Teaching students to think ecologically about the global political economy, and vice versa

Abstract

Global warming, biodiversity decline, and other global-scale environmental changes associated with the Anthropocene are profoundly reshaping and being reshaped by the global political economy. This pedagogical intervention argues that today’s students of International Political Economy (IPE) would benefit from a deeper appreciation of the dialectic between IPE and Global Environmental Change (GEC). We thus call for a re-think in the way environment is usually taught in the field of IPE, first by emphasizing the importance of the underlying GEC-IPE dialectic, and second by encouraging critical pedagogical methods which help students to integrate global ecosystems thinking into their analyses of the global political economy. Through our proposed pedagogical framework, students of IPE are prompted to critically examine taken-for-granted assumptions about the socio-ecological banality of business-as-usual capitalism, and apply this critique to their own personal experiences, identifying ways in which their differing personal struggles and privileges are shaped by the unfolding dialectic between environmental change and the global political economy.

Keywords:

• global environmental change (GEC)
• international political economy (IPE)
• critical pedagogy
• case studies

Acknowledgements

The authors thank all reviewers for their constructive feedback. Christopher would like to additionally thank Marie-Josée Massicotte, Susan Spronk, and Luc Turgeon for their supervision, and Kimberly, Eleanor, and Félix Bisson for their love and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is worth noting that critical IPE scholars have contested this narrative of the field’s origins, pointing to work which can be characterized as modern IPE before the 1950s (see Ashworth 2011).

2 It is worth noting that outside IPE, there is nevertheless a lot of work in Global Environmental Politics, or GEP, which has engaged this dialectic in various ways. This is exemplified for example by work on multinational corporations and the environment (McKern 1993), trade and the environment (Williams 2001) or the World Bank (Gutner 2005), as well as many other areas. Some of those scholars have also turned their attention to questions of pedagogy, although more rarely with a specific focus on questions of direct interest to those in IPE (see Litfin 2016). While this intervention could be read alongside any of these contributions, our focus here is on work that specifically self-identifies with the field of ‘IPE’.

3 Those following Moore’s ‘world ecology’ framework would likely even take issue with the framing we have used here (i.e. ‘humanity’s impact’), since it could be read as blaming ‘humans’ writ large, rather than placing responsibility for the ecological crisis on various ‘deep structures’ embedded within capitalism.

4 In such cases, where no localized or domestic information is readily available, an important aspect of the discussion will be to ask students to discern why: What historical political structures have made it possible for a large entity’s investment portfolio to remain a thing of secrecy, and what are the implications?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan M. Katz-Rosene

Ryan Katz-Rosene is an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies, where he studies climate policy debates about energy, transportation, and agriculture. His most recent book, co-edited with Dr. Sarah Martin, is Green Meat: Sustaining Eaters, Animals, and the Planet (McGill-Queen's University Press 2020). Ryan currently serves as president of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.

Christopher Kelly-Bisson

Christopher K. Bisson is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies, and a policy analyst for Seed Change Canada. His doctoral research investigates practices of large-scale farmland investments in eastern Ontario. Over the last four years he has operated an organic market garden in Ottawa, and published on permaculture and agroecology movements in Canada.

Matthew Paterson

Matthew Paterson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester and Research Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. His research focuses on the political economy of global environmental change. He is currently focused on the political economy and cultural politics of climate change, and starting to work on the networked character of global climate governance.