 I'm Andy Neucham. I am the MSc convener for the MSc on Environment, Politics and Development and this webinar is to introduce people to the MSc programme and to give us a chance to talk about it as well. What we're going to do today is look first at the Department of Development Studies within which this MSc programme sits. Then I want to give you a sort of introduction to MSc Environment, Politics and Development and talk you through what it's about. But I also want to give you a mini lecture which explores an approach called political ecology which is right at the core of this MSc programme. It's the core module and it's the way in which we try to think through the intersection of environment, politics and development. I've got some slides subsequent to that which are more sort of structural about how the degree of programme is structured and what your options are and what you can take etc. And then we'll have a Q&A session at the end where you can ask me either by unmuting your microphones or by putting little questions in the chat box and I shall field your questions as best I can. So let's move on to the overview of the Department of Development Studies. So in 2018 we were ranked fourth in the world for Development Studies in the QR rankings which is a global ranking system. We have about four to six hundred students per year. That's the postgrad numbers anyway. We have more undergraduates as well. We're a department with 27 full-time academics. We have expertise across the global south. We have a very strong postgraduate focus with 11 MSc degree programmes. We have very diverse regional and disciplinary interests although these roughly map on to those of SOAS which tend to be around the Middle East, Africa and Asia and to a lesser extent also Latin America although perhaps that's not the region of the world that we are most famous for. So the thing that you really sort of I guess key into if you come to do a degree with our department and indeed across large parts of SOAS is a commitment to critical scholarship. That is to understand you know contemporary development models but also really to question them and to cover the extent to which they have been questioned and in some ways very fundamentally as well. So that is I guess the background if you like to our sort of degree programme and it's something that characterises to quite a large extent the identity of the degree. So let's just move on to that then. Essentially the MSc in environment politics and development is maybe very clearly characterised in terms of its focus on critical inquiry. We're aiming to reach out to students who are seeking to explore the intersecting social, political, economic and ecological dynamics which give rise both to global environmental change but also to inequitable and unjust forms of development. So it's grounded as I say in this political ecology approach and it also speaks to the broader critical environmental scholarship. It's taught by leading scholars with interest in these areas and we cover a range of environmental issues from water to forestry, climate, fisheries, agricultural production, biodiversity conflict and energy and we're interested in the kinds of landscapes and the kinds of environments which are forged by development and if you look at these two landscapes here one is the biggest open pit gold mine in the world that's in Australia on your left hand side and the other is the line where the palm oil cultivation stops in Palawan, one of the Indonesian islands and where the forest coverage starts and it's that kind of intersection of environment and development if you like that. We're very interested in looking at some brief highlights of the MSc. Some of the things that we're really keen to sort of delve into would be questions around the following. So how does the environment intersect with global poverty, wealth and questions of inequality? Can global environmental problems be resolved through market mechanisms like carbon trading and payments for environmental services? How does access to environmental resources relate to wealth and poverty? Is wildlife conservation implicated in social injustice? What role can and do environmental movements play in development and is there a link between environmental change and conflict? So these are all issues if you like which are very much of the moment but of course as I say we're very keen to see how they come together and we're very sort of focused on demonstrating how processes of environmental degradation and poverty are often linked through broader sort of political and economic processes. The objectives of this MSc program are to showcase and critically engage with scholarship which seeks to reveal the underlying processes which give rise to global environmental crisis and there's a random word in there. We want to foster a critical interrogation of policy and intervention which claims to reconcile and deliver environmentally sustainable development and the question we really have there is, is the solution actually the problem? We have a lot of narratives which say oh yes sustainable development is possible and we have a lot of evidence which suggests that the contrary is actually happening and there's something about looking at how we get to the point where we think that the modes of development which we often call sustainable actually whether they really can be or not if we want to get to the bottom of what kind of environment and development sort of intervention we might be wanting to support. So that brings me to the third point which is that we're really encouraging students to step away from existing paradigms and arrive at their own conclusions about what it works to what it means to work within them. I want people to take for granted that the way in which things are working now is the way if we can get it right is the way that we will achieve a better balance between environmental and development considerations and we want to do that partly by highlighting interrogating and exploring alternatives to mainstream environment and development thinking. Through this we hope to give students the critical tools to the side for themselves what needs to change in environment and development dynamics and the prospects I guess ultimately for doing this within the system if you like but outside of it and to deconstruct those trainings as well because nothing's quite that simple. So that in a nutshell is what this degree programme is about and as I've said already political ecology is an approach that we put at the heart of how we try to understand some of these issues and this is where I want to sort of begin the mini lecture which will give you a flavour of what we actually teach on the MSc programme. These slides are taken from a lecture that I gave only a couple of weeks ago they're slightly adapted and there are not so many of them as there are in that lecture but it's to give you a flavour of what is the approach that we take and what does that look like and I'll also be trying to flesh that out in the context of I guess specific empirical context so that you get some sense not just of the approach itself but how we would apply it to a particular place in the world. So what I want to do is to define political ecology in brief. I want to show you the areas of focus if you like which are of interest to political ecologists and how they map on to what we do in our MSc core module on the political ecology of development. I sort of want to I guess highlight how political ecology might not be understood as one single approach but as a form of argument or almost like a genre if you like unpack what I mean by that a little bit later and then highlight the extent to which political ecology is often very critical of contemporary environment and development processes but entails a search for alternatives so there is if you like the other side which is looking for how do we make change not just critiquing the sorts of change that we currently find ourselves enmeshed in. First of all I want to tackle the question of why we would need an approach like political ecology in some ways ecology is quite a political topic and subject environmentalism more broadly is potentially a very radical project if you think about it in terms of the world that we live in it's about prioritizing environmental quality above economic growth and we may not have got very far in bringing about a greater prioritization but if you think about it the the ultimate sort of underlying objectives are are pretty much at odds with this sort of engine of development that we currently have in the form of global capitalism so why would we need something else like political ecology to to get to grips with what's happening what haven't we got enough already the way that we would answer that question is to say that environmentalism can often be either apolitical or it does not have a full account of social economic and political dynamics of human environmental interactions and so I did a quick google search of the world environmentalism and what images come up against that and so you see these ones that we have here one the top one sort of contrast to sort of a landscape which is full of trees and lions and vultures and it looks like some kind of sub-Saharan African landscape merged with some kind of northern european sort of crop field or something it's a bit it's a bit odd and against that you've got this sort of urbanized sort of industrialized polluting sort of image that we tend to think of as something if you like outside of nature or in contrast to what it is that we want we want to to conserve the thing about that is it doesn't really recognize that cities are natural environments and in fact that you could argue like some people do that it's the rest of nature that has been urbanized precisely through the demand that cities and urban centers place on the world's environment 75 percent or above of all energy and resource usage revolves around the populations that are resident in cities so you could say the rest of the world has been urbanized in in that sense even if it doesn't look like a city then the bottom photo shows the increasing propensity within sort of environmental circles to think of commodifying nature in order to save it so that if you can convince people of what its its value is in dollars then that's the way that you can you can save it so this is all very well but neither of these approaches to environmental really sort of they might recognize the environmentally damaging nature of capitalism but they don't really try to understand why capitalism persists in spite of the huge global environmental damage and the global inequality which it is implicated in generating and if we ask those sorts of questions we might find different kinds of environments different sorts of people that we would want to do research on and we might find that they're not necessarily the ones that environmentalists or conservationists would turn their or our attention towards so on that note this is the kind of landscape this is the kind of environment it's you know it is an environment even if it's not a protected area it's not some kind of pristine landscape untouched by or uninhabited by humans or or their livestock and this is a part of an informal settlement in in a cryo the capital of Ghana called and I've bought blushy and this is a dump site where essentially a lot of the world's sort of spent electronic equipment and in particular computers and you know tablets and smartphones and stuff like that gets sent to be processed in some kind of way so copper and other materials are stripped from the computers ready to be you know sort of sold to put them into into new computers or into into other forms of technology I suppose and what you have here is this this system if you like which connects people people who have quite incredible amounts of knowledge about the sort of chemical properties and the uses to which they can be put off of the materials which make up computers who then link to a group of sort of middlemen who set up their shop around the edges of the of the dump store and who then buy the the salvaged materials and and then there of course are the other people who are organizing for containers of old computers and and old electric equipment to be brought to the dumpster from places like China and Latin America so there's a sense in which this environment which also it doesn't just it's not just inhabited by humans but also by by some of their livestock as you can see there's a sense in which this this environment is a sort of a visual representation of the sorts of political and economic relationships and networks which which forge it it's completely integrated into forms of global trade even as the environmental consequences are only really felt that the most immediate ones and the most deadly ones are only really felt by the people who work there and the people who live around the dump site and what they're what they're doing is they're in some ways they're they're informally if you like part of broader global political and economic processes so you have containers of old electrical equipment being shipped from places like China and Latin America so they're connected to these places and they are recycling some of these materials for use in in other markets and and in in other machines if you like so this is the kind of environment which political ecologists will be interested in how do these people fit into a broader sort of political economy if you like of resource use and in this case resource abandonment what are the implications of that I mean the people who work on this dump site are not exactly wealthy and what are the environmental implications for those sites and as you can see there is this is not a very healthy place to live you can see the guy wearing the gas mask there you can see the photo of those not very healthy looking livestock eating some of what they can find on the dump site so political ecology is really impressive making this kind of landscape much more visible because it's much more representative of if you like the the broader sort of conditions of global capitalism as it relates to questions of poverty and environmental degradation this is a sort of a this is the kind of environment if you like that is of most interest to political ecologists more than say a pristine protected area where humans are prohibited from living although that's also a study a source of study for some political ecologists so I hope that gives you some sense of what do we mean by a landscape which would be interesting to you political ecologists so defining political ecology let's be very clear from the outset that political ecology is much more something that social scientists have written in than ecologists have there are some ecologists you've come over to social sciences such as human geography anthropology sociology political science etc but this is a discipline which or not really a discipline but an area if you like which is dominated by concerns and the questions of the social sciences as they imply sorry as they apply to the environment and what a social scientist we can and sometimes can't understand about the environment so there are various definitions that you could start with and they often I guess a lot of them are they're shaped by economic processes which often leads to a tendency to ask who wins and loses from particular states of affairs who has different interests in them how do they pursue those interests to what extent are they able to achieve those interests and who is prejudiced by this as a result that would be one definition of political economy understanding all of those political processes as they affect broader economic processes so you therefore get in political ecology a concern with words like class access control over resources and the implications for environmental health and sustainable livelihoods another goal can be to explain environmental conflict especially in terms of struggles over knowledge power and practice so here is another thing that political ecology is very much interested in not just what do we know about the environment but how is the environment framed who classifies what kind of problem it is whose voices are heard within that framing whose voices are marginalized within that framing and how can we get at those marginalized voices and you can see that this then links to another goal of for people who are in the field who have been in a position to define political ecology which is to locate movements emerging from the tensions and contradictions of under production crises understanding the imaginary basis of their positions and visions for a better life and the discursive character of their politics and sees the possibilities for broadening environmental issues into a movement for livelihood entitlements and social justice so there are sort of normative um if you like ethical commitments here in terms of how we study what people are doing to resist particular processes which are giving rise to environmental problems and to inequality and to maybe be part of that change as well it's about the way in which political ecology then beyond just particular definitions of it because there are quite a lot of people who do it in quite different ways now and emphasize different parts of it it's not really a theory or a method as such but draws on as I've said before largely social science theories around political economy feminism post structuralism new materialism all of it you'll learn a little bit about if you come and study here and the methods of the social sciences as well ethnography surveys and sometimes but less commonly ecological analysis this is something that the field could really work on um there's a sort of large constituency as we've seen on the borderlands between analysis and action political ecology is both very skeptical of mainstream institutions um involved in environment development processes but there are people who also work in them who are influenced by political ecology and who may be trying to change these institutions along lines that they see um to be um influenced if you like by this kind of framing so um there's a if you like at the heart of uh of this you know it depends how we understand it but that at this sort of movement or this approach uh there are you know a shifting canon of texts if you like from Marx to Gramsci, Pallani, Esther Bozer up, Vandana Schiefer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno LaTour, Dana Haraway, there's a lot of texts which are interested in the I guess relationship between humans and their environment and the things that happen as a result such as in the case of Karl Marx capitalism through the commodification of nature it's um the combination of nature as it is transformed by human labor um into products which can be exchanged in markets which gives rise to capitalism in the first place and in uh of course the classic account by by by Karl Marx someone like Bruno LaTour is very interested in the underlying philosophy of how you describe the relationship between humans and their environments uh and talks about them as assemblages which are always shaping and reshaping each other so that we can't understand them separately they're too entangled and and and stuck together to do that I was talking about the characteristics of political ecology understood broadly as a genre if you think about sort of I don't know okay um back so the things that I have in common many political ecology studies like to track the persistent structures of winning and losing there's often a focus on human and non-human dialectics the way that they both affect and shape each other things often start or end in a contradiction in um political ecology so if we think back to Agbog Blushy the fact that brand new radiators are sent over to Agbog Blushy um to be stripped and put into new equipment that presumably makes it its way somewhere else there isn't another dump site but who knows that kind of contradictory sort of dynamic is often a focus for political ecologists and then there's a lot of making claims about nature and making claims about other people's claims about nature so the ways in which some people represent the environment are sometimes challenged or at least flagged by political ecologists an example would be there was a lot of work in the 1990s in the early 2000s which was looking at the ways in which a lot of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa had been um blamed for all kinds of soil erosion and environmental degradation and deforestation and there were political ecologists who went in and contested those narratives and found evidence either that farmers weren't to blame all that in fact there are things that they were doing which were environmentally friendly that were being missed so if you see there you're making their own claim about nature even as you are contesting somebody else's and underlying that is a sort of I guess a concern with how do you make claims about nature can you make true claims about nature some of the theses of political ecology if you like the main areas of focus one would be on degradation and marginalization which is looking at environmental conditions and it's this I was giving an example of the ways in which political ecologists look at that just before um and it links to module topics that we have in political ecology of development we have a uh we have a week on global environmental history we have one on nature capitalism and political economy on biofuel agrarian change in rural livelihoods all of which in one way shape or form are linked to processes of degradation and marginalization conservation and control the extent to which conservation outcomes and failures are seen as often having pernicious effects which is sometimes implicated in that failure so if you think about the establishment of protected areas either in north america or across vast waves of sub-saharan africa in the process of establishing areas cast as wilderness wilderness is being defined as areas where people don't live sometimes people were living there and were evicted and they found their livelihoods criminalized even though arguably the state of the sort of environment that was deemed worthy of conservation was because of the way in which those people used it so um there's a lot of focus on environmental conflict and exclusion in political ecology this might be things like the resource curse which is the extent to which countries like sierra leone which have diamonds or uh nigeria which have uh which has oil um suffer a kind of curse in the sense that the politics around controlling diamonds are and oil are so nasty and so awful in there um consequences both for for people and for the environments that they live in that you know effectively end up being cursed that's the thesis we explore that in one of our classes is there a link between environmental conflict and security um mining livelihoods and indigenous people there are conflicts between mining companies who want to come in and work in particular areas of land and the particular indigenous groups who may have already lived there and have very different ideas about what they want that land to be used for um there's work on environmental subjects and identity which is the extent to which people's identities are actually shaped by environmental um thinking and that there are political identities and social struggles linked to livelihood and environmental scarcity so this is a kind of um if you think about um people to go back to the example of nigeria who live in the niger delta who are contesting the environmental effects of shell um pipelines which burst and which contaminates the water supplies uh in the places where they live and which have all kinds of nasty effects upon upon people there's an environmental struggle there but it's very much linked to livelihood um political objects and actors um so so show political conditions um which uh in some cases are structured in particular ways which then produce the winners and losers persistently that we were talking about before um so um political and economic systems are shown to be underpinned and affected by non-human actors which are intertwined so there's a whole sort of consideration if you like of the relationship between humans and their environments and how we're affecting each other um and how that what that actually looks like so a place like Agpogbloschi or uh the urban the urbanization of nature that I was talking about right at the start of the presentation I just want to end with a consideration not just of being critical of current um ways of thinking about the environment and of the political and economic conditions which give rise both to poverty marginalization inequality and environmental problems but there's a concern we're trying to do something about this or um working out where you stand in relation to these issues and one of the things that you're trying to do is explore alternatives and adaptations and creative human action in the face of mismanagement and exploitation so it's always trying to unearth what people are doing differently which might give us a different idea about what an environmentally sustainable practice might look like what well-being in human terms um might depend upon other than the the commodification of nature so there's always a concern there as I've said before with with highlighting some of these alternatives and we look at some of them in the module itself the structure of the MSc program what you'll essentially be doing is acquiring 180 credits of uh across the whole of the MSc which comprises 120 talk credits and a 60 credit dissertation most of this will come through talk modules which mostly are 30 credits but there are some 15 credit ones so you could study four or six modules across the course of the year most of the teaching falls basically between that pretty much all the teaching falls between October uh the start of October and sort of the end of March we've just finished with our terms now there are activities in the third term of the year but that's when the bulk of the talk work will be and then you have revision sessions and and particular study skill sessions um and maybe chats about career and what you might want to do next in combination with working full time on your dissertation in the third term and then into the summer so there are different module types um there are core ones which the core one for this is political ecology of development there are some compulsory ones which are here below so you would choose um two of these theory policy and practice of development political economy of development political economy of violence conflict and development or law and natural resources and then you have an optional module here are the ones from development studies just to give you some sense of what what we do so we um you can see some of the interests of the department here around agrarian change for example around cities around civil society social movements political economy of course is a big one for us gender and development global commodity chains you get some sense of what I was referring to before when I was talking about the critical bent of the department of development studies that's really what our reputation sort of is is for I suppose and that's really the kind of scholarship which we will get you engaged with uh if you come and study with us if you are interested in finding out about some of the optional modules you can choose across SOAS from other departments if you click on the link there I don't know if it will work or whether you might have to copy and paste it into your browser um that will take you through to the page where I've just sort of taken a bit of a photo and pasted it onto this slide which gives you PDFs of all of the open options that you can take across all of the other centers and departments that we have um in SOAS so there's a there's a lot of stuff there that you could try and get to your head around we have our first question here from Bethan which is are there any exams no I've not covered that so you haven't missed it and we have it's 100% assessed by coursework so you'll have one essay well it depends on what you take most of what we do in development studies now is some kind of coursework assessment there are some modules not very many now but ones like political economy of development which do have exams okay do you need to have a background in environmental politics for this course what we say is that you generally need to have some kind of um social science degree although we do have people who come across from the natural sciences we've got ecologists studying right now we've got people who've done environmental engineering and and um they've they're coming across because they want to get the sort of social and political side of the environmental um expertise that they they already have um if you also have a degree say in the humanities or the arts we have had people do our degrees do this degree but you tend then to need some kind of experience uh or you need to be able to demonstrate to us that you understand some of the issues say if you're when you're applying there's a personal statement that place where you can where you can do that does that answer your question Fabian is the course available for part-time students yes it is um you can do two or you can do three years um three years is the maximum you can do it in and I should really put that on my slides for next time shouldn't I that's a very um that's a question which will be a relevance to a lot of people who come along to this sort of webinar so thanks for raising it Fabian what kind of dissertation topics that were usually written by students of environment politics and development um gosh that's a good question um they tend to be something which um link to something they've either come to the university with and want to research more so sometimes people take a break from their careers or they want to make the next step in their careers by taking an msc like this one