Established in 2011, the Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) pioneers interdisciplinary, action focussed social science & humanities research to support transformations towards sustainable and just societies.
Delivering sustainability requires an integrated view of the world. Here at the GSI, we're committed to playing a key role in developing practical solutions to the challenges facing humanity. Key to this is bringing together the information needed to make decisions, with the people capable of taking action.
The GSI applies methodologies and approaches from a range of different disciplines to better understand how transitions in society work. Whether this is modelling European energy transitions or local housing challenges, we attempt to bring together the best techniques to tackle a problem while keeping our approach grounded academically. We are very interested in how academic knowledge is used in policy making, and how people and communities are engaged in, and impacted by, decisions and policy aimed at creating solutions to the challenges we face.
Our research is around the following key themes:
We've built a global reputation for our research, with major publications across a number of academic disciplines. We have partnerships with businesses, not-for-profit organisations, the UK Government, EU Commission and United Nations as well as UK Research Council-funded projects.
Our core team of researchers works alongside visiting and honorary fellows, and staff from across ARU. We have a successful postgraduate student community and alumni network, with an MSc Sustainability, as well as PhD researchers. We also lead on ARU's Education for Sustainability strategy which supports academics to embed sustainability into every course.
This is a glimpse of our capability; our overarching aim is to deliver sustainability solutions to some of today's global challenges.