Environment and Sustainable Development in Practice

Our core module ‘Environment and Sustainable Development in Practice’ provides an exciting opportunity for participants to take part in an overseas practice engagement which builds upon the knowledge and skills gained across terms one and two of the academic year. Our overseas practice engagements are an opportunity for our students to engage with real-life challenges in the urban Global South, developing their clarity and agency as environmental practitioners.

As part of this module, Environment and Sustainable Development MSc students join our Learning Alliances which are action-research platforms seeking to co-produce actionable knowledge for environmental justice and sustainability in the urban Global South. These Learning Alliances bring together a high diversity of learners, including international students, various institutions, and civil society groups working for pro-poor development.

Over several years, our Learning Alliances have incrementally built a body of knowledge to understand how environmental injustices are produced in different cities and how they can be addressed. In addition to influencing policy-making and planning through strategy development, we also aim to strengthen the local research capacity of young professionals and partner institutions.

Our previous Learning Alliances have explored India, Ghana, Peru, Sierra Leone and Tanzania.

Discover more about our practice module ‘Environment and Sustainable Develpment in Practice’ through our overseas Learning Alliances, through our ‘Insights from Practice’ student blog series, and through our field trip videos on YouTube.

Explore:

• Overseas Learning Alliances
• Insights from Practice student blog series
• More of our outputs

Overseas Learning Alliances

Our Overseas Learning Alliances shape our core module ‘Environment and Sustainable Development in Practice’. Each year, our Environment and Sustainable Development MSc students put into practice and test academic theories and concepts they learn through the course’s core modules, and they gain practical experience in advancing socio-environmental justice in collaboration with key actors on the ground in the Global South, including Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Peru and beyond.

Several months of collaborative research culminate in an overseas practice engagment whereby students conduct fieldwork with a partner organisation. Students present their work and collectively produce outputs such as videos and policy briefs to communicate their research findings and propose strategies for transformative change.

Discover where we’ve worked and the organisations we’ve partnered with in previous years:

2024: Bio-Urban Health in Bogota. 

The overall objective of the OPE is to understand and address environmental injustices in Bogota, focusing on disrupting these injustices to promote bio-urban health, which integrates ecological systems with urban living conditions to enhance public and environmental health. Bio-urban health emphasises rethinking urban health and wellbeing as deeply connected to nature, promoting environmental justice, and enhancing collective wellbeing through symbiotic and reciprocal engagement with nature. In Bogota, several social processes have proposed alternatives to traditional development paradigms, such as Ecobarrios, Eco-villages, and Transition Initiatives. The city has also implemented significant reforms to protect biodiversity and declared a climate emergency, emphasizing social justice, human rights, and gender equality. Since 2024, the ESD Learning Alliance has been working collaboratively to evaluate and address environmental injustices in five areas of Bogota’s metropolitan area with local civic and academic partners.

Explore the student’s policy briefs on the ESD Learning Alliances website.

2023: Mwanza, Tanzania

As part of the learning alliance with the action-research project OVERDUE, students from our Environment and Sustainable Development MSc have been producing actionable knowledge to advance just sanitation in the city of Mwanza, Tanzania. This research has been produced in collaboration with project partners Ardhi University and the Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI). 

The research focused on five thematic entry points:

1. Bridging grid and off-grid sanitation through simplified community sewerage system 
2. Shared sanitation facilities and land and housing tenure arrangements 
3. Grassroots collective action and financing mechanisms for just sanitation 
4. Social norms, bylaws and taboos regulating sanitation practices, gender relations, health and environmental outcomes 
5. Closing the sanitation loop, wastewater reutilisation for urban farming.  

Following a 10-day field trip to Mwanza where students undertook primary data collection through a variety of focus-group discussions, key interviews and mapping exercises with residents of informal settlements, civil society organisations and local government officials, research findings have been captured in four policy briefs.

2018 to 2021: Freetown, Sierra Leone

Our Environment and Sustainable Development students conducted action-research in Freetown, Sierra Leone to contribute to an understanding of how and why risk accumulation cycles or ‘urban risk traps’ affect local dwellers and their communities in Freetown’s informal settlements, and how they can be disrupted in a structural way.

Our Learning Alliance leveraged on our partnerships with the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC), the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDURP), Pull Slum Pan Pipul (PSPP) and the communities of six case study areas.

2021 marked our fourth and closing year of the Learning Alliance in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where our Environment and Sustainable Development MSc students have been co-producing knowledge with our partners and interns at the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC), facilitators from The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), local communities and international organisations.

We worked through four different but connected thematic areas:

1. Land and housing
2. Urban infrastructure and services
3. Ecological infrastructure
4. Food security.

Our engagemeent with project partners focused on developing strategies within each thematic area by learning from existing initiatives and from exchanging knowledge between different contexts in Africa and beyond.

2013 to 2017: Lima, Peru 

This Learning Alliance was linked to cLIMA sin Riesgo, a DPU action-research project funded by Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) which examines urban risk traps and their impact on people’s lives and investments. 

In 2013, our first year of our Learning Alliance in Peru, we partnered with Foro Ciudades Para La Vida to focus on ‘Transformative planning for environmental justice in metropolitan Lima: Water, risk and urban development’ following the DPU research platform ‘Water Justice in Latin American Cities’. Our objective was to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between water, risk and urban development and develop strategies that contribute to transformative change. Following fieldwork research in Peru, our MSc students produced videos and reports (in both English and Spanish) in collaboration with our project partners and participants.

In 2014, the second year of our Learning Alliance in Metropolitan Lima, we focused on ‘Environmental justice in Lima: Co-learning for action’. We aimed to understand how environmental injustices are produced and how they can be addressed by exploring scenarios and strategies embedded in the wider socio-political, economic and ecological processes. We focused on four case studies - Barrios Altos, Cantagallo, José Carlos Mariátegui and Huaycán - which each provide a unique lens through which we learn about the wider processes of change shaping metropolitan Lima. We explored power relations, the challenges facing citizens, and the strategies citizens are adopting at the neighbourhood level to gain insight into the wider drivers and dynamics of urban change. 

In 2015 to 2017, our Environment and Sustainable Development MSc students undertook research to develop an understanding of the relationship between everyday risk and urban development in Metropolitan Lima, and to develop an environmental action plan in collaboration with local communities and organisations for selected case studies within this jurisdiction. With our local partners within ‘Foro Ciudades Para la Vida’, CENCA, CIDAP and SEA, we chose six areas in Metropolitan Lima to ground our investigation, including Costa Verde, Barrios Altos, El Agustino, José Carlos Mariátegui, Chuquitanta and Pachacamac. We chose these areas to offer unique readings of the city, enabling a better understanding of the urbanization processes, institutional, private and local communities practices, and socio-environmental trends operating in Metropolitan Lima. 

2009 to 2012: Accra, Ghana 

In our 2009 overseas practice engagement, we investigated ‘Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture (UPA) in the city’ of Accra, Ghana. 

In our 2010 overseas practice engagement, we investigated ‘Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture (UPA) in the city’ of Accra, Ghana. 

The focus of our overseas practice engagement in Accra, Ghana, in 2011 was ‘Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture (UPA) in the city: the potentials and challenges faced by those practicing it as their livelihood’. 

Our 2012 overseas practice engagement focused on environmentally just urbanisation through urban agriculture in Accra, Ghana.   

2007 to 2008: Mumbai, India 

In 2007, our Environment and Sustainable Development MSc students were ‘Working with pavement, railway and slum dwellers in a conflicting housing environment’. 

In 2008, our overseas practice engagement focused on ‘Resettlement and rehabilitation’ in Mumbai, India. 

To find out more about our previous overseas Leaning Alliances and the outputs produced, visit the ESD Learning Alliance website.​​​​​​

Insights from Practice

A vital part of our ‘Environment and Sustainable Development in Practice’ module is the ability to encourage our students to critically self-reflect throughout their learning journeys, and ultimately develop our students into reflexive, ethical and forward-looking environmental practitioners. We do this in several ways, starting with an exploration of our students’ assumptions about urban socio-environmental transformation and the skills required to become active players in pursuing transformative planning. Students capture their individual development across the three terms through personal blogs and share their reflections through our ‘Insights from Practice’ blog series.

More of our outputs

• To find out more about our previous overseas Learning Alliances and the outputs produced, visit the ESD Learning Alliance website.
• You can find all our field trip videos hosted on YouTube.