Marc,1) As far as I know I'm the only one at SF State who teaches courses on development that have a strong environmental component, although we do have an environmental studies program. Our campus will also soon make it a requirement that all undergrads take at least one course relevant to "sustainability". What will qualify is yet to be seen.
2) ABSOLUTELY the best way to teach "sustainable development" is to integrate it with challenges to development. I've been doing this for some time. To see why I feel so strongly about this, take a look at the abstract I just prepared of a paper I'm writing.
KM Selling Nature to Finance Development? The Contradictory Logic of "Global" Environmental-Services MarketsCommodification and transnational trading of ecosystem services (ES) is the most ambitious iteration yet of the strategy I call "selling nature to save it". It is modulated today by "social" or "inclusionary" versions of neoliberal development policy. Per this discourse, ES are the new tropical miracle crop, exports of which will foster the economic development of formerly colonized regions. Advocates assert that international payment for ecosystem services (PES) projects, financed by carbon-offset sales and biodiversity banking, can benefit the poor. World Bank and UN agencies proclaim that global carbon markets can slow climate change while generating resources for development. However, the World Bank's own PES guidelines warn that a focus on poverty reduction is counterproductive to the primary goal of maximizing efficiency in conservation spending. Recent case studies of PES-type projects confirm that, in practice, market-efficiency criteria clash with poverty-reduction priorities. Nevertheless, the dubious premises of market-based PES are being extrapolated to support the claim that REDD and similar programs financed by carbon-offset trading can simultaneously mitigate global warming and foster development. I argue that contradiction between development and conservation goals is inevitable in projects framed by the a-social logic of orthodox environmental economics. Moreover, the notion that ES exports are the missing link between conservation and development accepts the failed paradigm of development by integration into international markets. I contend that the full-scale application of market logic in "global" conservation policy, in which profit incentives depend upon differential, so-called opportunity costs, will instead entail a net, upward redistribution of wealth from poorer to wealthier classes, rural to urban areas, and from the South to distant centers of capital accumulation, mainly in the North. I conclude that efforts to "save" (socio)nature can only succeed as part of broader strategies for endogenous rural and regional development.
Keywords: ecosystem services, development, neoliberalism
1) Would you say that, where you teach, undergraduate classes on "sustainable development" are more or less framed as extensions of environment/natural resource science and policy, or as subject areas that seek to integrate challenges to sustainability with challenges to development? 2) Which approach do you think is most appropriate? Thanks, Marc -- Marc A. Levy Deputy Director, CIESIN Adjunct Professor, SIPA PO Box 1000 61 Route 9W Palisades, NY 10964 t +1 845-365-8964 f +1 845-365-8922 m +1 845-270-5762
-- Kathleen McAfee Associate Professor, International Relations San Francisco State UniversityOffice hours fall 2010: HSS 381 most Tuesday and Thursdays 4 - 5 or by appointment
McAfee Nature Inc ABS.doc
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