*This course is being offered F09*

This course will examine how society manages - and sometimes fails to manage - environmental issues that fall beyond the authority or capability of a single national government. The course will examine relevant theoretical literatures from political science, law, and policy analysis, in order to characterize the systematic problems of making and implementing international policy to manage collective risks and resources; examine the approaches that have been proposed to mitigate these problems; and assess the available evidence of the effectiveness of these approaches. Topics to be considered will include scientific and technical assessment, negotiation of formal treaties as well as declarations, statements of principle, workplans, and other soft-law instruments; the establishment and management of international organizations; implementation and compliance systems, and initiatives by non-state actors as alternatives or supplements to government action; and the linkage of international environmental issues to issues of trade, international economic policy, security, and development. In addition, the course will examine past and present policy on several international environmental issues (including both pollution and resource-management issues). For each issue considered, the course will take distinct perspectives of description, explanation, and assessment. We will describe the history and present status of attempts to manage the issue, and our knowledge about it. We will employ casual reasoning, attempting to explain the policy outcomes we see. And we will look to assess the effectiveness with which the issue is being managed, relative to its apparent severity and urgency. Overall, the perspective of the course will be synthetic: it will seek to apply insights from research and scholarship to help advance practical understanding of what is happening, why, and how things might be done better. The bridge between theory and practice will go both ways: we will both use theoretical concepts to help understand specific issues, and use the evidence from these issues to help criticize and refine theoretical claims.