IDS Live

African countries must work more closely together at regional and continental levels if they are to overcome barriers to innovation and drive sustainable development, experts have warned. In this episode of the IDS Between the Lines podcast, IDS Senior MEL Specialist Jo Carpenter interviews Emmeline Skinner, Social Development Adviser, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Brando Okolo...

Social protection is seen as a solution to many problems of development, including poverty, food insecurity and access to services. But we also know that social protection has its limitations. So how do we justify getting Governments to invest in social protection programmes rather than investing in infrastructure or job creation or other services like health and education? In this episode of the...

IDS was recently honoured to welcome the Hon. Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Dr Harini Amarasuriya to mark the 60th anniversary of IDS. She shared her journey from her career as an academic and an activist before entering politics and being elected as Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in 2024. In this special episode of the IDS Between the Lines podcast we present the Prime Ministers speech and her discus...

Last month a series of events were held at the University of Nairobi to celebrate 60 years of IDS together with alumni and other partners. The host was our namesake the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi, which celebrated its 60th anniversary last year. At the event this podcast was recorded: 'What is the future of ‘development studies?' It featured commentaries by Prof...

Disability is very much part of the human experience, with an estimated 16% of the world’s population experiencing significant disability. Despite this, people with disabilities often remain excluded or underrepresented in development programmes and research. In this new episode of the IDS Between the Lines podcast, researchers - whose articles have been published in the recent IDS Bulletin ‘Build...

Climate change is no longer a distant threat. Heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding are reshaping lives and ecosystems across the world. Adaptation efforts to date have largely been incremental and insufficient for the scale of change now underway. In this book talk, Dr Susannah Fisher discussed her new book, Sink or Swim: How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate, which argues th...

This Between the Lines podcast features a conversation between IDS Fellow Rosie McGee and authors John Gaventa and Gabe Schwartzman about their new book, Power and Just Transitions: Struggles for a Post‑Coal Future in an Appalachian Valley. The book examines how power is transformed during energy transitions, using the Clearfork Valley in Appalachia as an in‑depth case study.

Automation and digitisation are set to impact on many areas of work and livelihoods in developing countries and there is an urgent need for robust empirical work to address this issue. Participants at the 2017 Digital Development Summit, convened by IDS, called for research institutions to create cross-cutting partnerships across disciplines, geographies and sectors both to develop research and to...

Most development thought is based upon the assumption that the uplifting of the world’s poor is to be carried out by elite actors (states, corporations, NGO’s) , rather than the poor themselves. This way of thinking, paradoxically, helps justify new ways of oppressing and exploiting the poor. In this talk Professor Benjamin Selwyn from the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, laun...

Advances in digital technology and artificial intelligence are transforming the future of work. Self-driving trucks are due to be tested on UK roads in 2018 and are already being piloted in the US where around 3 million people are employed as truck drivers, while in the Philippines 89 per cent of call centre jobs are now at risk from automation. Women are also likely to be disproportionately impac...

Three years since the launch of China's flagship outbound investment strategy, One Belt One Road (OBOR), many are left uncertain - what is OBOR and what exactly is China trying to achieve? Based on study of trade-related potential for win-win development between China and Africa countries, Dr. Lauren Johnston will explain economic push factors underlying China's outbound investment agenda, and the...

In this seminar, the speakers will share their thinking on Participatory Accountability; how it connects to the surfacing and valuing other types of knowledge; and its potential as a more inclusive and transformative approach to monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals. Speakers Chair: Jackie Shaw, IDS Fellow-Participation cluster whose expertise focuses on integrating visual methods into acti...

Wednesday 21st June 2017, 10:00 to 11:15, IDS Room 221 The Centre for Rising Powers in Development welcomed Paulo Esteves, the Director of the BRICS Policy Center, and Geovana Zoccal, IDS Visiting Fellow and researcher at the BRICS Policy Center, for a discussion on 'The BRICS Effect: The Impact of South-South Cooperation in the Social Field of International Development Cooperation ' The seminar w...

Professor Jan Selby will deliver a Sussex Development Lecture to discuss claims that climate change was behind Syria's descent into war. For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war - now entering its seventh year - has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evi...

Reducing inequalities is one of the biggest development challenges of our era, and a key focus of the current IDS strategy. The 2016 World Social Science Report on this theme, which IDS has co-led with the International Social Science Council, was launched in September 2016, bringing together over 100 authors from around the world. This seminar share's the report's key findings and messages about...

Precarious Lives : Food, Work and Care After the Global Food Crisis - Report Launch by Institute of Development Studies

Professor James Ferguson from Stanford University delivers the inaugural IDS Annual Lecture titled 'Not Working: Rethinking Production and Distribution in the Jobless City'. It is a public lecture and all are welcome to attend. For more details visit: http://www.ids.ac.uk/events/ids-annual-lecture-with-james-ferguson

Future of food: Burgers...or bugs event - Full panel discussion by Institute of Development Studies

This seminar marks the launch of the Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Edited Collection. Comprising 33 articles, photo essays, interviews and thought pieces with academics, activists and legal practitioners from over twenty countries in the world, the speakers will reflect on the complexity of the deceptively simple question posed by the Collection’s title: Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice...

IDS Seminar

Jeremy Allouche on BBC World 8/4/2015 - Recording of IDS Research Fellow on BBC World programme talking about global water scarcity