Course examines current problems and issues in the field of public policy. Topics may vary from year to year and will be announced at the beginning of the semester. Open to students from other departments.

This course provides a broad survey of environmental policy in the United States. It is broken into three parts. The first part of the course focuses on the foundations for analyzing environmental policy. We’ll start by asking just what it is that we hope to accomplish with environmental policy. We will then review the process of looking at environmental debates through multiple lenses to clarify what’s important (and what’s not), quickly consider some important concepts from environmental economics, wade into the debate about the meaning of environmental sustainability, and conclude with a review of systems thinking. The second part of the course lays out aspects of environmental policymaking applicable across most environmental issues. In particular, we’ll investigate shared responsibility across branches and levels of government, and touch on the connection between environmental science and policy. We will also explore processes such as risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and environmental impact assessment that apply to most U.S. environmental policies. Finally, we will conclude Part II by looking at a menu of specific policy tools. The third part of the course comprises five subsections, each of which focuses on a single environmental policy domain. In Part III, we will study clean air policy, clean water policy, environmental justice, endangered species and federal land management policy, and climate policy. In each case, we’ll look at some of the unresolved issues that are currently under debate.

Repeat Rules