Utrecht University

Earth System Governance

The track Earth System Governance concerns the governance of human-induced environmental change from a planetary perspective. Central to this track is the concept of earth system governance, which builds on earlier notions such as environmental policy and management, but puts these into the broader context of earth system transformations. As such, the Earth System Governance track is necessarily interdisciplinary, introducing students to a wide-ranging literature from the fields of political science, sociology, geography, economics, and law.

You will:

• be equipped with research and intervention skills that they will need in their future professional career;
• be able to apply paradigms, concepts and theories from the social sciences to analyse and explain issues of sustainable development and to design ecologically sensible and socially acceptable solutions;
• gain insight in the importance of conducting both social science and natural science analyses of sustainability issues and will have the skills needed to work in a multidisciplinary team.
   

Energy & Materials

The track Energy and Materials examines the production and consumption of energy and materials in society, and the possibilities for sustainable development within energy and material systems. One area of research concerns the description and explanation of historical developments; another area looks towards the future and concerns possible technological and societal developments, including technological opportunities and policy development.

You will:

• be able to apply the knowledge, methods, and techniques of the natural sciences, and to a lesser extent those of the social sciences, when analysing energy systems and materials systems and the possibilities for a sustainable development of these systems;
• gain insight in the importance of both the natural science and the social science aspects of sustainability issues and will have the skills needed to work in a multidisciplinary work environment.

Environmental Change and Ecosystems

The track Environmental Change and Ecosystems is concerned with the interaction between human activities and the quality of the physical and biotic environment. The multidisciplinary character of the programme appears from the integration of knowledge from the fields of physical geography, hydrology, landscape ecology, toxicology, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Some of the relevant priority areas are the following:

• land use;
• dispersal of substances in water, soil, and air;
• impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity;
• possibilities for remediation;
• and the value assigned to the quality of nature and the environment.

You will:

• be able to apply the knowledge, methods, and techniques (for instance, mathematical simulation models) of the natural sciences in an effort to improve the quality of the environment and ecosystems by way of changes in human activities;
• gain insight in the importance of conducting social science analyses of sustainability issues and will have the skills needed to work in a multidisciplinary team.

Political Ecology and Society

Politics, Ecology and Society is an interdisciplinary social and natural sciences track focusing on the political, economic, cultural, material and social structures that underpin social and ecological injustices within and across global regions. This track emphasizes the co-constitution of ecological, social and political processes and addresses it by critically examining global socioecological interconnections and injustices, as well as interventions seeking to transform them. This track places emphasis on practical engagement, such as field work, and combines it with theoretically-informed analysis and empirical research, with insights from political ecology, anthropology, human geography, development studies, sociology, science and technology studies, ecology and environmental sciences.

Here are some examples of research themes you could focus on in this track.

• How are politics of sustainable development shaped today? How do they affect our knowledge of ecological and social processes?
• How are spatially distant world regions interconnected and interdependent through flows of energy, natural resources, ideas, people, and what social, economic, political structures and knowledge determine such interconnections?
• What do socially and ecologically just transformations look like in different socio-cultural-political contexts?
• How are deeply seated understandings of wellbeing, progress, justice, development, and nature discursively used to prevent or promote different approaches to transforming society?
• How does sustainable development intersect with processes of ecological decline, colonization, modernization and political transitions?

For details see our course guide.