Faculty
Associate prof. Ole Helmersen

Course Coordinator
Associate prof. Ole Helmersen

Climate change is not just an environmental problem requiring technical and managerial solutions. It is also very much a political arena where a variety of actors – state agencies, corporations, industrial associations, NGOs etc. engage in contestation and collaboration over regimes of governance and ways of framing and influencing the climate change debate to these actors’ desired ends. This course examines the agendas which these actors try to promote and the ways in which they try to do so; i.e. the political processes in climate change debates and the results of these.

The theoretical perspectives drawn on will include global governance theory, risk theory, theories on the framing of public policy and discourse analysis.

The course will be taught as a combination of lectures/teacher-led discussions and students working with and presenting ‘case studies’ relevant to the climate change debate.

The course aims to train students’ ability to analyse and understand the many, messy and very conflicting tendencies which characterise the climate change debate and to understand these in the light of the theoretical perspectives applied to decode climate change debates.

Mini projects. To assess students’ ability to define, discuss and analyse a particular issue under the umbrella of climate change politics informed by (parts of) the theoretical core of the course.

(possibly): Malone, Elizabeth L. (2009) Debating Climate Change. Earthscan (130 pages)

Other: A specially prepared compendium of book chapters and articles. (Number of pages not known at this point)