Society and Environmental Governance

The course aims to introduce students to theory and practice of  environmental governance, and the relationship between science, society and environmental governance. It examines how scientific knowledge and scientific developments are formed within social processes and institutions and how social values and ethics influence the processes of environmental governance. The course will equip students with practical insights of the real-world environmental governance and how the environment is understood, controlled and regulated by a range of actors and institutions, and the socio-cultural cognitive and normative frames.

This course has two main objectives. The first is to provide sound knowledge on the concept of resource use as a key environmental sustainability challenge at various scales that is fundamental to the environmental governance questions. The second is to present the resource efficiency as a technological and systemic solution through various options that help to decouple the resource use from the environmental sustainability. This course approaches these questions more from angle of sustainable consumption, use and demand side rather than the management of ecosystem and natural resources.   

The course aims to describe the interdisciplinary perspective of adaptive governance in the light of complex socio-ecological and environmental change and transformation and help the students to analyze the resilience and adaptive capacity building can be examined from the local, national and regional perspective.

The course provides students with knowledge about environmental governance as socio-political attempts and help to address global and regional changes, including climate change, food, water and energy insecurity, biodiversity loss, urbanization and land-use change.

The objective of this course is to understand and analyze the environmental policy and the challenges faced in policy making, actors and institutions, policy making approaches and processes, and help to formulate proper environmental policy for enhancing environmental management.

This course aims to provide fundamental concepts of environmental systems modeling and apply the assumptions and approximations for understanding environmental systems. Students will build the system dynamic models of climatic, hydrologic, geochemical, and human systems, using STELLA and VENSIM modeling software on PCs. The model results will provide information to support the decision-making process.