Environment and Development -- Second class of the term

This week's topic was "Environment and Global Political Economy".  I continued to build the foundation for our study, to come later this term, of some more specific environmental topics that relate to the Global South.

I asked the students to study these readings before the class:

• Jennifer Clapp, "Environment and global political economy," in: Gabriela K�tting, ed., Global Environmental Politics: Concepts, Theories and Case Studies, (Routledge, 2011), pp. 42-55.
• Shangrila Joshi, "North-South relations: colonialism, empire and international order," in: Paul G. Harris, ed., Routledge Handbook of Global Environmental Politics (Routledge, 2016), pp. 272-283.
• Catherine Weaver and Ralf J. Leiteritz, "�Our Poverty Is a World Full of Dreams:� Reforming the World Bank," Global Governance, 2005, 11: 369-388.

And for the class itself (after some thought!) I decided to focus on three topics, each of which only touched on very large areas of study and debate: a quick overview of the lingering consequences of colonialism, the environmental dimensions of colonialism, and the relation between economic growth and sustainability.

My starting point was the controversy that erupted two weeks ago about an article in Third World Quarterly that aimed to show that colonialism had actually been a pretty good thing.  The article itself was an absurd and shoddy piece of work, but I thought the reaction to it demonstrated well how central colonialism remains to our understanding of contemporary global economic and political divisions.

And so here's how the class went, as represented by my slides: