CST213 | Just Sustainability Transitions – A Policy Practitioner’s Introduction

DESCRIPTION

Climate change-induced mitigation and adaptation policies are proliferating, in a bid to fasten the process of greening our global economy. In this process of justly and sustainably transitioning to a greener future, inadvertently winners and losers emerge among actors as diverse as nations, businesses, and communities. In order that we successfully transition into a greener, juster, and a more sustainable future world, we need to not only understand our subject position as global South citizens, scholars and analysts, but also practice critical reflection on how policies affect us, and how our daily choices enable/constrain this just transition process. This situatedness of ours calls for a culture of applied action learning that will help us re-engineer our lives with effective policy tools of control and behaviour change.

In this institutional background, I propose this interdisciplinary course on just sustainability transitions to help introduce systems thinking to law and policy students interested in solving the problem of just transition.

This specialised course then is applied in its orientation, and is suitable to those law and public policy students interested to forge a boundary-spanning career in policy practice and analysis at the intersection of Climate policy, Governance of Businesses and Society, and Institutional Economics. Because of this interdisciplinary nature, instead of a purely legal treatment of “just transition” as an evolving principle in the International Climate Law, the course aims to put in practice what the philosopher of science William Whewhell calls “consilience” – a term used to describe unity of knowledge among different academic disciplines. In this course, I aim to use this compounding synergy of consilience to understand, analyse, and evaluate the systemic, multi-pronged, multi-actor, multi-phase process of sustainability transitions, and prepare students to think like policy practitioners.

To do this, I use a combination of relevant policy case studies, Indian case laws, scientific literature, and opinion pieces to juxtapose and deconstruct differing understandings of the “justness” of the transition process among the diverse actors involved. The pedagogical method would be a combination of socratic discussion, student-led presentations, and response papers to be submitted every week. Students also get to learn how to draft policy memos on issues of their choice. All in all, through this course, I aim to introduce systems thinking to law students, in the multidisciplinary field of just sustainability transitions.

The course sequence is as follows:

1) Weeks 1-2: Setting the stage: Understanding the scientific literature on “Justice” in the fields of Sustainability studies, Ecological Economics, Science and Technology studies, Political economy, Human Rights theory, and Legal theory, in relation to the evolution of its contextualised conceptualisations emanating from grassroots social/environmental movements in the global North and Southern societies. This part aims to synthesize and deconstruct “Justice” as an analytical frame that can be used to evaluate the “sustainability” of transition policies.

2) Weeks 3-4: Analysing the politics of sustainability transitions and understanding the just transition process as a “wicked” systems problem – actors involved, their varied interests, coalitions, winners and losers among them – and how the synergies and conflicts of these diverse interests interact to produce policy formulations in favour of/against a smooth transition process. This part of the course module helps students understand the complicated process of agenda setting and practical tools of consensus building to ensure an inclusive and participatory transition process.

3) Weeks 5-6: Tools to achieve Business Sustainability: This part segways into Business from Justice theory and politics of transition process, and delves into the realm of Business and Human Rights. Focussing exclusively on business interests and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) leadership, this part aims to foreground the policy tools that can help businesses internalise sustainable corporate practices and achieve organizational change towards sustainability: like prioritising the stakeholder perspective over the shareholder perspective in making strategic business decisions, mandating ESG reporting, integrating circular economy and carrying out human rights due diligence across the business supply chains, setting up a policy mix that facilitates sustainable finance and leverages nudging as a policy tool to encourage behavioural change of producers and consumers 4) Weeks 7-8: These two weeks will be spent in learning how to write policy briefs, and memos, advising policymakers and businesses on just sustainability transition strategies, focussing on real life case studies like the below listed, but not limited thereto:

a. Effects of ultra-mega solar parks on human rights of surrounding communities vis-à-vis decentralised renewable energy potential in India

b. EV and green mobility policy – their interface with green infrastructure and consumer behaviour and green urban and spatial development

c. Agriculture and food systems transition – adapting crops and food policy to enable a smooth transition to a nutrition-secure and biodiversity-rich future

d. Facilitating sustainable climate finance for green business enterprises – interface of International Climate Law with International Trade Law

e. Effects of climate change on marginalised communities – how caste, class, religion, region, and gender identities interplay with transition policies

f. Just transition for coal communities – Juxtaposing the Indian coal policy along with the possibility of reskilling and/or rehabilitating coal workers to greener jobs

g. Just sustainability in universities – How do we as students and academics enable an academic culture that prepares us for a greener future?

h. Integrating circular economy and green practices in business supply chains – evaluating possibilities of human rights and sustainability due diligenceprocesses

5) Weeks 9-10: We conclude the course by understanding and practising systems thinking in the context of just sustainability transitions, and how this kind of thinking can be used to not only evaluate policies, but also to write policy memos addressing policymakers.