Environmental Policy in Practice

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The course Environmental Policy in Practice provides students with a deeper understanding of why certain environmental agendas take precedence (as others are ignored), and so a deeper knowledge of how policies are struggled over and eventually implemented in the real world. It also provides some concrete tools for analyzing and implementing environmental policies and policymaking. We will also focus on environmental, climate and social justice. We'll open by reviewing the emergence of contemporary environmentalism since the 1960s and how principles that came forth on the global stage set the context for subsequent environmental policies and practice. We'll discuss underlying moral traditions to better interpret different concrete policies and policymaking processes we can observe in the world around us today. This in part will be done using Aristotle's ideas of Techne and Phronesis, as a guide. This includes considering the intense debate on how we 'value' nature. We'll dig into the framing of environmental "problems and solutions", to think more critically about whose interests are being served in divergent representations and narratives of environmental phenomena. We'll also cover some of the aspects of how policy-making occurs, from stakeholder identification and analysis, participatory processes, and the choice of policy tools and instruments, through to aspects of policy evaluation.