Understanding Global Challenges: Theoretical Foundations

What are global challenges and how do we understand them from a political science perspective? Understanding global challenges: theoretical foundations is a graduate research course that explores the nature and role of the transnational governance regime for understanding and tackling global challenges. The course provides the conceptual and theoretical tools for understanding policy complexity as well as an increasingly complex and interwoven decision-making structure for global challenges, including global, national and local as well as public and private actors and organizations.

The course will proceed in two parts. Firstly, students will develop an understanding of global challenges and critically investigate how they are addressed at different levels and by different actors. Secondly, students will examine and discuss central theoretical approaches to understanding global challenges:

• The role of complexity in addressing global challenges such as climate change, migration, pandemics and inequality
• Interactions and interdependence between different norms, actors and policy levels involved in tackling key global challenges 
• Mobilization for framing complex problems, creating agency and securing accountability for responsible action
• Trade-offs between legitimacy, effectiveness, efficiency in governance

In addition to formal lectures, students will approach these themes through project-based learning: student-driven investigation of selected real-world problems through different theoretical lenses. 

A student who has completed the course should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence.

Knowledge

The student

• has conceptual knowledge to identify global challenges and the related policy and organizational complexities
• has in-depth knowledge of key political science approaches to explaining the politics and governance of global challenges in different settings
• demonstrates extensive knowledge of the global governance regime and selected national and local approaches to addressing some selected global challenges

Skills

The student can

• align abstract theories and concepts, empirical knowledge about policy responses to global challenges, and the political science analysis of different governance approaches
• recognize the potential and limitations of specific theories and approaches for opening (or closing) specific routes of inquiry on the politics and governance of global challenges
• identify key dilemmas and trade-offs in the politics and governance of global challenges, expose normative choices, and discuss the power dynamics shaping policy
• provide practical applications of theory through written and oral presentations and in discussions with relevant actors in public policy and administration

General competences

The student can:

• work in groups - both physically and in digital formats - to address complex challenges
• make independent and professional assessments of policies, relevant organizations and institutional arrangements
• assess the importance of local context (economy, power relations, culture, history) and local activism (e.g., litigation, social movements) for political action and transformation