Designing an environmental justice course

Andrea Ross (University of Dundee) will present a paper on designing an environmental justice course at the UKCLE event on Environmental justice in legal education on 29 March 2010. She will explore the rationale of including a specialist module in environmental justice at LLM level, the development and delivery of such a module, and some reflections on the experience.

As part of the Masters of Environmental Law, the team at the University of Dundee decided it was vital students were offered one ‘black letter’ module on Environmental Regulation and another more theoretical module on either Sustainable Development or Environmental Justice. The preference from candidates was for Environmental Justice and in the summer of 2008, Andrea set about designing such a module. The result was a module based on the following syllabus:

1. Introduction, research methods.
2. Environmental injustices, causes of environmental injustice.
3. History of the environmental justice movement, meanings of environmental justice – distributional and procedural issues.
4. National concerns and solutions to environmental justice – Scotland.
5. National concerns and solutions to environmental justice – South Africa, India, Brazil.
6. International environmental justice – north south divide.
7. Analysing the approaches to environmental justice – regulatory, market and rights based approaches.
8. Differing theoretical perspectives of environmental justice.
9. Environmental justice and sustainable development.
10. Overview – climate change case study.

Andrea’s paper will detail how this syllabus came about, the delivery of the various seminars and some reflection on the success of each seminar. A key objective for Andrea was to familiarise herself with the topic as her focus had previously been on sustainable development and she was only familiar with the basics of the environmental justice agenda. The result was a significant environmental justice injection into her work on sustainable development.

A key insight in developing the syllabus was the fact that despite the use of the term ‘justice’ the environmental justice agenda had surprisingly little legal input and instead much of the research had been conducted by geographers, anthropologists and to some extent philosophers. There was a need to ensure the students were willing and capable to engage with these other disciplines.

Some insight as to the assessment tools used will also be discussed.

This year, due to timetabling and needing to teach the theoretical subject first, sustainable development was offered instead of environmental justice, however the content of the sustainable development module included a significant review of the environmental justice aspects of sustainable development. The syllabus and success of this module will be compared to that of the environmental justice module.

A key lesson from this further year was that the theoretical module is best taught after the black letter law module so that students have examples to draw on.

About Andrea
Andrea Ross is a senior lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Dundee. She teaches and researches in the areas of environmental and public law. Much of her work focuses on the role of law and the way law interacts with other disciplines in the implementation of sustainable development.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010