PGDip Sustainable Development

This module offers a deep dive into the concept of sustainable development, equipping students with a nuanced understanding of its definitions and implications for policy and decision-making. It critically examines the evolution of sustainable development, addressing the contradictions and challenges inherent in this broad approach. Students will engage critically with current debates, exploring mainstream and alternative perspectives of sustainable development around issues such as justice, equality, ethics, and decoloniality. The course will also tackle pressing global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and gender disparities, highlighting their impacts on the planet and its inhabitants. Students will gain critical analysis and research skills as well as the opportunity to contribute their own understandings, reflections and experiences of sustainable development.

This module is about biodiversity as the material and conceptual phenomenon which links conservation and development. How biodiversity is treated is one of the fundamental determinants of the nature of society for current generations, and for how future generations will live. A key aspect of this module Is to examine current understanding of global threats to biodiversity and to demonstrate how heavily implicated development processes are in the magnitude of these threats. The links between biodiversity and social and political organisation are explored.

This module assists students in understanding the nature of poverty, its causes, its consequences, trends in poverty reduction, and debates over the drivers of these trends. There is an emphasis on assisting students to gain a rigorous and critical understanding of key concepts used in international poverty debates, and on showing how the definitions of poverty that we use affect our evaluation of poverty incidence and trends, and the policies prescribed to tackle poverty.

The module examines food (in)security structured around the internationally recognised pillars of food security. Students will explore the challenges of nutrition in a world where a growing number of countries (and households) suffer from the double burden of undernutrition and obesity as well as situations of food crisis such as conflict and climate change. This module introduces key concepts related to food security and social protection, including the themes of poverty, vulnerability and the different approaches to addressing food insecurity. Students will evaluate a variety of social protection approaches aimed at mitigating food insecurity and are encouraged to reflect on the political economy that influences context and outcomes.

This module explores the main issues around climate change mitigation and the transition to a low-carbon development. Global climate change poses a serious threat to international development efforts. To reduce emissions and achieve human development, there is a need for serious global and local commitments to low- carbon development. This module elaborates the key issues and concepts in the field of low-carbon development, and their interactions with critical debates on poverty and poverty reduction, economic growth, social justice, inequalities, sustainable development and transformative changes.

This module examines the theory and practice of adapting to climate change. It considers the underlying global political and economic conditions which influence differences in vulnerability to climate impacts and how the processes governing how we adapt are fundamentally intertwined with development.

This module provides an opportunity to study and understand fundamental theories, concepts and tools relevant to the management of water and land resources. Management of water, land and the linkages between are key for sustainable development, and affect both the developed and developing world. The themes of climate change, poverty, gender, equity, development and sustainability are treated as cross-cutting in this module.

This module provides an overview of the major contemporary issues in global environmental change and sustainability which are of critical importance for environment and sustainability policy locally and globally. In addition to an exploration of the processes global environmental change, students will engage with critical questions about politics and power relations influencing sustainability implementation.
These are placed in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This module explores current challenges and trends in urbanization, focusing on their connections to social and environmental sustainability issues. Students will investigate historical urban development and essential components of sustainable urban systems including water, energy, the built environment, transport, communication, food, and health. The module will examine how these elements contribute to city functionality, their evolving nature, and the policies and approaches that seek to ensure sustainable, just and equitable urban environments. Students will develop research skills in data collection and case studies while also honing reflective skills based on their personal experiences and contexts.

This course provides a grounding in analytical approaches to the political economy of violence, conflict and development. It will discuss empirical trends, difficulties of data collection and the importance of categorization and boundaries to matters of violence before moving onto some of the foundational theories on conflict and violence including gender perspectives, debates about the origins of human violence, and the role of violence in historical change.

This module introduces students to the study of gender as it intersects with, and is embedded in, the field and discourse of development, through a range of issues, debates, and concepts. The module is founded on the understanding of gender as a social construction and an understanding of development as a construction with competing and contested frameworks. Students identify, analyse, and critique how different approaches and policies in development both impact upon and are impacted by gender.