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International Development, Environment & Sustainability
Instructor: Jane Collins
Community and Environmental Sociology 375 section 001; 3 cr; call number: ((tba))
Class meets: TR 2:30 - 3:45 pm
There is no discussion section.
International development, environment and sustainability are contentious terms that structure current debates about globalization. Each of these terms is value-laden: how we think about development, environment and sustainability is interwoven with our most basic assumptions about what is just, fair and desirable for our communities and the world as a whole. In this course, we will work to chart the key social processes that these terms seek to capture, the debates surrounding them, and the conceptual frameworks that we use to interpret them. To accomplish this, we will take a somewhat unusual approach—one based on the concept of global commodity chains. Both scholars and activists have found the concept of the commodity chain useful as a way to think about complex global processes. It can help to simplify and illuminate connections between geographically distant locales and offers an alternative to models of development and sustainability built around the nation-state or the isolated local community. In fact, the idea of the commodity chain provides a means to bridge the local/global divide that troubles much of the research and activism surrounding globalization. We will use it to address issues of sustainable development in a way that addresses processes that span global north and south. Course goals include: gaining an understanding of the key terms: “development” and “sustainability;” learning how they are implicated in contemporary debates over globalization; gaining a critical understanding of frameworks for discussing them; identifying important actors in processes affecting development and sustainability, including government, corporations, transnational institutions and social movements; identifying processes that are involved in securing or compromising sustainable development; learning how to conduct a commodity chain analysis; and gaining concrete knowledge of several global commodity chains and their implications for development and sustainability.
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