Critical Sustainable Development Challenges

We are an interdisciplinary group of scholars who work on sustainable development and sustainable development.

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We take a critical stance towards sustainable development challenges and the idea of sustainable development. Our work spans issues of, for example, food justice, urban justice, climate justice, energy justice, digital justice.

Thinking through these critical ideas, the group members collectively wrote and published an article sketching some of our ideas on Sustainable Development and an agenda for post 2030 when the Sustainable Development Goals period comes to an end.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represented a key landmark in collaboration and shared agenda-setting to address global challenges across scales and geographies. However, despite initial optimism that measurable goals would support accountability and transparency in development, progress towards realising goals has been mixed. Global development agendas increasingly face challenges from the intensification of climate change, the return of populism and ethnonationalism, and a deepening of inequalities at intra- and inter-national scales.

Our research group interrogates the priorities that must inform the current development agenda and a critical post-2030 development agenda. To think towards this, we explore three questions of the development agenda: 1) can development be sustainable? 2) Can development be delivered through markets? And 3) can development be ‘global’? To address these tensions and take a first step towards a more critical post-2030 agenda, our research agendas focus on spatialities, multiplicities and historicities of development.

Titled Development beyond 2030: more collaboration, less competition?, the article is available open access.

Kumar, Ankit, Stephanie Butcher, Daniel Hammett, Sandra Barragan-Contreras, Vanessa Burns, Ollie Chesworth, Gregory Cooper, et al. ‘Development beyond 2030: More Collaboration, Less Competition?’ International Development Planning Review 46, no. 2 (2 April 2024): 227–42. https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2024.4.

Some project our members are involved in

Co-creating sustainable food systems: Learning with communities in Zimbabwe - Stories of food systems change

A participatory action research project that is a close collaboration between Pamela Richardson (University of Sheffield), Kufunda Village, PORET Trust and PELUM Zimbabwe .

A key questions that has been driving the research is “How does transformation towards more sustainable food systems take place?” And for the project collective, “what are the positive changes that have been taking place towards more sustainable food systems in Zimbabwe?” Find more information here: https://storymaps.com/stories/b8d4962d055c4ad2b7845317b16d2614

Neighbourhoods fit for diverse young people: civic media practices and urban claims-making in Nepal and India

This action-research project is focused on exploring urban claims-making by young people in two secondary cities: Dharan, Nepal and Bhuj, India. In each city, a series of ‘civic media’ workshops’ are being conducted by locally-based NGO partners with emerging youth leaders, supporting young people to engage with digital tools to build evidence and advocate on issues that matter to their neighbourhoods and cities. The project aims to explore how diverse groups of young people can use civic media technologies to enable meaningful and equitable participation as ‘urban citizens’ towards ‘neighbourhoods fit for young people’.

The project is led by Sheffield University, by Stephanie Butcher (PI) and supported by Rajanya Bose (PDRA). It partners with six other institutions, including Kathmandu University, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, Hunnarshala Foundation, Lumanti Support Group for Shelter, and the International Institute for Environment and Development. It is supported by funding from the Fondation Botnar.

Members

Winnie Musivo