Our Research
The Pathways approach
Our unique ‘pathways’ approach aims to understand the complex, non-linear interactions between social, technological and environmental systems. Some pathways may threaten poor peoples’ livelihoods and health while others create opportunities for sustainability.
- Find out more about the 'pathways' approach
- Pathways to sustainability: An overview of the STEPS Centre approach (pdf 694kb)
- Briefing: STEPS Centre approach (pdf 219kb)
Our Projects:
The STEPS Centre works on projects at three levels:
1. Core research projects: cutting across domains & themes
Our first five large projects on issues that cross-cut the agriculture, water and health domains and designs, governance and dynamics themes. Linked to regional hubs, this first two-year cycle of field-based projects will allow for the development of in-depth partnership, communications and influencing relationships in regions around the world.
- Crop disease and innovation in Africa - focussing on dryland Kenya, maize and farming system dynamics in areas affected by climate change.
- Urbanisation in Asia - urbanisation and sustainability in Asia's growing cities, on the expanding peri-urban fringe of Delhi, indicative of conditions for an increasing proportion of global poor.
- Rethinking regulation -addressing the gap between current assumptions about regulation in the cases of drugs, seeds and water in China and Latin America, and more complex realities.
- Risk, uncertainty and technology - how different institutions and groups frame and respond to risks and uncertainties in areas of rapid scientific and technological advance.
- Epidemics, livelihoods and politics - HIV-AIDS, SARS, avian flu, BSE - procedures for addressing epidemics that support rather than compromise poor people and support social justice.
The fieldwork for these first five STEPS projects is well underway with our partners around the world.
Each project involves elements of all three themes - designs, governance, dynamics - and all three domains - health, water, agriculture - with varying emphasis. This facilitates the development of cross-cutting analysis, and iteration between project work and thematic development.
2. Big theme projects
These projects pull together thinking from across our research projects and draw on our domains, themes and global networks
- Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto
- Biotechnology Research Archive
- Reframing Resilience
3. Our affiliate partners and projects
We work with an exciting array of affiliate parters and projects whose interests and aims complement ours
with projects including:
- Avian 'flu: the politics and policy processes of a global response
- Working with our health affiliates
- Veterinary Science, Transboundary Animal Diseases and Markets: the case of foot-and-mouth disease in southern Africa
- HIV and development: a guide to our work
Project objectives
- To pursue cross-domain issues and perspectives: Key dynamics and sustainability challenges involve the interaction of agricultural, health and water-related processes. Major intellectual and policy opportunities exist to connect 'sectoral' debates and perspectives that, to date, have often remained separate.
- To ensure depth of partner and user engagement: The Centre's analytical and normative aims required genuine partnerships involving cross-cutting conceptual and analytical work as well as projects. Capacity-building, communication and influencing policy can be better met through
Helpful links :
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Mother & baby at a health clinic / Aubrey Wade / Panos |
Steps Direct
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