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Announcing 'Natures', our theme for 2020.
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2020: NATURES

Our theme for 2020 is Natures.

Nature is all around us, but there are many ways of seeing different kinds of ‘natures’, and many efforts to involve it in forms of control or domination.

How is talk of crisis shaping nature and people’s views of it? How can colonial forms of knowledge, technology and power be challenged, and what might it mean to ‘decolonize’ the study of environmental change? What do alternatives look like, and how can we explore, nurture, imagine and live the relationships we might want for the future?

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How to respond to Nature in crisis: Look beyond the big stories

Modern views of Nature are defined by anxieties and fears of crisis. 'Planetary' solutions and 'triple wins' seem to offer a way to restore balance. But is there another way to think about diverse 'natures' around the world and explore different crises, struggles, alternatives and emerging futures?
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Event highlights

Conference: POLLEN20 - Contested Natures

The contested notion of ‘nature’ is one of the central themes in political ecology. The third biennial conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN), Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration, co-hosted by the STEPS Centre, aims to explore plural natures and plural futures as sites of struggle and possibility whilst critically engaging with and ‘unpacking’ multiple and overlapping crises of our times.

Conference website

Annual lecture: Bounding Unruly Landscapes

Open to the public, our Annual Lecture in May will be given by Andrea J Nightingale, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. Drawing from research in Nepal, and theories from studies of science, feminism and political ecology, this lecture will look at how boundary-making reflects the operation of power across scales, suggesting new approaches to tackling environmental issues.

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Project highlights

TAPESTRY focuses on three 'patches of transformation' in India and Bangladesh – vulnerable coastal areas of Mumbai, the Sundarbans and Kutch, facing multiple uncertainties – where new alliances and practices are reimagining sustainable development and inspiring transformation.
SEEING CONFLICT AT THE MARGINS explores how people view and respond to large-scale resource developments in Kenya and Madagascar. Participatory video and photography highlight the different perspectives of people affected by these developments.
Browse our projects

Resources on Natures

Our Natures theme page includes resources, articles and videos from the STEPS Centre to help explore what it means for sustainability and development.
Browse the resources

About STEPS

The ESRC STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) is a research centre hosted by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex, UK. We are supported by a grant from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council.

The STEPS Centre is part of the Pathways to Sustainability Global Consortium, which includes hubs in Africa, China, Europe, Latin America, North America and South Asia.

Copyright © 2020 STEPS Centre, All rights reserved.


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