory, European Commission Joint Research Centre
Swift, J. (1991) ‘Local Customary Institutions as the Basis for Natural Resource Management among Boran Pastoralists in Northern Kenya’, IDS Bulletin 22.4: 34–7 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Tanner, T. and Allouche, J. (2011) ‘Towards a New Political Economy of Climate Change and Development’, IDS Bulletin 42.3: 1–14 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Toulmin, C. (1991) ‘Natural Resource Management at the Local Level: Will This Bring Food Security to the Sahel?’, IDS Bulletin 22.3: 22–30 (accessed 29 August 2024)
Wade, R. (1989) Village Republics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future (the Brundtland Report) , Oxford: Oxford University Press for the United Nations
Yamin, F. (ed.) (2004) ‘Climate Change and Development’, IDS Bulletin 35.3 (accessed 11 December 2024)
© 2025 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2025.102.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 56 No. 1A January 2025 ‘Environmental Change, Development Challenges – Revisited’.