ESPA Insights into Resilience and Wellbeing: Research Frontiers for Sustainable Development

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In the decade since ESPA started, a new approach to sustainability has been forged. New Sustainable Development Goals have been agreed, a Climate Change agreement signed, and initiatives on Disaster Risk Reduction have become mainstreamed in international development. These each respond to the recognition of the scale and significance of global-scale change, and the necessity to more effectively integrate global poverty elimination, global environmental change, and shifting and uncertain geopolitics, insecurity and increasing inequalities. Within this context, ESPA research can play an important role, and potentially contribute to the new policy arenas that have emerged. Our proposed project aims to enhance the impacts and relevance of the ESPA programme and its projects, and help to define and shape future research agendas to inform global sustainability. This work will explore the lessons learned through 10 years of ESPA projects. It will bring together two critical fields of knowledge that provide powerful conceptual and analytical lens to inform sustainability: resilience and wellbeing. We use these lenses to review ESPA research, and specifically to generate new insights on understanding of the dynamics of poverty and responses to change. Through a synthesis of the literature, an analysis of ESPA science, and a workshop with leading scholars in relevant fields, this project will produce a synthesis of ESPA science on Resilience and Wellbeing for Sustainability, and an interactive guide for policy. The interplay between wellbeing and resilience offers exciting opportunities for informing sustainable development in the face of global unprecedented changes. The synthesis of ESPA findings together with a deeper investigation of the wellbeing and resilience literature will enhance the utility of ESPA project output for future research and policy in a world facing these new challenges.