Sectors
Sustainable Development and Inclusive Growth
Sustainable Development and Inclusive Growth investigates the role of business in society and its potential to contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The idea of sustainable impact is to improve institutional conditions that encourage public and private interest groups to engage in cooperation on the local, national, and international levels and enable together inclusive and sustainable change. In our concrete projects in Africa and Eastern Europe, we study the successes and failures of development cooperation in rural development and the build-up of sustainable economic ecosystems. In our projects, we are dedicated to the interdisciplinary merging of anthropology, economic sociology, and political economy, and in our approach, we apply qualitative and quantitative methods. The combination of interdisciplinarity and fieldwork research enables us to provide thorough, profound, and applicable analyses and solutions to sustainable change.
Projects
- Mobilising capacity in African agriculture (responsible: Philipp Aerni)
- KDC - Kosovo Development Cooperation (responsible: Jovana Diković)
- Pharmakina Project (responsible: Jovana Diković)
- Various in the fields of Agricultural Biotechnology, Agricultural Policy, Science and Public Policy, Plant Breeding Innovation, Biodiversity & Regenerative Agriculture, True Cost of Food and Ethics of Innovation.
Head of sector
Associated research fields
Related publication highlights
Diković, J. 2025. The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-socialist rural development in Serbia. London: UCL Press. (see also: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10201667/)
Diković, J. (ed). 2024. Sustainability of Development Assistance: Problems, Prospects and Perspectives. Zurich: CCRS. (PDF & Flip booklet)
Aerni P (2023) COP-27: A great opportunity to address the double crisis of food security and climate change–and for the EU to re-align its farm to fork strategy. Frontiers in Environmental Economics. 1:1082869. https://doi.org/10.3389/frevc.2022.1082869
Diković, J. 2023. Prudent Resilience of Farmers. Journal of Rural and Community Development, 18 (3), 152-173. https://journals.brandonu.ca/jrcd/article/view/2335/622
Zaccari, C., De Vivo, R., Pawera, L., Termote, C., Hunter, D., Borelli, T. et al (2023). Lessons learned from the Second International Agrobiodiversity Congress: Adopting agricultural biodiversity as a catalyst for transformative global food systems. Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health, 100411. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468584422000861?casa_token=0N2sM8lurTEAAAAA:7Z5IXUtR2yMUWJf4e_fzkGYOQV2FMNWfkQeKNIlsLUJqjrXhxkjXi8sGP1rI9hUWEDbUdNhTbpRY
Lappe-Osthege, T. and J. Dikovic. 2023. Constructing Postconflict Memoryscapes: From Narratives of Division to Coexistence. Arcadia 18, https://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/constructing-postconflict-memoryscapes-narratives-division-coexistence
Diković, J. 2023. „The Graveyards of Development Projects: Why do they fail and how this can be prevented? Case Study of Kosovo“, CCRS Working Paper 1/2023 (80 pages). Available upon request.
Aerni, P. and Zou, W. (2022) Stakeholder Surveys in Selected African Countries on the Perception of Initiatives to Promote Capacity Development (CD) for Agricultural Innovation. CCRS Working Paper 1/2022.(see https://www.ccrs.ch/en/research/publications/working-papers/
Dikovic, J. 2021. “What is not known about rural development? Village experiences from Serbia”.
Eszter Krasznai Kovács (Ed). Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, pp. 261-283, https://www.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/OBP.0244.pdf
Aerni, P. (2021) ‘Decentralized economic ecosystems in Switzerland and their contribution to inclusive and sustainable change’. Sustainability 13(8), 4181. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13084181
Aerni, P. ‘"Business as Part of the Solution": SDG 8 Challenges Popular Views in the Global Sustainability Discourse’. MPDI Book Series on Transitioning toward Sustainability, pp 67-101 (2021).
Aerni, P. (2017) ‘Principled Embeddedness: How Foreign Direct Investment May Contribute To Inclusive And Sustainable Growth In Developing Economies’. ATDF Journal 9(1/2), 3-19 (https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/143717/)
Aerni, P., Nichterlein, K., Rudgard, S, Sonnino, A. (2015) ‘Making Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS) Work for Development in Tropical Countries’. Sustainability 7 (1), 831-850, https://doi.org/10.3390/su7010831 (auch gut für ‘Sustainable Agriculture)
