Environmental Policy and Governance

90-781

Units: 6

Description

The purpose of this course is to understand how environmental outcomes and policy are profoundly affected by politics and governance. Students develop these understandings by analysing the politics of several key international environmental issues:

Climate change and the Paris Accords
Climate Change adaptation
Energy policy
Managing Ozone depletion and the Montreal Protocol
The Mekong River Commission
Antarctica
Water management
Fisheries management
Biodiversity conservation
Ecologically sustainable development

This analysis includes assessments of the application of various instruments of policy in the context of environmental politics and the institutional arrangements needed to support them. It leads on to a discussion of the capabilities that the modern state needs to have in place to manage the unique challenges of environmental policy and custodianship.

This requires addressing the complexities of constraints on public sector resources, skills shortages and competing political agendas. Perhaps the most important complexity is the growing demand from citizens to participate in the government decisions that affect them, both as individuals and as members of communities.

Learning Outcomes

Students completing this course will be able to:

understand major contemporary issues in environmental policy and management
apply skills from Policy Analysis I to environmental policy analysis
identify and understand alternative approaches to the management of environmental issues with different policy instruments
research and critically analyse governance arrangements for managing major international environmental issues
critically evaluate environmental positions taken by government, industry and interest groups

Prerequisites Description

Nil