People, Poverty and Environmental Change

The world is experiencing rapid and unprecedented changes, including the depletion of environmental resources. This has profound adverse effects on people and communities who rely on these resources for their livelihoods. An open question is also whether poverty drives environmental degradation or whether the causality predominantly runs in the opposite direction. Balancing environmental and social concerns and achieving sustainability is an analytical and practical challenge.

In this course, we focus on poverty and environmental change. We explore key concepts and perspectives from social science disciplines focusing on livelihood strategies and how they change over time. The course is research-based and develops students’ quantitative and qualitative skills through working with original research data. We use cases to highlight the relationship between environmental resources, institutional arrangements, poverty and wellbeing. And we discuss how external factors such as climate change, market forces, and state legislation affect local resource control and access and how that affects rural livelihoods.

A vital component of the course is its focus on both quantitative and qualitative tools for understanding and analyzing rural livelihoods. This provides students with a solid foundation for critically assessing and reflecting on academic representations of livelihoods and linking local issues to broader developmental processes. Through this work, we aim to provide students essential skills for conducting thesis work involving fieldwork in the Global South.