Environmental Politics

The Department of Politics and International Relations is home to one of the largest contingents of environmental politics scholars in the country, who are united by concerns about global environmental change.

Our Research

Interdisciplinary Research

Our research is interdisciplinary in nature; and many of us have backgrounds and close connections with Geography, Philosophy and Sociology. We have close ties with a range of international environmental NGOs and policy-makers, and we are strongly linked with colleagues across the University of Sheffield, such as those in the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, the Sheffield Institute for Global Sustainable Development, The University of Sheffield Sustainable Food Futures and the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre.

Our expertise

Our research expertise:

  • Political ecology
  • climate change
  • animal rights,
  • environmental policy-making and governance. 
  • formal political institutions and organisations
  • non-governmental activists
  • corporate interests.  

Our projects

Community Energy

Jayne Carrick

South Yorkshire Combined Mayoral Authority (SYMCA) have committed to 'enabling community energy schemes by working closely with community groups to develop and supporting community schemes across South Yorkshire', this project aims to identify policies that the SYMCA could implement to achieve this goal.

Jayne's profile

Beastly Business

Examining the Illegal Trade in Bears, Eels and Songbirds in Europe

Rosaleen Duffy

This project seeks to understand the underlying drivers of why, and how, legal and illegal spheres in the trade in European species are linked.

Beastly business website

Consuming sustainably and community energy

Jayne Carrick and Matthew Wood

This project explores the determinants of domestic energy use and energy saving behaviour in South Yorkshire and will account for how this has changed in response to external circumstances, including the cost of living crisis and increasing public awareness of, and concern for, climate change.

South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre

Globalisation and environmental justice in global value chains

Natalie Langford

Natalie's research focuses on the politics of sustainability in the global political economy, with a particular focus on how states, firms and civil society in the global South seek to shape norms around the global governance of labour and the environment.

Natalie's profile