Course Syllabus

SPEA P710 Environmental Politics

Course Description

This course is designed to introduce doctoral students to scholarly inquiry into domestic environmental politics. The primary goal of the class is to engage through reading, writing, and discussion with the central theoretical and empirical approaches driving research into U.S. environmental politics and to prepare students to conduct their own theoretically innovative, empirically rigorous, and substantively relevant scholarship. This includes understanding the historic, dominant and emerging topics, frameworks, theories and models which have been used to advance theoretical understanding and empirical evidence about environmental challenges, as well as the actors, policy processes and institutions which impact them. Students should have a comprehensive understanding of American government and U.S. environmental policy and politics, although some background on the U.S. context will be covered throughout the semester.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a deep understanding of major theoretical frameworks used to diagnose and prescribe political processes and institutions pertaining to environmental governance.
• Evaluate the quality of research on complex environmental policy and political processes and outcomes at the local, regional, state and national scales.
• Develop and execute original, innovative research designs which can make theoretical advancements to extant knowledge of environmental politics.

Day/Time/Location

Thursdays, 9:30am-12:00pm in SPEA 270