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Sustainable development means different things to different people. Most definitions imply an appropriate balance between economic, ecological and social developments, the achievement of human well-being for all, and the balance between current and future generations, and between local and global developments. Students are challenged to assess the multiple dimensions, interlinkages and consequent trade-offs involved in the field of sustainable development by examining most important concepts and theories regarding the environment-economy-society interface from various disciplines. Throughout the course, students will discuss sustainable development in relation to its challenges for (sustainability) science and policy-making.

The quest for a sustainable society challenges our political-institutional system, where we observe a shift from a ‘government-model’ to ‘governance-approaches’. However, like sustainable development, governance is a contested concept. It’s about new relations between actors from different societal domains, such as the state, the market, and the civil society. It’s about collective action by multiple actors, involving multiple sectors at multiple scale levels. It’s about new multi-actor constellations, and their structures, institutions, processes, resources and instruments. It’s about different modes of governance, depending on prevailing worldviews and perspectives.

In matters of sustainable development, policy making and knowledge production are entangled in many ways. Policy makers, for instance, will need scientific knowledge to justify and target their plans. Likewise, scientists hope to make their findings about sustainability useful and to inform policy makers. In this course we will investigate the various ways in which scientific knowledge production and policy making are intertwined or clash.

To facilitate policymaking in the pursuit of sustainable development, sustainability assessment can assist in the task of making both problems and solutions more concrete. An important element is problem structuring: the analysis of drivers, uncertainties and problem perceptions pertaining to the sustainability issue under investigation. It also includes the exploration of possible future pathways, and the evaluation of multiple policy strategies through which sustainable development might be pursued.

The Sustainability Assessment project requires students to compare, combine and integrate different concepts, methods and tools, and transferring them to the case study context in order to develop a sound research plan, which will be carried out by the student project team during the course.

Given the existence of global environmental problems, it is of utmost importance to have adequate international law approaches in order to steer the behavior of governments and private actors towards more sustainable behavior. At the same time, the international community has acknowledged that environmental law should not have a single environmental focus and that law should be developed on the basis of a balance between economic, social and environmental concerns. It is however not easy to reconcile the often single-focused legal approaches, based on competences for regulatory action, with such a broad balancing of different interests.