I've been trying to scope something very similar out here at Columbia, for a new undergraduate major in sustainable development.
I am still sorting it out, but what I had in mind was to organize it around big questions in sustainable development, and get into what political science has to say about those questions, e.g.: + How do you balance the imperative for freedom with the imperative to save or restrain for the sake of the greater good or future generations? - Elster's Ulysses and the Sirens, Beitz, Rawls, etc. Examples e.g. Reciprocal Tariff Reduction Act, creation of Federal Reserve system. - main point is to show that if sustainability means finding ways to get people to accept constraints on their behavior, political science has tools for how to understand that. + How do you cope with competing values in a pluralistic world? - Sen, Arrow, ?? - Not sure exactly where I'm going with this but I think there's something political science can offer that just takes Arrow's theorem and shows how there's no simple way to get the right answer. You need institutions to make acceptable answers stick. + Choice and agency in a complex world. - I am less certain of what literature goes here, and it may be mostly histories and case studies. But there's a need to get into the guts of how societies steer themselves according to a long-range vision, and what kinds of things make that go well and badly. + Distributive Justice - Rawls in the real world. What does justice require, how do we achieve it? What works, what doesn't. + Paternalism - How is it determined what "we" want to sustain and what "we" want to develop? Is it whatever people say they want, or is there a need to steer people in the "right" direction? If the latter, how do we do that effectively? What are the side effects of organizing society that way? How are abuses checked? + Responsibilities for sustainability at the limit, or managing difficult tradeoffs - How do societies make irreversible decisions? Which species go extinct? What cultures disappear? What kinds of political institutions make it possible to bring about choices that are more robust, and what kinds of institutions are fragile? === All very inchoate. I am kind of assuming that for undergrads in a sustainable development major, for whom this may be the only political science class they take, the aim should be to develop a fluency in the major elements of political theory that are relevant to sustainable development, and to identify a handful of the most enduring empirical insights that are relevant. I'm still searching for what that is. - Marc On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 2:23 PM, Katrina Z. S. Schwartz <[email protected]>wrote: > Dear colleagues - > I am drafting a proposal for a new course on "Politics & Sustainability" > that would be a core course for a proposed new interdisciplinary major in > Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida. This would be an > introductory-level course, and would probably also serve as the prerequisite > for existing upper-division polisci courses in environmental politics. > > Does any of you teach a course like this, or have any thoughts about how > such a course might differ from an introductory "Environmental Politics" > course, what topics you would cover etc? > > thanks, > Katrina > -- > Katrina Z. S. Schwartz > Assistant Professor > Department of Political Science > University of Florida > 234 Anderson Hall, P.O. Box 117325 > Gainesville, FL 32611-7325 > > Tel.: (352) 273-2371 > Fax: (352) 392-8127 > email: [email protected] > homepage: > http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/kzss/<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/kschwart/> >
