Presentation by Hayley MacGregor at the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, 17 November 2010.

1. The ESRC STEPS Centre
Social
Technological and
Environmental
Pathways to
Sustainability

2. Global challenges in a dynamic world….

3. STEPS challenges
• Linking environmental sustainability with poverty
reduction and social justice
• Making science and technology work for the poor
Conventional approach
failures
• Separate sectors and disciplines
• Assumed stability and certainty
• Universalised views
• Missing targets, failing the poor
www.steps-centre.org

4. The STEPS approach
from singular solution towards multiple pathways
• Understanding dynamic patterns & pathways of change
• Addressing governance - politics and institutions
• New tools and methods for appraisal, deliberation,
mobilisation
• Building pathways to Sustainability - involving poorer and
marginalised people, contributing to their goals
• Across food & agriculture, health & disease,
water & sanitation
www.steps-centre.org

5. What makes STEPS different
• Social and natural scientists working together
• Linking development studies with science and
technology studies
• Interactive research involving citizens and decision-
makers
• Reflexive approach, appreciating how one’s position
affects action
• Adaptive approach, dealing with uncertainty and building
resilience
• Building on the knowledge and perspectives of
marginalised people
• Integrating research and communication
www.steps-centre.org

6. Initial global projects with partners
• Crop disease & innovation: Negotiating maize
innovation pathways, Kenya
• Urbanisation: Building peri-urban Sustainability, India
• Rethinking regulation: Seed, drug and water
regulation, China and Argentina
• Risk, uncertainty & technology: Responses to
technological risks and uncertainties, India & UK
• Epidemics: Addressing epidemics, livelihoods and the
politics of policy, Africa, Asia, Latin America
www.steps-centre.org

7. Epidemics
• Capture public and policy attention
• Effective responses a challenge
• How to generate sustainable responses that benefit
health and wellbeing of all
• STEPS work: exploring complex dynamics at play in
health/environment interface
• Paying attention to short and long term drivers of
disease
www.steps-centre.org

8. Dynamic Contexts
• Diseases arise in dynamic contexts
• STEPS work explores a range of case studies
• Concern about rate of emergence of new diseases
• Established diseases shifting into new geographic niches
• Resistant disease strains
• Zoonotic disease and complex human-animal-
environment interactions
• Changing contexts: a range of drivers and exacerbating
factors to keep in mind
www.steps-centre.org

9. Epidemic Narratives
• Accounts of the causes and appropriate responses to
outbreaks of a disease
• Reflect different perspectives eg policy-makers,
scientists, local populations
• Reflect different ways of framing the issues – affect who
is blamed, who gains and who loses from responses
• Dominant versus hidden narratives
• Interested in how the category of epidemic disease is
itself constructed and can shift over time and according
to perspective eg HIV and AIDS
www.steps-centre.org

10. Haemorrhagic Fevers
• The power of different perspectives on disease
(Leach and Hewlett)
• Four narratives:
1. Global Outbreak
2. Deadly local disease events
3. Best managed with local cultural practices
4. Requiring longer term insights from both ecology and
social science approaches
www.steps-centre.org

11. Implications
• The power of dominant narratives to shape responses
• Contribution of neglected understandings
• Need to pay more attention to interactions between long
and shorter term drivers
• The importance of integrating different understandings
• The methodological challenges of interdisciplinary work
www.steps-centre.org