Handbook

Are you interested in understanding and tackling important environment-development challenges in the 21st century? Do you think a community-based approach to development and environment management delivers more sustainable and equitable outcomes? The course interrogates these and many more critical questions surrounding the community-based approach to development and environmental management. The course exposes you to a sophisticated understanding of the current development and environment issues affecting the well-being of local communities in Australia and developing countries. Specifically, the course provides you with the necessary theoretical background as well as a set of case studies to understand and tackle real-world environmental and development challenges. Through this course, you will have an opportunity to integrate social, economic and environmental aspects of development and environmental issues, and the concepts are discussed through the lens of sustainable development from a societal perspective. Ideas and issues are presented as contested entities because of the multiplicity of diverse, and at times, diametrically opposed stakeholder interests. The approach of the course, therefore, eschews the “one right way” approach to development and environment management in favour of an approach based on understanding the diverse and complex societal contexts in which development and environment professionals operate. Different approaches to managing the environment and development projects and programs are illustrated throughout by means of relevant case studies. You will be able to explore whether and how different policies and practices are working (or not working), and how policy responses can be made more equitable and sustainable at the community level.