Sustainable Global Development

MGDI20061 Sustainable Global Development 20 Semester 1 Undergraduate Level 2 Jose Antonio Puppim de Oliveira Unit coordinator 1 FHEQ level (Framework for Higher Education Qualifications) ' Middle part of Bachelors ' European Credit Transfer & Accumulation System Rating : 10.0 The course unit is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides the historical and conceptual grounding needed for the rest of the unit. Part 2 will focus on target-setting and monitoring in global sustainable development, taking the example of the Sustainable Development Goals: Part 3 will focus on different visions of and pathways towards global sustainable development, providing students with the knowledge and skills to understand the origins of different perspectives on these debates and to draw their own informed conclusions. This part of the course unit will be updated annually to reflect the most important current debates. The final week of the course unit will focus on revising the content and synthesising overarching themes, including by providing space for student reflections on the main things they have learned from the course unit. The course unit is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides the historical and conceptual grounding needed for the rest of the unit:<ul> <li>Week 1 (History and Conceptualisation of Sustainable Development) will focus on (i) the evolution of sustainable development ideas and how they became dominant in global environmental policy discourse; (ii) key sustainable development frames such as the three pillars and planetary boundaries</li> <li>Week 2 (Whose Sustainability?) will explore critiques of the sustainable development paradigm and introduce students to environmental justice as an analytical lens.</li></ul>Part 2 will focus on target-setting and monitoring in global sustainable development, taking the example of the Sustainable Development Goals:<ul> <li>Week 3 (Goal-Setting and Sustainable Development) will (i) introduce the SDGs, the process by which these were agreed, and the debates around their achievability; (ii) use the SDGs as the starting point for a discussion of the discursive and political power of goal-setting in sustainable development.</li> <li>Week 4 (Measuring Sustainable Development) will use the SDG indicators as the basis for an exploration of the challenges and potential consequences of trying to quantify progress towards global sustainable development.</li></ul>Part 3 will focus on different visions of and pathways towards global sustainable development, providing students with the knowledge and skills to understand the origins of different perspectives on these debates and to draw their own informed conclusions. This part of the course unit will be updated annually to reflect the most important current debates, with likely initial topics including:<ul> <li>Triumphs and Tragedies of the Commons, which will discuss the characterisation of global environmental change as a common property resource problem and trace debates about common property resource management from Hardin, via Ostrom, up to contemporary discourses on land rights.</li> <li>Technology, Innovation and Sustainable Global Development, which will contrast ecomodernist perspectives on technological solutions with critiques of the viability and potential injustices of techno-fixes.</li> <li>Pricing-in Nature will evaluate attempts to represent the ‘true cost’ of the environment, introducing the concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services and their practical applications in carbon markets, payment-for-ecosystem-services schemes, and corporate sustainability strategies.</li> <li>Indigenous environmentalisms, Ubuntu and Buen Vivir will focus on the arguments for alternatives to sustainable development rooted in Indigenous and Southern environmentalisms</li> <li>Degrowth will introduce the arguments for lowering consumption and reversing economic growth, along with critiques centred on feasibility, political viability, and risks of injustice.</li></ul>The final week of the course unit will focus on revising the content and synthesising overarching themes, including by providing space for student reflections on the main things they have learned from the course unit. <ul> <li>Introduce the history and key concepts of the sustainable development paradigm</li> <li>Enable students to analyse the values and limitations of different sustainable development conceptualisations, targets, and monitoring strategies</li> <li>Equip students to understand the conflicting perspectives on different visions of sustainable global development and to take informed, well-considered positions within these debates</li> <li>Develop transferable skills in academic writing and communicating ideas to non-academic audiences</li></ul> <ul> <li>Describe the history of sustainable development and how the idea became dominant in global environmental policy</li> <li>Analyse the purposes, potentials and limitations of sustainable development targets and associated monitoring strategies</li> <li>Understand different perspectives on key debates in sustainable global development and adopt a well-justified position in these debates.</li></ul> <ul> <li>Appraise the evidence for different perspectives and draw well-argued conclusions</li> <li>Engage with and interpret literature from a wide range of academic disciplines</li></ul> <ul> <li>Synthesise evidence and identify the most important key messages</li> <li>Present material in a format accessible to a non-academic audience</li></ul> <ul> <li>Communicate knowledge of sustainable development to non-academic audiences </li> <li>Manage time effectively to complete the work required for the course unit</li> <li>Reflect on their own learning and recognise how their own positionality might shape their perspectives on key issues.</li></ul> Each week of the course will involve 2 x 1hr lecture sessions and 1 x 1hr tutorial. Lecture sessions will be in-person except if there are cases where a lecture is being contributed by a visiting speaker who can only participate remotely. Lecture sessions with the whole cohort will cover the core content, including through interactive activities, while smaller-group tutorial sessions will encourage students to apply the knowledge they have gained through discussions, debates, or working together to create outputs like posters.Students will be asked to complete a 10-question open book online quiz each week. This quiz will be designed to take no more than 10-15 minutes per week and will provide an ongoing gauge of engagement and understanding. The quiz will also offer a box at the end for students to ask questions about the week’s content, which will be compiled by the course coordinator and addressed in the first lecture session the following week. Questions asked over the course unit (with answers from the lecturer that week) will also be made available to all students in an appropriate online space or a weekly Padlet. 2 Written assignment (inc essay) 50% 7 Oral assessment/presentation 40% 9 Set exercise 10% Verbal feedback on contributions to tutorial activities will act as formative assessment to prepare students for this summative assessment.Written comments on the VLE with summative assessment. The content and timing of feedback will be consistent with University policy.Weekly quizzes will be scored immediately. BSc Global Development BSc (Hons) Global Development Second Year Mandatory BSc Global Dev with Int Study BSc Global Dev with Int Study Second Year Mandatory N History and Conceptualisations of Sustainable Development (Week 1)Hopwood et al. (2005) Sustainable development: mapping different approaches. Sustainable Development 13: 38-52Robertson (2014) Sustainability: Principles and Practice. Routledge. Section 1.2 A brief history of sustainability.Steffen et al. (2015) Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet. Science 347: 1259855Sustainable Development Critiques and Environmental Justice (Week 2)Okereke (2007) Global justice and neoliberal environmental governance. Routledge. Most likely Chapter 8 (Ethics of global sustainability and neoliberal ideas of justice) and Chapter 9 (Global justice and neoliberal environmental governance)Schlosberg & Collins (2014) From environmental to climate justice: climate change and the discourse of environmental justice. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 5: 359-374Goal-Setting and Monitoring (Weeks 3 and 4)Biermann et al. (2022) Scientific evidence on the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals. Nature Sustainability 5: 795-800Fukuda-Parr & McNeill (2019) Knowledge and politics in setting and measuring the SDGs. Global Policy 10: 5-15 (and papers on specific goals from associated special issue) Stafford-Smith (2014) UN sustainable goals need quantified targets. Nature 513: 281 Lectures 20 Tutorials 10 0 170