東西文明学I（環境と身体２）

Over the last decades, the world is facing unprecedented global environmental challenges – biodiversity loss, climate change, deforestation, pollution, health risks. This ecological planetary crisis is in turn underpinned by socio-economic disparities and inequalities across groups and regions. As a response, an international sustainable development agenda grounded on a “green economy” that can tackle both environmental and socio-economic challenges has emerged, resulting in a variety of environmental governance forms and policies. Yet tackling global environmental and sustainability problems ultimately depends on solving ecological distribution conflicts across regions, groups and over generations. This in turn requires understanding the social conflicts emerging from the unfair access to natural resources and the unjust burdens of environmental degradation, from which social mobilization processes of a variety of groups and communities across the globe emerge.

The course introduces key concepts and approaches from the fields of political ecology and ecological economics from which to develop a critical perspective on international environmental governance and the “green economy”, so as to understand social mobilization processes related to the environment. Ecological distribution conflicts, environmental racism, environmental justice, the environmentalism of the poor, ecological debt, agroecology, and ecofeminism are some of the concepts explored in depth throughout the course. The United Nations’ and other global environmental initiatives, particularly in agriculture, biodiversity and climate change, are analyzed in connection to social mobilization processes for environmental justice from both the North and the South.