Exploring Best Practices for New Climate Change Policy and Law Program

Abstract

Climate change law is seldom taught formally as a program at institutions of higher education. Hence, it is unclear as to how climate change law lessons should be delivered. This paper focuses on the exploration of best practices for new climate change policy and law program. The study engaged in purely qualitative methodology, involving interviews with 10 experts in environmental law and climate change from academia and industry partners, as well as environmental law alumni. The collected data was analysed in ATLAS.ti software version 22 using thematic analysis approach. The study found that among the recommended best practices of teaching delivery methods for the program are service learning (SL), global learning, article contributions to newspapers and project-based learning (PBL). SL involves the implementation of credited projects by the students for the benefit of a targeted community focusing on climate change issues. Meanwhile, global learning involves collaborative events with member institutions within Malaysia or abroad, in which experts, academia and industry practitioners can join and participate for sharing of experiences, skills and knowledge on climate change current issues and challenges. Students can also be encouraged to write their articles to be submitted to newspaper portals, either printed or online sites. Additionally, lecturers can prompt specific PBL projects to the students, in which students are to “carry out” climate change-related projects in this innovative and inspiring learning strategy. The final strategy is to encourage students to implement roleplay in classes, aiming at giving simulation experiences in solving climate change issues. Hopefully, this paper will become a catalyst for future studies on climate change curriculum development, particularly on teaching delivery practices. The findings are highly pertinent to United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal SDG13 on climate action. In the broader context, the findings of the study will be a great contribution towards the attainment of sustainability efforts on climate action, particularly in capacity building of the people on teaching delivery methods of climate change policy and law.