This course explores how the peoples of an increasingly stressed planet earth can achieve better lives for themselves, their neighbors, and their posterity. Our focus is on the long-term, large-scale pathways of human development that emerge from the intertwined systems of nature and society that characterize our planet today in what some have called its “Anthropocene” epoch. In particular, we address two pernicious attributes of current development pathways:
(1) They are achieving their many gains in ways that degrade the resources (natural and social) on which future prosperity depends.
(2) They are fundamentally inequitable: a privileged minority improves their lives while limiting opportunities for everyone else—particularly today’s poor and vulnerable communities, as well as future generations.
The course seeks to understand how these ills can be remedied through collaborative actions and capacity building efforts that support the transition to more just and sustainable pathways of development. It does so via the systematic exposition of a theoretical framework grounded in sustainability science that we then use to analyze a series of in-depth case studies in sustainable development prepared especially for the course.