International Environmental Negotiation
As taught in: Fall 2002
Smog hovers over Mexico City. (Image courtesy of Christian Figenschou.)
Instructors:
Prof. Lawrence Susskind
MIT Course Number:
11.364
Level:
Course Features
Course Highlights
With the growing necessity for sustainability and environmental protection, education on the negotiations and topics surrounding the environment become important for students in all fields. This class takes a look at the international issues that come into play regarding the environment, and has an extensive reading list covering those topics.
Course Description
The class will explore the obstacles to achieving sustainability; in particular, the difficulties of managing common resources, achieving transboundary pollution control, making tradeoffs between economic and social development needs and environmental resource protection, and harmonizing environmental protection standards. At their core, these problems must be addressed through international or multi-lateral negotiations. We will focus especially on problems of representation and voting, issue linkage, balancing science and politics, and monitoring and enforcement in negotiations of these kinds. We will also examine these issues in light of actual treaty negotiations especially the on-going efforts to implement the Climate Change Convention. The class will operate as a research seminar. Each student will be expected to prepare and present an analysis of a specific international environmental negotiation which is heavily prescriptive.
*Some translations represent previous versions of courses.
