In this course current environmental, social and economic challenges will be critically discussed and analyzed from a political economy and distributional perspective. The first part will deal with the global climate crisis and the way of how certain aspects of climate change are percieved and communicated in the public and political discourse and from different economic perspectives. The second part will deal with sources of unsustainable development, economic inequality as component of unsustainability and trends and drivers of economic inequality. Part three will discuss the vicous circle of environmental and social inequalities, adressing issues of unequal access to environmental resources, unequal exposure to environmental risks as well as unequal responsibility for pollution. In part four political, social and economic policy implications and concrete measures how to reduce inequalities in a finite world will be analyzed.
The course is interdisciplinary and will use concepts and literature related to Economics, Ecology, Sociology and Geography.