Fundamentals of Environmental Policy

Human societies depend upon the natural world, but we also transform, deplete, and degrade the environment. Indeed, the human imprint is so great that the planet has entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene. This course investigates not only what humans have done to modify the environment (impacts), but why they have done these things when the consequences are detrimental (behavior), and how this behavior might be changed to make people better off (policy). The purpose is to explore various possible conceptual frameworks for policy analysis and social action. To do so, we draw on insights from a range of disciplines -anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, political science- and from different parts of the world. The course provides an overview of different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between politics, environmental change, and economic processes. While it embeds these paradigms in a history of the growth of capitalism, the inter-state system, and scientific progress, it concentrates on the global environment of the 20th and 21st-century world, with special attention to developing countries and the dilemmas they face. Ideologies, material processes, and institutions are critically examined to analyze how our ways of ‘knowing’ and changing the environment cannot be understood separate from social relations and power dynamics. By covering a wide range of subjects and drawing on a great variety of local and global examples, Environmental Fundamentals intends to give students a solid grasp of key academic debates and the complex trade-offs inherent in crafting environmental and development policies.