Sustainability Governance Challenges

Many of the sustainability grand challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change and food challenges require fundamentally different ways of understanding, deciding, and acting. In this course, you will advance your social science perspective on the causes, consequences and interdependencies of sustainability challenges, and relate to life sciences knowledge. You will be introduced to and critically appraise state-of-the-art transformational theories. You will reflect on the uncertainty and complexity of sustainability challenges and how to confront this via legal, regulatory and governance arrangements. Moreover, you will reflect on the ethical and moral challenges of the governance of sustainability transformations, including equity and justice inherent to system transformations. This course sets the scope for the rest of the Master programme Governance of Sustainability Transformations. You will develop a personal sustainability leadership mission and learning plan that will guide you through the master programme.

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:

• analyze current and future sustainability challenges in food, climate, energy and biodiversity systems aided by the application of life sciences knowledge of the causes, consequences, and trade-offs;
• engage with natural science arguments and integrate them into governance debates;
• critically appraise transformational theories related to sustainability challenges;
• analyse transformative change from ethical and moral perspectives, including equity, justice, inclusiveness and philosophy of science;
• evaluate social science academic literature on sustainability challenges;
• develop a personal sustainability leadership mission and learning plan.