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Friday 7 November
Intro
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Warwick’s Politics of Climate Change MA provides students with a deep understanding of the political dimensions of climate change. It explores the political opportunities and obstacles to addressing climate change and its effects at the global, regional and national levels.
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Warwick’s Politics of Climate Change MA equips students with a deep, critical, and actionable understanding of climate change and its political dimensions. It explores and explains opportunities for, and obstacles to, addressing climate change, and its effects, at the global, regional and national levels.
Overview
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The Master's in the Politics of Climate Change gives students the knowledge, skills and vision to translate critical insight into practical change in an increasingly complex, competitive and fragile world, to respond to one of the greatest challenges humanity is facing.
Climate change is a political problem – it raises fundamental questions about the nature of our societies, what drives our politics, and how major transformation can happen. To address this all-encompassing crisis, we first need to ask some of the big, complex questions that underlie everything: What shapes how we see climate change within wider contexts? What do we value, and how is this changed by climate change; does this reality prompt us to rethink assumptions about the world we’ve been taking for granted? What is justice in relation to climate change? Who gets a say in how it is governed, and who benefits? What should be the purpose and remit of politics – and of the economy? What drives change – and what are the power dynamics behind this? What kind of world do we want and need to create?
This course equips students both to critically engage with these major questions and to develop a deep understanding of how they can inform and improve public policy on climate change. It addresses the politics of climate change in all its diversity and at all levels, from the local, regional and national to the global, and through different perspectives and methodologies, including political theory, political economy, international relations, public policy and governance. The course is taught by leading scholars: from the meaning of climate justice to the political economy of energy transitions, the power dynamics behind climate politics and sustainability transformations, environmental public policy and party politics, how climate policy relates to other core policy areas, and the global politics of development, decoloniality and North-South relations.
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The PaIS Masters in the Politics of Climate Change is unique in its ability to place climate change policy within embedded political, economic, and social contexts. It equips students to be able to ask, and find answers to, some of the big, complex questions that sit behind our ability to meet net zero ambitions and targets. Understanding the complexities of climate politics can inform more lasting and just policy design.
Key thematic areas explored include: just transitions; fossil fuel phase out and incumbency; decolonial perspectives; green growth & de-growth; loss & damage; geopolitics of sustainable transitions; power & democracy; and climate denial and obstruction.
Alongside regular modules, students will be offered unique learning and networking opportunities: including negotiation and advocacy training (Café Diplomatico); and engagement with the PaIS Environmental Cluster and the university-wide Sustainability Spotlight group – both of which organise regular research and networking events.
This MA includes three core components: two climate-specific modules and a dissertation, leaving students to choose from a wide range of other climate change, public policy, development, international security, political theory, and international political economy modules. This MA is taught by world leading researchers in their fields, including: Professor Simon Caney; Dr Marit Hammond; Professor Caroline Kuzemko; and Dr Mitya Pearson.
Key transferable skills that you will gain:
• Ability to critically engage with the systemic politics of addressing one of the greatest-ever challenges to the world
• Understanding of how climate policies are shaped by, and help to re-shape, political, economic, and social contexts
• Insights into key opportunities for, and obstacles to, climate action, and into how to design more sustainable and feasible policies
• Ability to critically evaluate climate policy options and strategies
• Exposure to public policy; international political economy; and political theory approaches to climate change