Phd Student and Postdoc course in "Science and Politics in Global and Environmental Governance"

The course provides for in-depth insight into the workings of science, politics and governance of environmental and sustainability issues and will allow the doctoral students and early post-doctoral researchers to explore how recent scholarship in environmental governance is investigating the discourses, agents and institutions of environmental politics and policy in a multi-level context. The course focuses on non-state actors, public-private cooperation, and policy making at the local, transnational, intergovernmental and global levels, from various theoretical and methodological perspectives ranging from agent-based modelling in governance research to political ecology and critical theory. The politics of scientific expertise and knowledge production is investigated and the science/policy interface explained. This course invites the doctoral students and early post-doctoral researchers to critically examine conceptual, theoretical, empirical and methodological innovations in this field and to reflect upon its relevance for environmental politics and natural resource management in general, and their thesis projects in particular. The course is an interdisciplinary initiative open to students in social science, law, humanities and natural science.