At King’s, I teach at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
At undergraduate level, I teach:
- Environmental Governance for third-level undergraduate students in public policy, political economy, PPE.
At graduate level, I teach:
- Comparative Public Policy, one of the core modules of the Masters in Public Policy
- Climate policy and the energy transition, an optional module for Masters students in Public Policy and Political Economy.
In the tabs below I summarize how I go about teaching these things.
The 3rd year undergraduate Environmental Governance module I teach at King’s has been the first of its kind (a module on governance, and on the environment) in the Department of Political Economy. The module focuses on the components of environmental governance (scale, collective action, power & justice, science, and actors) and how they interact to produce solutions (or to achieve nothing) in specific cases of environmental governance processes. The module highlights the political nature of environmental governance processes and the political economy of making decisions to face the consequences of a changing climate. The key takeaway of this module is that the notion of ‘leaving the politics at the door’ is wishful thinking when discussing environmental problems and solutions. Now in its fifth iteration, the module has seen student numbers grow from 25 in 2020/2021 to 133 in 2023/2024 academic year as shown in the plot below.
I take this growing interest to show that students understand that dealing with environmental problems is an inter-disciplinary enterprise, combining politics, political economy, public policy, engineering and climate science.
- In connection with this module, I have created a Shiny app that is meant as an introduction to social network analysis and the way it’s used in environmental governance studies. The app is called VisualGov and it is currently in development.
The MA level Climate policy and the energy transition module I co-convene with Tomas Maltby at King’s is a policy-focused module stemming from the realization that climate policy and energy policy are becoming the same policy topic. It was offered for the first time in 2023/2024.
The MA module in Comparative Public Policy is of the two compulsory modules in the MA Public Policy at the Department of Political Economy at King’s. The other compulsory module is titled The Policy Process and precedes this one. The module is conceived to provide an introduction to the study of public policy in comparative perspective, by using the methods of agreement and difference. Each annual cohort typically comprises around 80 students.