Environment, Society and Development in the Global South

This course teaches state-of the art research within the field of environment, society, and development with a specific focus on understanding theoretical approaches to urbanization, rural transformation and coupled human-environment systems in the Global South. The course provides the theoretical and empirical foundations for understanding contemporary sustainability agendas, including approaches to sustainable development.

Within this broad context, the course will focus on societal transformation processes in urban and rural areas in the Global South. As the current dynamic centers of urbanization have shifted to the Global South, there is a growing scholarly attention to urbanization, its varied impacts on economies, livelihoods and environments and the interconnected transformations of both urban and rural contexts. Rural transformation is concerned with long-term trends and transitions in rural areas, including the socio-economic differentiation of the peasantry and the emergence of capitalist farmers and rural workers. This is linked to understandings of coupled human–environmental systems and the course will address the multiple conceptual models that have been proposed to understand this complex relationship, including human and political ecology, land use intensification, land system science, sustainability science, resilience and vulnerability approaches.