The primary aim of this course is to strengthen and expand students' understanding of global environmental issues and their implications for local development challenges. To do so, we critically engage both longstanding and emerging theoretical, conceptual, and methodological debates concerning sustainable development and environmental governance in human geography. Students will cultivate an in-depth understanding of important themes within these debates, further empowering them to independently assess and utilize key theories and concepts relevant for their respective Master thesis projects.
The course adopts a `global` perspective on sustainable development and environmental governance as processes that necessarily affect all nations - rather than simply the nations of the so-called Global South - but which are nonetheless eventually translated into concrete form within grounded local contexts. Exploring the interrelations between `global` and `local` iterations of these processes, we examine influential discourses and narratives of environmental change, assessing these in relation to a diversity of place-based geographical perspectives. Key themes include global climactic change and its mitigation; forest and biodiversity conservation; food security and sustainable agriculture; and renewable energy transitions. In short, the course leads us to both a critical and a nuanced understanding of how power relations shape - and are shaped by - encounters between `local` communities, global environmental discourses, and sustainable development institutions operating across multiple scales.
A student who has completed the course should have the following learning outcomes:
Knowledge
The student
Skills
The student
General knowledge
The student
All parts of assessment must be passed in the same semester. Grades for each part of assessment and the final grade will be published in Studentweb.
Assessment in teaching semester.
Students who have a valid document of absence or fails the exam may take the exam in the following semester.
Department of Geography
advice@geografi.uib.no