Research
Our researchers are deeply engaged across a range of critical issues in global development from climate change to growing levels of inequality, food insecurity, health, migration and humanitarian crises. We add value via our unique approach to interdisciplinarity which starts with innovation and design thinking, moves on to unpacking complexity and ends with understanding impacts. Linking our research areas are four cross-cutting themes designed to capture new thinking and accelerate research-based solutions to complex global problems.
RESEARCH AREAS
DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE
LIDC is developing and supporting an emerging community of practice in climate change across our seven University of London institutions.
Member research crosses a wide range of disciplinary boundaries with input from social scientists, climate modellers to infectious disease specialists.
We explore climate both as a variable and as an embedded context important to the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable communities.
Our interests range from the fostering of a new episteme in global health ‘climate change syndemics’ to modelling the role of climate on social structures to understanding the behaviours important to mitigating risk and enhancing the resilience of farmers to climate impacts to understanding the role of climate on antimicrobial resistance.
LIDC coordinates and supports interdisciplinary research that aims to advance high-quality and inclusive education across the global North and South. In doing so, we draw on critical expertise of the UCL Institute of Education (IOE), one of LIDC’s founding members and a globally recognised centre for research and teaching in education and social science.
We work at the individual, household and community levels, and our research uses a range of tools and methods to forge solutions to this central development challenge. What’s more, LIDC’s work in this area closely aligns with our existing research on food as well as poverty and inequality.
RELATED PROJECTS
UKRI GCRF Action against Stunting Hub
As part of the UKRI GCRF Action against Stunting Hub, researchers will assess the cohort’s early learning environment, basic cognitive ability, and biologically-determined ability to respond to education in Indonesia, India, and Senegal.
AGRI-HEALTH
LIDC co-ordinates and supports one of the largest communities of researchers in the UK working across the global food and nutrition landscape. Utilising new tools and approaches our researchers aim to provide a road map to a sustainable global food system.
To this end, LIDC has pioneered a new paradigm: Agri-Health, to establish a unifying approach and methodology for understanding the relationships between agricultural production and population health, and the factors which drive them both.
This interdisciplinary initiative brings together research groups working on agricultural production; nutrition and public health; political and cultural dimensions of agriculture, food and health; and global change processes.
RELATED PROJECTS
Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH)
LIDC established the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) to build a new inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary platform for integrating research in agriculture and health, with a focus on international development goals.
Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions (IMMANA)
IMMANA is a research initiative funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and coordinated by LCIRAH.
IMMANA aims to accelerate the development of a robust scientific evidence base needed to guide changes in global agriculture and food systems to feed the world’s population in a way that is both healthy and sustainable.
Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA)
A consortium including LCIRAH, Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA), has secured funding for research that will make recommendations on how agriculture and food-related interventions can be better designed to improve nutrition, with particular focus on children and adolescent girls.
Led by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in India, partners include: BRAC (Bangladesh), Collective for Social Science Research (Pakistan), Institute of Development Studies (UK), International Food Policy Research Institute (USA) and LCIRAH (UK).
The six-year (2013-2018) research programme was funded through a grant from the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition
LIDC is the Secretariat for the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, funded by The African Development Bank, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and Irish Aid.
The purpose of the Panel is to provide global research and policy leadership to maximise the contribution of agriculture and food systems to improve nutrition and health outcomes, particularly of women and children.
LIDC facilitates and co-ordinates interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral approaches to address the existing and potential risks that originate at the animal-human-ecosystems interface.
We explore the wide range of drivers important to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases for human, livestock and wildlife populations from the pathogen to the systems level.
UKRI GCRF Action against Stunting Hub
The ‘UKRI GCRF Action against Stunting Hub’ is an interdisciplinary team comprising researchers from 18 institutions. Running for a five-year period from March 2019 – March 2024, the Hub aims to transform current research on child undernutrition or stunting. The team proposes to change the focus of investigation of child undernutrition from individual components of the problem to the ‘whole child’. Through this, we aim to understand the biological, social, environmental and behavioural context in which stunting occurs.
LIDC coordinates and supports interdisciplinary research on migration. We work at the individual, household and community levels, and our research uses a range of tools and methods to forge solutions to this central development challenge.
RELATED PROJECTS
LIDC MIGRATION LEADERSHIP TEAM
Jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the LIDC Migration Leadership Team (MLT) will seek to improve collaboration on migration studies between the social sciences, the arts and humanities.
The Migration Leadership Team will review existing research on migration, highlight best practice and identify opportunities and priorities for new research. The team will identify areas of research to prioritise, determine how to make an impact, and ways to communicate and collaborate that are likely to help bridge research, policy and public engagement.
The following video illustrates the MLT's work: http://ow.ly/3BHt30o0Lxj
LIDC coordinates and supports interdisciplinary and intersectoral research that aims to advance the understanding of poverty. We work at the individual, household and community levels, and our research uses tools and methods from a variety of disciplines to provide solutions to this multidimensional problem.
Meta Themes
LIDC supports interdisciplinary research into the creation and use of high-quality evidence in development work. We also consult on the design and implementation of evaluation.
RELATED PROJECTS
DFID’s Global Evaluation Framework Agreement (GEFA)
LIDC and two of its constituent colleges, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), are part of a consortium led by consultancy firm Mott MacDonald chosen as one of the service providers in DFID’s Global Evaluation Framework Agreement (GEFA).
SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGIES FOR LOW-INCOME SETTINGS
LIDC's innovation area creates, tests and measures the impact of low cost, sustainable technologies for low-income settings.
We support a diverse range of tools to address a diverse range of challenges from disease diagnostics to knowledge technologies, bio-sensors and decision-support tools. Our tools are solution-led.
LIDC’s Innovation work also supports the wider application of design thinking processes to underpin research exploring wider challenges faced by our stakeholders.
RELATED PROJECTS
Bloomsbury SET
Infectious diseases, and increasing resistance to antimicrobials (AMR) used to control these diseases, pose a major threat to human health. In particular, the rise of AMR in zoonotic pathogens (bacteria, parasites) can lead to infections in humans that are untreatable even by last-resort drugs.
Our ability to assess disease risk, by early detection of pathogens circulating in animal populations, is hampered by a lack of low-cost, portable diagnostic tools. Likewise, disease control is hindered by a dearth of suitable vaccines, and by data scarcity, leading to large uncertainties in mathematical models of pathogen spread and persistence, both in humans and livestock.
The Bloomsbury SET (Science, Economics, Technology), which is funded by Research England, will connect place, people, businesses, ideas and infrastructures in pursuit of innovative scientific / technical solutions (tools, vaccines, models) that will help safeguard human health.
At the same time, we will use our convening power to test whether our proposed public health interventions are acceptable socially, economically and politically – a vital, but often overlooked, aspect that ultimately determines their success in the real world. In weaving these strands together, The Bloomsbury SET will facilitate innovation and productivity within business (core aims of the Industrial Strategy), whilst also helping to shape public health policies and practices.
UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCE
LIDC's Resilience work represents a diverse range of members, disciplines and interests which aim to advance the understanding of resilience from the neuro-biological to the socio-cultural, institutional, policy and infra-structural.
As such, we work at individual to the household and community-levels. By applying convergent tools and methods from a variety of disciplines, our work provides innovative solutions to often long-standing problems.
Our emphasis is on both prediction and protection. Our internationally recognized experts inform both global and national policy and practice.
Vulnerability is one of LIDC’s cross-cutting communities. As such, LIDC's vulnerability work explores the wide variety of drivers or risks that communities, households and individuals face from humanitarian crisis to inequality.
RELATED PROJECTS
LIDC’s ESRC MIGRATION LEADERSHIP TEAM
Jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the LIDC Migration Leadership Team (MLT) will seek to improve collaboration on migration studies between the social sciences, the arts and humanities.
The Migration Leadership Team will review existing research on migration, highlight best practice and identify opportunities and priorities for new research. The team will identify areas of research to prioritise, determine how to make an impact, and ways to communicate and collaborate that are likely to help bridge research, policy and public engagement.
The following video illustrates the MLT's work: http://ow.ly/3BHt30o0Lxj