Environmental Governance

1. Principles and Practices of Environmental Governance

This module will provide students with in-depth knowledge of the diverse forms of, and rationales for, modern environmental governance. It will draw on conceptual and empirical material from a wide range of case studies, to help students understand the contemporary management of the environment, broadly defined.

The module’s main components include an exploration of the rise of environmental governance, examining why and in what ways ‘the environment’ has become an important sphere of policy and practice intervention around the world, including some of the different conceptual lenses through which it can be examined.

A further component explores the differing scales of environmental governance, covering international and transnational processes and institutions, as well as the part that we all as individuals now play in acting on and for the environment. The main topic, cover in a series of lectures and seminars, is anthropogenic climate change and the evolution of climate change governance.

Finally, the module examines various tools of governance, providing detailed insight into the ways that particular mechanisms of and for environmental governance are put into practice and experienced ‘on the ground’, drawing on international case studies.

On completion of the module a student should be able to:

1. Describe and understand the origins and drivers of key environmental problems, intersectoral disputes and uneven responsibilities across governments, social groups and generations;
2. Recognise and critically analyse key theories and ‘schools’ of environmental governance theory and practice;
3. Understand and evaluate key approaches to environmental governance, including international conventions (as the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), national policies, private sector responses and personal behaviour change;
4. Understand the ways that scale and context impact on how environmental governance is understood and enacted; and
5. Critically discuss and evaluate key tools and mechanisms of environmental governance, drawing on empirical case studies and, in particular, human-induced climatic changes.