IGA-104: Managing a Living Planet: How Interactions Among Population, Health, Resources & Environment Shape the Stage of Global Affairs

Semester: Spring

Credit: 1.0

Faculty: William Clark

Schedule

Day Time Location
First Day 1/25
Meet Day M/W 1:10 PM - 2:30 PM STARR
Review F 11:40 AM - 1:00 AM STARR

Description

Concerns for how human well-being can be increased in a world of finite resources have long been voiced at local and national levels. Increasingly, however, these concerns have escalated to the global stage. Transnational migration, disease pandemics, food security, and climate change are among the most recent issues that have crowded on to high-level agendas of global governance that were previously reserved for discussions of collective security and world trade. Such high-profile concerns, however, are all symptoms of a more fundamental transformation in which nature and society have become a single complex adaptive system, increasingly tightly coupled at all scales from local to global.  This course explores those interconnections through hands-on policy analyses of their consequences for efforts to promote sustainable utilization of the planets energy, land, water, and biotic resources. It seeks to understand how global institutions can be designed to promote such efforts.

Prerequisites: IGA-101 (International Relations: Theory and Practice) or permission of instructor.  Priority enrollment will be given to IGA concentrators.