SUSTAINABILITY 2: SUSTAINABILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

Second course of Ca' Foscari International College's Minor programme in 'Sustainability', building on the introduction to sustainability and systems thinking (SUS1) and laying the bases for the following courses.

GENERAL OBJECTIVE:
- to provide students with tools and stimuli to critically analyse environmental politics and policies and to attentively address the several aspects of sustainability so as to possibly face the manifold 21st century challenges

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:
- to valorise learnings from “Sustainability 1’ in the active study of environmental politics, and its geographic, social, and economic implications
- to provide new notions and to stimulate the development of new tools closely related to both top-down and bottom-up environmental politics
- to present the multiple narratives of sustainability and environmental politics
- to nudge some independent appraisal of current politics and policies

Fruitful completion of the course SUS 1 'Sustainability'.

LECTURES
- Course introduction + preliminary approach to environmental issues
- Environment and institutions: politics, indicators, and actors
- Systems thinking, sustainability, and environmental cultures
- Environment and science: political ecology
- Environment and society: environmental movements
- Environmental action between the personal and the policy level
- The manifold environmental narratives
- Environmental politics today: mainstream institutional and corporate plans, and bottom-up alternatives to them

OTHER
- Lectures and seminars by local, national, and international guests
- Student assignment reporting and discussion; case-based work

Polanyi (1944), The Great Transformation.
Commoner (1971), The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology.
Meadows (2008), Thinking in Systems: A Primer.
Odum (2007). Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-first Century.
Raworth (2018), Doughnut economics.
Kothari et al. (2018), Pluriverse.
Ferdinand (2021), A Decolonial Ecology.
Huxley (1962), Island.
Moore (2016), Capitalocene.
Iovino (2016), Ecocriticism and Italy.

Both ongoing and final evaluation.

GRADING WEIGHTS
20% written assignments
20% assignment oral presentation
20% overall active engagement in lectures, seminars, and revisions
40% final paper, related discussion, oral answers to general questions

GRADING CRITERIA
appropriate use of course tools and vocabulary
enthusiasm, originality, and critical approach
clarity of presentation in both written and oral forms
coherence in analysis, critical discussion, and synthesis
appropriateness in answering questions and in asking new ones
willingness and ability to valorise received stimuli and to offer new ones

Lectures; interactive seminars; interactive keynote guest lectures; participatory learning (and teaching); mixed inductive/deductive approach; case-based foci; assignments, reading, writing, and reporting; group discussion

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "International cooperation" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development