Environmental Governance I

(2.5-5 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The environment emerged as a new object of concern in the 1960s. Since then, and largely through the work of citizens, scientists, environmental justice movements, and NGOs, many different environmental problems have been raised from chemical contamination to climate change, from oil spills to plastic filled oceans. Despite growing awareness of these many forms of environmental degradation, the political and societal response has been far from adequate. How can we explain this? One starting point is to interrogate the contested history and development of environmental politics since the 1960s. What we learn from such an approach is that there have been radically different ways of framing environmental problems, giving rise to radically different proposals on how to deal with these problems. This historically informed understanding thus invites us to consider how reframing current environmental problems may help us to orientate society towards a more just and sustainable future. This module will introduce students to the emergence of environmental politics as a unique field of policy-making, scientific production, and conflict since the 1960s. It will discuss key texts, writers and thinkers, whose work has been instrumental in shaping how we think about the environment, as well as how private, public and civil society actors have responded to environmental problems in recent times.