Critical Perspectives on the Green Transition: Geographies of Power and Futures

About

The course offers a critical geographical perspective on the green transition. Rather than treating decarbonisation as a mainly technical or governance-driven process, it approaches transition as a political economy: a reworking of power relations, global inequalities, and contested ways of governing nature. Grounded in political economy and global relations, the course focuses on two dynamics that now sit at the centre of climate policy: the financialisation and digitalisation of nature. Students examine how environmental goals are pursued through markets, metrics, and data infrastructures—carbon markets, ESG frameworks, offsets, and digital monitoring—and how these tools reshape control over land, resources, and value across different regions of the world.

The course combines key concepts with a small number of focused case studies, and ends by engaging debates on futures, utopias/dystopias, and sociotechnical imaginaries (including selected speculative texts) to explore how visions of “what comes next” shape policy choices and transition pathways.

Fee info