Knowledge, Technology and Society (KNOTS) Team

Science and technology offer crucial ways to reduce poverty and increase social justice by improving agricultural livelihoods, tackling ill-health and sustaining the environment.

Rapid innovation in science and technology at a time of dynamic social and ecological change has created new opportunities for health, agriculture and environmental development. But with the new optimism comes threat, risk and uncertainty.

Increasingly globalised responses to the complex challenges posed by technological, social and ecological change are emerging as the influence of private sector and international organizations strengthens and states and civil networks transform.

While scientific advances promise quick fixes for poverty and ill-health, many people remain excluded from the real benefits of basic technology. Institutions shape whether technologies meet people's real needs and who can access them.

Knowledge is crucial in linking rapid health, agriculture and environmental change to poverty reduction and social justice. But global policy solutions are often based on simplified, universalized and standardized forms of knowledge. Failure to recognize dynamic local realities can result in policy collapse, consternation, backlash and social injustice.

he KNOTS Team works to understand and influence the institutions and power-knowledge relationships that link technology, ecology and society. The KNOTS Team examines who is gaining and who is losing and how science and technology can be made to work for the poor.

The team connects global debate with local realities through interdisciplinary research, networks and partnerships, as well as teaching and training. It also co-hosts the major new ESRC Centre for Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability (STEPS).
KNOTS researchers work on health, agriculture and environment, specifically looking at how to promote poverty reduction and social justice.

By bringing health, agriculture and environment together in one team, we are able to work across 'sectors' that are often treated separately in development, enabling us to generate comparisons and cross-learning through joint projects and debate.