The Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD) was founded in April 2001 in Brighton, England. In July 2005, the Institute moved office to the heart of London, Marylebone, where it currently operates.

Its establishment was rooted in the growing recognition by scholars, scientists, and research groups, that the world is currently facing an increasing multiplicity of interrelated and overlapping crises, on local, national and international scales, encompassing almost every sphere of human activity, including social, political, economic, cultural, ethical and psychological dimensions. These crises escalate and aggravate one another in the form of inter and intra-state conflicts, ecological and environmental degradation; resource competition and long-term energy (hydro-carbon) depletion; increasing marginalization, deprivation and impoverishment particularly in the South; and potentially fatal economic instability on national and world scales.

The Institute is a tentative attempt to establish a truly international forum that will promote and commission dialogue and research on these problems, their causes, and their fundamental interrelationships. The Institute’s ultimate objective, then, is to ascertain genuine and workable solutions to those problems in both theoretical and practical terms.

The Institute’s goals are premised on the notion that events and crises at different spatial levels are, in fact, dynamically interconnected elements of an overall global system, dominated by the Northern or western powers, largely to the detriment of the South. The key to developing constructive and practical solutions to the multiple global crises we face today is a fundamentally inter- and cross-disciplinary methodology of analysis, designed to select and utilize the expertise of different fields in the social and physical sciences in a critically integrative manner. Doing so will be particularly productive in producing new and insightful theories – and potential solutions – that might otherwise never be recognized.

The Institute hosts two research centres – the Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (CISS) and the Centre for Philosophical and Ideological Studies (CPIS). These conduct the core interdisciplinary research programmes that make up the bulk of the Institute’s work, supported by an international network of leading scholars and researchers. The Institute also publishes electronically a bi-annual peer-reviewed journal, Global Crisis Review, which draws together cutting-edge research from the social and physical sciences to give readers access to the most authoritative interdisciplinary analyses of global crises available.