Environment Cluster

Members of the Environment Cluster collaborate on analysis of the social, economic, and political causes and consequences of environmental change. The cluster advances critical approaches to topics including:

• Environmental inequalities of race, gender, class, and age
• Climate change vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience
• Low carbon transitions, industrialisation, and finance
• Social movements and environmental justice
• Governance of water, energy, forests, food, agriculture, extraction and conservation

Our research reflects the disciplinary diversity of the department, drawing on strands of political economy, postcolonialism, political ecology, geography, politics, sociology, and economics. Members have expertise in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and with global institutions, working in collaboration with practitioners from the UNFCCC to governments, community groups and grassroots collectives. We are committed to creating more equitable research partnerships, recognising how colonial relationships can be reproduced through project design, funding modalities, and institutional structures of higher education.

The cluster’s research informs teaching across the department’s interdisciplinary programmes, including the BA Global Development, MSc Environment, Politics and Development, and postgraduate distance learning programmes in Climate Change and Development and Sustainable Development.

• Anzolin, G., Lebdioui, A. 2021 "Three dimensions of green industrial policy in the context of climate change and sustainable development" European Journal of Development Research 33: 371–405
• Ingram, J., Ajates, R… de Frece, A…et al. 2020 "A future workforce of food-system analysts" Nature Food 1, 9–10
• Marois, T. 2021. "Public Banks: Decarbonisation, Definancialisation, and Democratisation" Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mollinga, P. 2020. "Knowledge, context and problemshed. Critical realist method for interdisciplinary water studies" Water International, 45(5), 388–415
• Newsham, A.J., Muñoz-Cruz, R., Pulido, M.T., Ulrichs, M., Cantellano-Ocón, X, Shankland, S. and Cannon, T. 2018. "Ecosystems-based adaptation: are we being conned? Evidence from Mexico" Global Environmental Change, (49), 14–26
• Phillips, J. and Petrova, S. 2021. "The materiality of precarity: Gender, race and energy infrastructure in urban South Africa" Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 53(5), 1031–1050
• Siciliano, G., Wallbott, L., Lederer, M., and Dang, A. (2021) "Low-carbon energy, sustainable development and justice: towards a just energy transition for the society and the environment" Sustainable Development, 29(6), 1049-1061
• Tanner, T., Mazingi, L., and Muyambwa, D.F. 2022. "Youth, Gender and Climate Resilience: Voices of Adolescent and Young Women in Southern Africa" Sustainability, 14(14), 8797
• Taplin, R., Uddin, N., Pibalsook, K., Tshering, K. and N.W. Nitiphons (2022) "A different form of sustainable development in Thailand and Bhutan: Implementation of a sufficiency approach" In: P.S. Low (ed) Sustainable Development: Asia-Pacific Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Tilley, L. 2020. "'The impulse is cartographic”: Counter‐Mapping Indonesia’s Resource Frontiers in the Context of Coloniality" Antipode, 52(5), 1434-1454.

• Jambreen: Australian Rainforest Erasure (Exhibition) – Outside the climate change negotiations in Glasgow, Dr Ros Taplin presents an exhibition of mixed media work on the ‘Jambreen’, pockets of biodiversity in Eastern Australia that remain after extensive forest clearance by European settlers.
• Lessons from Zimbabwe’s tobacco farmers for the COP26 climate change talks (The Conversation) – Dr Andrew Newsham and colleagues offer lessons on climate change adaptation and social justice informed by tobacco farmers in Zimbabwe
• A climate plea: An IPCC Special Report on Children? (From Poverty to Power) – Dr Thomas Tanner and colleagues make the case for child-centred climate action in this guest contribution to the From Poverty to Power blog

• Water Aid and Trade Contradictions: Dutch Aid in the Mozambican Waterscape Under Contemporary Capitalism (Chris Büscher)
• Overcoming the Constraints to On-Grid Renewable Energy Investments in Nigeria (Fadekunayo Adeniyi)
• Shaping Room for Manoeuvre: A Political Ecology of REDD+ in Indonesia (Aled Williams)
• Just Add Water: The Alchemy of Authoritarian Rule in Desert Land Reclamation Projects in Egypt during the Mubarak Era (Musa McKee)
• Contesting Conservation: Shahtoosh Trade and Forest Management in Jammu and Kashmir, India (Saloni Gupta)
• The Politics of Development in Rural Rajasthan, India: Evidence from Water Conservation and Watershed Development Initiatives since the Early 1990s (Saurabh Gupta)