Sustainable Development Policy and Pract

Open to MPA-DP Only. The term ‘sustainable development’ evokes a multiplicity of meanings and consequences: Leave no one behind, earth justice, one planet, inter-generational equity and green development, to name a few. There is no single body of academic work we can point the keen student to. Instead, we need to examine weaves of thought across social, economic, political, ecological and environmental spheres, to get a better sense of the emergent understandings of sustainable development. 

Paradoxically, the interest in sustainable development has never been higher. At the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015, leaders of 193 countries adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Some months later, in December, the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted supporting the objectives of sustainable development to help establish an upper limit for human-induced global warming to ‘well-below 2-degree C’ and for ‘pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degree C’.  The COVID-19 pandemic and measures to contain it has exposed the deep fault lines of inequality that run through societies; requiring profound reflection on the idea of ‘progress’ and on the kind of development that is needed. 

Despite the thicket of ‘sustainable development’ meanings, national leaders in 2015 were responding to the immense social, economic and environmental challenges we are facing. With the world at around eight billion people and an annual economy (GDP-Purchasing Power Parity) of around US$147 trillion, human impacts on the environment have reached dangerous levels. By 2050 there will likely be around ten billion people, sharing in a highly unequal manner a global GDP that will likely be double the size of current GDP. By sustainable development, the leaders were emphasizing the need for economic prosperity to be achieved simultaneously with social inclusion and environmental sustainability, both in the now and the future. 

The SDPP is an overview course. It examines the intertwined nature of the economic, social and environmental strands of thoughts and ideas that loosely constitute the constellations of ‘sustainable development’. Further, the course investigates key challenges and transformational ideas/conceptions that are needed to advance sustainable development in the 21st Century. In the final third of the cours