Environment and Local Communities

In today's increasingly globalized world local communities often lose control over resourses, for example when external actors over-exploit or expropriate previously common natural resources or when extreme weather conditions with long-lasting drought make earlier forms off arming and stock-raising impossible.  In some parts of the world such changes have forced certain groups to migrate seasonally or more permanently to the growing big cities or to other countries.

The course offers deepened insight into the role of local communities in a changing world. It deals with the obstacles and possibilities that local and smaller social communities face in managing resources and creating long-term sustainability. Pollution of the environment, emissions and various forms of negative environmental impacts are not equally distributed across the world and the course examines the political and cultural geography of this environmental impact and use of resources in time and space. The course deals with different theoretical perspectives  using a number of concrete case studies as starting point.