Katrina Z. S. Schwartz
Assistant Professor
234 Anderson
(352) 273-2371
kzss@ufl.edu
Office hours
fall 2010 TBA
Graduate seminars
Environmental Politics
How
do politics -- ideas, institutions, interests, and power relationships
-- shape humans' interactions with the natural environment? This
seminar takes a thematically eclectic and geographically broad approach
to this overarching question, drawing upon a wide range of
social-scientific perspectives. The course is organized in two parts,
essentially divided along the global North/South axis, because not only
do environmental constraints and political contexts differ strikingly
in the "two worlds", so too do the topics and analytical approaches
pursued by scholars working in these regions. Part I explores the
politics of environmental policy-making in the global North, focusing
on relationships among governmental and private actors. Topics include
collaborative management, inter-agency competition and cooperation,
ecological modernization, risk and precaution, and the politics of
science, expertise, and knowledge production. Part II centers on the
nexus of environmental and development in the global South, examining
key analytic paradigms such as sustainable development, common-pool
resource institutions, political ecology, and eco-governmentality.
Water Politics
This course offers
an
interdisciplinary exploration of "water
politics" -- that is, the political dimensions of human manipulation of
water, wetlands and watersheds. While the substantive focus is water,
the course is designed to provide a broader introduction to social-scientific
theorizing about human-environment relations; it is thus of interest
also to students not specializing
in water-related topics.
Employing a range of
geographically diverse case studies, we examine major topics in water
politics, including: large-scale hydrodevelopment and grassroots
resistance thereto (as a subset of the contested history of
international development policy more broadly); the
governance and use of
common-pool resources; the emergence of
participatory and community-based water
management policies; the "neoliberalization" of
water resources
through privatization, marketization and commodification; and conflict
and cooperation in the governance of transboundary waters. Our
examination is guided analytically by themes central to the environmental social sciences: power; political economy; institutions; discourse; and the social embeddedness of science.
Drawing from not only
political science but also geography, sociology, anthropology and other
disciplines, course readings provide the necessary basic background in
social theory to make this analytical approach accessible to students
with little training in social sciences.
A central objective of the course is thus to provide analytical tools f or thinking critically about how and why water resource policies are crafted and implemented in particular ways. How, for example, is the deployment of scientific and technical expertise in water resource policymaking a fundamentally political enterprise? Why did the 20th-century witness such grandiose efforts at hydro-engineering, and what types of governing institutions and political alliances were required for the realization of these efforts? Why has "development" been such a powerful discourse in the post-WWII, post-colonial era, and at the same time why has it wrought such spectacular environmental damage while failing to improve human welfare? Why have neoliberal policies recently become so widespread in water resource management, and what are the social and political consequences of this policy shift.
