Research in the Department is organised around three thematic clusters. All clusters consist of academics with established international reputations, and contribute to the Department's teaching at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level. The three clusters are:
Cities & Development
Cities@Geography| brings together a key group of staff in the Department of Geography & Environment with research and teaching interests relevant to understanding the contemporary city. The cluster is inherently interdisciplinary and actively collaborates with urban specialists located in other LSE departments through Urban@LSE| (notably Anthropology, Sociology, Social Policy, and Development Studies) and with initiatives such as the Asia Research Centre, Africa Initiative and Urban Age.
Staff have worked with or advised a range of national and international agencies including DCLG, DfID, EU, GLA, UNEP, UN-HABITAT, UNDP and the World Bank, as well as non-governmental organisations.
Staff in the cluster have undertaken a number of ambitious research projects in recent years. These have involved work on urban regeneration, governance and sustainable development; megaprojects and the impact of the Olympics; the relation between urban competitiveness and social cohesion/inequality; gender, labour and rural-urban change in South India; state racism and biopolitical struggle in 20th century South Africa; female-headed households, gender and poverty; youth livelihoods and urban violence; 'slums'; and on migration and migrant diasporas.
(See the Cities@Geography| page for more information).
Development is very much part of the wider development community at LSE (including the Development Studies Institute and the Asia Research Centre). There has been a distinctive research emphasis upon urban aspects of international development, and on application of ethnographic methods, but it has not chosen to focus on a single specialism. The approach is outward-looking, in that, while members carry out work with each other, many working relationships have been forged with academics and policy-makers elsewhere - particularly in the UK, in India, China, Korea, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Gambia, Ghana, Cameroon and Tanzania , and in the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the British Department for International Development (DfID).
Staff have attracted significant funding from the World Bank, DfID, Nuffield Foundation, Leverhulme, and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to support work on: growth, poverty, and empowerment at the global scale; on street children, urban violence, and economic restructuring in central and South America; on urban politics and policy-making in post-apartheid South Africa; on migration and migrant diasporas, and on the changing position of women and youth in urban areas of the Global South. Cluster members provide a wealth of consultancy advice to agencies such as the World Bank, the UNDP, UN-DESA, UNICEF, ILO, DfID, and the British Parliament and Government (on issues including economic development, migration, urban bias, female-headed households, gender, development and globalisation, and labour market restructuring), while at the same time contributing to intellectual debates on transnationalism, the agrarian question, the feminisation of poverty, urban public space, and the meanings of development in the wake of the post-colonial turn. Future plans centre around deepening and extending current lines of research, while further enhancing their policy relevance.
Economic Geography & Regional Science
The Economic Geography and Regional Science Cluster integrates spatial and urban economists with more institutionally-oriented economic geographers. It has established an international reputation both for economic geography and regional/urban economics, by adopting the stance that economic geography as a sub-discipline has to, first, engage with analyses of business behaviour, growth, labour markets, property development, and other research areas emanating both from mainstream economics and from more institutional/social perspectives and, second, be policy relevant. The emphasis on 'economic' logics as a crucial element differentiates the group from most other economic geography groups in the UK and elsewhere. As a result, the cluster has become a key player in articulating the dialogue between economic geography, as practiced by geographers, and a resurgent geographical economics, as practiced by economists.
Substantively the cluster has largely been concerned with the traditional economic geography issues of regional development, spatial inequality, location of economic activity, innovation, agglomeration, and labour market outcomes, as well as pushing the boundaries of the discipline in areas such as the New Economic Geography and the impact of institutions on economic development. A related focus, reflecting also the Department's longstanding planning interests, is in property markets and their regulation, real estate economics, and their relation to environmental externalities/public goods (e.g. education and crime) and underlying urban economic theory. The members of the cluster have been successful in publishing in the top scholarly journals in both Geography and Economics, as well as in the very best field journals.
The international standing of the cluster has been recognised in a number of ways. It hosts the Spatial Economics Research Centre| (with associates from several other universities), financed by the ESRC, the Departments for Business, Innovation and Skills and Communities and Local Government and the Welsh Assembly Government. In addition, its members have been awarded a number of prestigious prizes, including one European Investment Bank-European Regional Science Prize – the highest accolade for any regional scientist – a Doctorate honoris causa, a Leverhulme Foundation Major Research Fellowship, two Philip Leverhulme Prizes, a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award, and a number of prizes for the best papers published in scholarly journals.
Members of the cluster have also played key roles as advisers and consultants to numerous international organisations and government departments and the private sector. Major UK examples include important inputs by four group members into the Treasury's Barker, Eddington and 'sub-national' reviews, while among international examples the World Bank/Cities Alliance Report on "Understanding your local economy" or the important input into the European Commission´s Barca Report on the future of cohesion policy could be highlighted.
Environmental Economics and Policy
Human-induced environmental change and scarcity is presenting decision-makers with a growing number of critical policy choices. An indispensable element in making these choices is evolving research from a range of social science disciplines. The central aim of the Environmental Economics & Policy Cluster is to contribute to this process by advancing empirical understanding, that is in its turn informed by theory, of environmental performance, behaviour and governance. Our research agenda covers state, market, and civil society actors and explores the interrelationships with other policy spheres and regulation (social, economic, and political) across a range of geographic scales, from the local to the global, both in the developed and developing worlds. This includes diverse studies of the social costs of climate change, renewable energy in the Middle East, water resource management in Spain and the impacts of the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games. Recent appointments in the cluster have also strengthened our research expertise on environment and development and includes research on farming and biodiversity in Ethiopia as well as community forest management in Namibia and Malaysia.
The cluster's research draws on a focused array of expertise in geography, political science and economics. For example, the cluster has what is the largest group of full-time academic environmental economists in UK universities (and probably one of the largest elsewhere). All members have strong expertise in environmental economics and policy and are regularly involved in high profile policy work. Staff have acted as advisors and consultants for the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD and other international organisations, as well as UK government departments (such as Defra) and the private sector. The cluster has also attracted substantial grants from the European Commission, British Government and the Alcoa Foundation. However, the biggest achievement in terms of grant application has been the successful recent bids for an ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy| (CCCEP) and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment|. As a result, the cluster enjoys close links with the Grantham Research Institute, chaired by Lord Stern of Brentford, as well as the research programmes of CCCEP. With these awards, the LSE is emerging as one of the leading places in the world to research and study the environment and climate change. In addition, from 2011/12, the Environmental Economics & Policy group and Grantham Research Institute will launch a MSc Environmental Economics and Climate Change.