The Politics of Global Climate Change
University of Manchester
Political Science
Spring 2021
Prof. Matthew Paterson
Masters
Group projects
This course will discuss the dynamics of climate change politics. Climate change is both one of the most significant consequences of and challenges for contemporary politics. We explore climate politics primarily through a political economy lens, focused on the dynamics of capitalism, but explore the limits of this lens in particular in relation to questions of culture and everyday life, the role of the state, and international cooperation. The course is organised sequentially to get you to think about three distinct questions about climate change politics: the political-economic origins of climate change; the political economy of responses to climate change; and the sort of transformational politics that thinking about the future in a climate-changed world entails.