Context
Here, I present an overview of a specialist 3rd Year UG and PG course I have designed on the IPE of climate change. I was very keen to develop this course, as a pluralist contribution and complement to the existing list of modules on most universities’ 3rd Year UG and PG programmes in Politics; Politics and IR; Politics and Economics; Government; Public Policy; and (International) Political Economy.
For reasons related to intellectual property protection, I cannot directly share the syllabus here. However, I invite any colleagues and students that would be interested in receiving a PDF copy to contact me by email at t.da-costa-vieira@lse.ac.uk. I will be very happy to share the syllabus and would love to hear your feedback on it!
Summary of the course
The climate crisis is now widely seen as one of the main existential questions of our time. It is not simply that few other topics — apart from issues like nuclear war, global pandemics and the threat of AI — come close, which makes it an increasingly important topic to teach and learn about. Rather, it is that arguably, climate change is the challenge that will increasingly condition, shape and influence all others.
As a holistic, open and highly diverse discipline, IPE is particularly well suited to analyse the climate crisis and provide solutions to it, in particular by revealing climate change as the intensely political, economic, social and cultural problem that it is — beyond simply a technical, technological and scientific one.
Over the span of 11 weeks, we will examine the key issues that currently underpin and dominate the landscape of climate change and climate policy.
The first half of the module starts by establishing the scale of action needed, to then turn to the main actors tasked with addressing the ecological crisis of our time: the state, the private sector and — too often forgotten by most courses, but having an extraordinary role and responsibility — the central banks of the world. We will ask incisive and difficult questions, exploring all of these institutions’ inherent relationship with, and role in, creating the climate crisis in the first place, but also the crucial task that they all have in solving it.
The second half of the module uses the first half of the module as a springboard to tackle key developments in international climate politics and the green transition: the new US-China relation and the outsized impact it will have on the climate; the present and future of the unequal and exploitative relation between North and South; why climate change is not just a collective action problem but perhaps more so a distributional problem; the legitimacy of, and our addiction to, fossil fuels and a comfortable consumerist life; and finally, diving more in-depth in the politics and economics of solutions, and the various forms of activism that can get us there.
An important note: each week, the course proposes to have an integrated approach, which means not just analysing the problem and uncovering its origins – which if done repeatedly week after week can prove highly frustrating. Instead we will also systematically discuss solutions and scenarios for the future on each occasion. Our approach will be that we cannot be naive nor fall prey to “doomerism”, but that instead we need to be realist, practical, yet dare to be bold.
Aims and Objectives
This course offers students a pluralist, yet critical exploration of the issue of climate change through an IPE lens.
It proposes a fresh and novel approach to teaching and studying climate change, in two respects:
1) the material: the material assembled here is the most cutting-edge scholarship (and news/think tank coverage) on the political economy of climate change. This allows the course to discuss the most recent issues going on in the world today, while maintaining a strong grounding in historical research.
2) the approach: here, the first objective of the course is to not replicate the traditional way of teaching IPE. Usually, such modules usually starts with mainstream or classical approaches in a first half, and explores more “peripheral”, critical approaches in a second half.
Instead, this course proposes a blend of “mainstream” and critical IPE approaches throughout the term, to provide a pluralist outlook on the issue of climate change which emphasises the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches in assessing the multifaceted nature of the problem, and building the solutions to it. This allows any week to combine some of the advantages of traditional approaches such as institutionalism to the analysis of policy issues, while putting for instance feminist and decolonial insights to work to provide a truly comprehensive and just analysis to a given problem.
The second objective of the course is to not replicate the traditional way of teaching the environmental and climate crisis. The first point is that usually, such modules start by presenting the economics of environmental issues, to then turn to more political aspects. Secondly, such modules have a tendency to divide issues into “silos”, or sectors, such as “energy, food, production, finance”, or “domestic climate policy, international climate negotiations” — exploring those topics one after the other, in an artificially separated way. Instead, this course offers a holistic approach which assembles various sectors, issues, policy areas, timescales and geographical scales in any given week to provide an integrated assessment of the main issues each week — even when seemingly reproducing silos, it in fact offers an IPE approach that maintains linkages with other topics (for instance, the course consistently discusses the state with reference to the private sector, and the private sector with reference to the state), which always adds up to a full-fledged, comprehensive approach.
Altogether then, the aim of the course is to provide students with a range of theoretical and methodological tools to firstly understand and analyse the climate issue, and secondly confront and tackle it in their personal, social, political and professional life.
Thomas Da Costa Vieira 