GEOG 2139 - Environmental Management

The course will provide a critical survey of the contemporary field of environmental policy, planning and management in the Australian and international contexts. The course is centrally concerned with understanding deliberate efforts to translate environmental knowledge into action in order to achieve particular outcomes in the way landscapes, societies and/or natural ecosystems are used and managed. It will also consider how the objectives for land and resource use are shaped, fashioned and contested in democratic and non-democratic settings. The course will introduce students to the dominant management models that have been applied historically. This work will set the scene for an analysis of contemporary approaches to environmental policy making, planning and management. The course will critically examine contemporary thinking on these environmental themes including: sustainable use practices, political-ecology, decentralised environmental management, NGO and community-based approaches, social learning, and regional and urban planning. A feature of the course's examination of contemporary approaches will be in-depth critical analyses of prominent cases of environmental management, including Regional Forest Agreements and the Murray Darling Basin Authority in the Australian context, and the emerging international environmental challenges for climate change adaptation, agro-ecosystems, biodiversity conservation and megacities.