ASPECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND ITS GOVERNANCE

Instructor: / lector Evelina Jagminaitė, mob. ph.: +37069802222
e-mail: ;
Language of Instruction: / English
Required Prerequisites: / none
Suggested Academic Cycle or Year of Studies: / Bachelor and Master degree studies
ECTS credits: / 6 / Local credits: / 4
Contact Hours per Week: / 4
Semester: / spring
Methods of Teaching: / set of lectures, discussion, case studies
Form of Assessment: / short papers, conceptual maps, and presentations

This course is designed as a broad overview of environmental problems and their interpretations. Because human behavior is at the root of the contemporary environmental issues, understanding individual and societal processes is critical to addressing and solving environmental problems. Traditionally, political science and government studies have focused on the nation state and questions of public policy. Economics principally concerned itself with patterns of private exchange in markets. Sociology has addressed norms, values and community interactions. And conservation psychology investigated relationship between human behavior and the natural environment. However, in the contemporary world, every future policy maker or a well informed citizen should have a broad understanding of a given problem and to be able approach, analyze, and interpret it from various standpoints. Therefore, we will borrow from a broad spectrum of academic traditions to offer an interdisciplinary perspective for thinking of sustainability, environmental governance, and resource conservation. Participants in the course will explore the roles of individuals, collective action, governments, and market institutions in environmental management and mismanagement.

We will start the course emphasizing psychological dimensions of human behavior, extending further into social formations of individual actions, and specifying these formations through the focus on political governance and market exchange principles. To conclude, we will synthesize this information with the help of the empirical examples of governance arrangements from different parts of the world, different historical periods, and different ecological contexts. The course is structured to place an emphasis on learning to synthesize diverse information, to critically evaluate conceptual material and empirical studies.

Reading list (some of the literature can be adjusted to fit specific needs of the students):

  1. Brown L. Plan B 3.0(Norton, also available free online at (chapters to be assigned).
  2. Hardin G. 1968. Tragedy of the Commons. Science,1968. 162
  3. North D. Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. in Cooperation: The Theoretical Problem. 1990. Pp.11-15.
  4. Ostrom E. Private and Common Property Rights, 2000. (pp. 332-352).
  5. Quinn D. Ishmael (Bantam).
  6. Schwartz K. Nature and National Identity after Communism: Globalizing the Ethnoscape. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
  7. Williams R. Ideas of Nature. In Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, London: NLB, 1980. Pp. 67- 85.
  8. Williams. R. “Ecology” and “Nature” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Cambridge: Oxford UP, 1985. Pp. 110-111 and 219-224.
  9. WinterD.D., Koger S. Psychology of Environmental Problems (Second Edition). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004 (chapters to be assigned).
  10. Worster D. Nature's Economy: a History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edition. London: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994. Pp. 2-55.

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