HOW AND WHY COVID-19 REQUIRES US TO RECAST SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Thursday, April 14, 2022 - 14:00 to 15:00
The COVID-19 pandemic can be placed amongst several current or impending disruptions in the Anthropocene era; one that both demands and offers directions for a major re-casting of sustainable development. My talk will consider how the pandemic鈥檚 origins and unfolding effects reveal cracks in fundamental systems and deep problems with longstanding development models. I will suggest five key themes to inform post-pandemic transformations: re-working relationships with non-human natures; redressing inequalities and vulnerabilities; taking uncertainty seriously; building resilient economies, and reconfiguring state-citizen relations. Where mainstream sustainable development approaches have often been top down, rigid and technocratic, I will suggest that post-pandemic sustainable development must have a radically transformative, egalitarian and inclusive knowledge and politics at its core, and reflect on the extent to which crisis offers opportunities for such transformation to happen.
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Melissa Leach is Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. She co-founded and co-directed the ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre () from 2006 鈥� 2014. As a social anthropologist she has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa while engaging with scientific, policy and public discourses and debates around health, sustainability and development. She has led numerous interdisciplinary, policy-engaged research programmes in Africa and beyond. Amongst external roles, she was听 vice-chair of the Science Committee of Future Earth 2012 鈥� 2017, lead author of the 2016 World Social Science Report 2016 on Challenging Inequalities, and is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). She is now working on COVID-19 as co-lead of the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform and the Wellcome Trust-funded Pandemic Preparedness Project. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2017 was awarded a CBE for Services to Social Science.
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Read more about the seminar and the seminar series here. Organised by the Centre for Business and Development Studies听(CBDS) and听casino 168 Sustainability.
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The page was last edited by: Department of Management, Society and Communication // 01/03/2023