Sustainable Development
- NINT 5231 - Sustainable Development (Spring 2008)
Monday 6.00pm - 7.50pm
The seventh United Nations Millennium Development Goals reads "Ensure environmental sustainability". Indeed, on the surface, sustainable development is a goal everyone could agree with–who would be for unsustainable development? But in fact, there is no consensus on the meaning of the term: some definitions emphasize the importance of preserving natural capital for future generations, while others aggregate all forms of capital together, arguing that our only obligation to the future is access to an equivalent capital stock. A related dispute is over what the relationship is between environmental sustainability and human well-being–as well as how the relationship may differ by gender, class, and other factors. And finally, there are heated debates about the appropriate route to achieve sustainability–for example, whether through neo-liberal trade policies, centralized governmental regulation, or decentralized local control. This course will examine these differing views of sustainable development both in theory and through the examination of specific development projects. Economists approach environmental questions through three differing theoretical schools: environmental economics, ecological economics, and political economics. These schools use differing techniques to value the environment, offer different understandings of what would be good environmental and economic outcomes, and advocate different policies to achieve sustainability. Underlying these differences are political economic questions of distribution of power and resources both within specific countries and globally. This course will explore the range of views, with an emphasis on understanding the assumptions underlying their disagreements, and on the policy implications of these views. Topics will include the "green development" policies of the World Bank, the controversial issue of water privatization, carbon trading as a response to global warming, the effects of neo-liberal policies on the environment, and cases of specific commodities such as gold and cotton which illuminate the problems and complexities of sustainable development.
Concentration:Development