Course content

Finding ways for all people to attain and sustain well-being, while maintaining the ecological foundations that keep our planet liveable, represents one of the most profound challenges facing humanity. The course examines this tension through diverse analytical lenses that connect environmental issues and changes with social, economic, and political structures and dynamics.

Students will be introduced to debates and analyses linking population growth and consumption with biophysical limits and will examine how these challenges are complicated by inequalities across scales from the local to the global. The course introduces biophysical, economic, and ethical approaches to sustainability and environmental governance, alongside political ecology and environmental justice perspectives.

The course engages with concepts and illustrative cases of resource use, access, and control regimes, examining how they relate to societal structures and (in)equality, shape environmental outcomes, and are intertwined with diverging perspectives and conflicts. It explores key sustainability challenges such as land use change, agriculture, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, nature conservation conflicts, and climate change. The course links conceptual perspectives and global overviews with empirical cases from different parts of the world, including Norway.

Learning outcome

A student who has completed this course should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge:

• understand key debates on environment-society relations and sustainability.
• be familiar with varied approaches to analysing sustainability challenges.
• recognise how population dynamics, unequal consumption patterns, and technological change interact with biophysical limits, and how inequalities across scales complicate sustainability challenges.
• understand how resource use, access, and control regimes and the roles of different actors shape environmental and social outcomes.
• have knowledge of key global sustainability challenges, including land-use change, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and nature conservation conflicts.

Skills:

• be able to apply different conceptual perspectives to examine sustainability challenges across contexts and scales.
• be able to reflect and contribute to discussions on alternative ideas and approaches to achieving and sustaining well-being within ecological limits.
• be able to link conceptual understanding with real-world challenges of creating more just and sustainable futures.
• be able to analyse different resource use, access, and control regimes as well as the roles, perspectives, and conflicts of diverse actors in environmental and natural resource governance.

General competence:

• be able to engage critically and constructively in discussions about sustainability and environmental governance.
• acknowledge the complexity of sustainability challenges and the need for interdisciplinary perspectives.
• demonstrate enhanced analytical and academic writing skills.

Learning methods and activities

The course combines up to 26 hours of lectures and up to 10 hours of seminars with varied discussion formats, peer-review, readings, and a one-day field trip.

Please note that compulsory activities and lectures may be scheduled earlier than the deadline for registering for the course.

Teaching will only be given if a sufficient number of students register for the course and if the Department has sufficient teaching resources. See www.ntnu.edu/studies/courses for the most up to date information on the courses not being offered.

Compulsory assignments

• Individual assignments
• Active participation in seminars and group work
• Participation in the field trip

Recommended previous knowledge

Completed GEOG1010, GEOG1011, GEOG1012, GEOG1013, GEOG1014.

Required previous knowledge

None.

Credit reductions