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Environmental and Natural Resource Policy


Course Description

Students will study how the effectiveness of different institutional responses to environmental problems is shaped by underlying legal rules, user characteristics, and resource characteristics. Current research related to environmental policy instruments will be examined across a variety of common-pool resources (e.g., groundwater, fisheries) to environmental externalities (e.g., air pollution, congestion).

Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will work on a journal-length research paper and link concepts covered in the course to their own work. Depending on their position in the graduate program, their paper should be used as the basis for a grant proposal, a dissertation prospectus, or a dissertation chapter.


Athena Title

Env and Nat Resource Policy


Prerequisite

ECON 2106 or ECON 2106E or ECON 2106H or AAEC 2580 or AAEC 2580E or permission of department


Semester Course Offered

Offered fall


Grading System

A - F (Traditional)


Student learning Outcomes

  • Students will understand and explain the key economic principles of environmental policy and use them to analyze policy interventions.
  • Students will evaluate major environmental policy approaches, including command-and-control, market-based, and collective action strategies, and the political processes that shape them.
  • Students will develop and communicate clear, evidence-based policy arguments using appropriate theoretical and empirical support.

Topical Outline

  • Introduction to New Institutional Economics
  • Sustainability as a Problem of Ownership and Responsibility
  • Some Basic Public Economics
  • Solutions to Collective Action Problems: Ideal Types
  • The Politics of Sustainability
  • Common-Pool Resource (CPR) Governance
  • Potential Pitfalls of CPR Governance
  • Property Rights Approaches
  • Potential Pitfalls of Property Rights
  • Global Environmental Challenges: Vulnerability, Adaptive Capacity, and Adaptation
  • Feedback, Lags, and System Resilience

Syllabus


Public CV