Environmental policy-making in Germany - Einzelansicht

1. General notes

Please note that the current situation requires all of us to adapt our teaching formats and ways of working in order to provide an educational and interesting semester even without face-to-face sessions on campus.

2. Course overview

This BA course will address the main theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of policy-making in multi-level systems. We will deal with environmental policy-making in the selected case of Germany as one example of addressing policy problems in federal systems. The first part of the course will deal with general considerations in the field of environmental politics and will present the theoretical background, conceptual and practical issues as well as examples from the literature. Next to the definition of environment as a policy problem, we will take a closer look at the specific actors, policy instruments and learning procedures in the field. The second part of the course will focus on the German case in order to discuss the complex policy-making in multi-level settings. Here we will differentiate between the federal, regional as well as local level in the German polity. In addition, European and international policy influences shall likewise be addressed. The last section of the course will bring insights from the field with respect to selected policy issues and in different contextual settings. Content and discussions will be based both on scholarly literature on theory and on empirical evidence.

3. Literature and additional materials

The literature will be available via Moodle.

The BA course will be held online (synchron) via Zoom meetings starting on Monday 12^th April 2021 (10am – 12pm).

Registration for this seminar on PULS starts on 6^th April 2021. Please register for this seminar no later than 9^th April 2021 as the first contact by email will take place via PULS. All additional information (including the password for Moodle access) will be sent via email.

Please note: The number of participants in this course is restricted to 25 students. You will only be considered for participation after registration for this seminar on PULS.

If registration on PULS is unavailable to you due to technical reasons (e.g. no university account yet), please inform the instructor of the seminar as soon as possible via email.

Requirements:

• Participation in class: required readings, discussions and short assignments
• Presentation in class via Zoom
• Final exam: written term paper 4,000 words (+/− 10%, excluding references)