IEP 511: Environmental Decision Making

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Environmental Decision Making

Module Description

What makes for good public decisions about the environment? A variety of different and competing decision making tools and procedures have been employed in environmental decision making from formal procedures such cost-benefit analysis and multi-criteria decision analysis to deliberative institutions such as citizens juries and consensus conferences. In this module we look at the theoretical underpinnings of these different approaches. Doing so will take us into foundational issues in ethics in particular surrounding the utilitarian assumptions of some of these approaches. It will cover issues in social and political philosophy on issues such as the use market-based approaches to the solution of environmental problems, different models of democracy and their role in environmental policy making, the appeal to justice and equality within and between different generations in environmental policy, the compatibility of environmentalism with liberalism, and debates around the politics of wilderness.

Topics may include:

• Cost-benefit analysis and surrogate prices
• Value Incommensurability and decision making
• Property-rights and the environment
• Markets in environmental goods and harms
• Austrian economics and ecological economics: some continuing debates
• Valuing goods over time
• Sustainability, community and equality
• Democracy, deliberation and environmental problems
• What makes for a good decision