This module is not currently running in 2021 to 2022.
This module examines the international community’s responses to international environmental problems. Thus understanding and explaining why and how actors (state and non-state) resolve conflicts and set up international environmental institutions to provide governance and how successful or effective these governance structures are is at the heart of this module. We accomplish this by considering various theoretical accounts, including accounts of power, interests, knowledge, and domestic politics that allow us to understand and explain international environmental outcomes. The module also considers aspects of institutional design such as institutional design that addresses problems of enforcement and participation as well as aspects of the normative dimension of environmental decisions-making at the international level.
100% coursework
Barrett, Scott. 2005. Environment and statecraft: the strategy of environmental treaty-making, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ronald B. Mitchell. 2009. International Politics and the Environment, London: Sage
Chasek, Pamela. 2001. Earth Negotiations : Analyzing Thirty Years of Environmental Diplomacy, Tokyo: United Nations University.
Dai, Xinyuan. 2007. International Institutions and National Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miles, Eduard et al (eds.). 2002. Environmental Regime Effectiveness: Confronting Theory with Evidence, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Grundig, Frank. 2009. Political strategy and climate policy: a rational choice perspective, Environmental Politics 18 (5).
Hovi, Jon, D.F. Sprinz and Arild Underdal, 2009. Implementing Long-Term Climate Policy: Time Inconsistency, Domestic Politics, and International Anarchy. Global Environmental Politics, 9 (3)
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Appreciate the complexity of international environmental decision making within the context of uncertainty, domestic politics, and international constraints.
Conceptualise ways to assess the effects of international institutions and apply these to evaluate the role of international institutions in the provision of international environmental goods.
Comprehend and explain, using up-to-date theoretical accounts, negotiation outcomes, institutional effects, institutional design, and policy implementation.
Evaluate theoretical explanations and academic debates relating to international environmental outcomes and environmental governance by drawing on primary and secondary qualitative evidence as well as quantitative evidence.
Be able to evaluate policy debates relating to key issues in international environmental politics and articulate policy solutions by bringing both evidence and theoretical reasoning to bear on the problems.
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