This group focuses on the critical study of the processes that drive and link social and ecological change in the contemporary world, with special attention to the climate crisis and its multiple social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions.

In line with the broader focus of the Department of International Development, the group places particular attention on these processes as they unfold in Global South, placing these in the context of the power relations and patterns of planetary uneven development that situate these regions within a broader world-system.

The group aims to host research on a range of key contemporary topics in environment, development, and political ecology including: the global politics and political economy of the climate crisis; climate finance and green capitalism; ecosocialism and ecomarxism; politics of climate adaptation and mitigation; green transitions and energy; global political economy of extraction and uneven development; social movements, subjectivity, and the environment; water politics, infrastructure, and the hydro-social cycle; agrarian change and agricultural development; decolonisation, indigeneity, and environmental racism; social reproduction and the environment; urbanisation and urban political ecology; and the politics and socio-economic dimensions of conservation, biodiversity and extinction, among other theoretical and empirical themes.

The group also aims to critically engage with contemporary debates on environmental politics and policy, as well as with different ideological and theoretical frameworks for addressing and understanding environmental change and its relation to international development.