Abstract
It is widely recognised that for the green economy to develop successfully, new educational curricula will be required to help professionals develop appropriate knowledge and skills. Relatively few university courses have been developed to date that explicitly focus on the green economy, reflecting its recent origins. Here we present the lessons learned from developing and implementing a new Masters course in the green economy, at Bournemouth University in the UK. The most significant challenges were institutional barriers, such as different departmental policies and procedures and decentralised budget strategies, which inhibited the cross-departmental collaboration desired for interdisciplinarity. Uncertainty about the future development of the green economy and its value as a concept, among both teaching staff and prospective students, presented a further challenge. In addition, the development of an appropriate curriculum for green economy courses has received little attention previously. Here, we present an overview of the curriculum developed for this Masters-level course, and, based on our experience, we demonstrate how the challenges in developing such a course can successfully be overcome.
Highlights
The green economy has recently become the focus of increasing policy interest, at both national and international scales
We identified 47 other Master of Science (MSc) courses offered by UK Universities that offered material in a cognate area, such as renewable energy, sustainable development or environmental technology
While there is widespread recognition of the need for new educational opportunities to support development of the green economy, universities have generally been slow to respond to this need
Summary
The green economy has recently become the focus of increasing policy interest, at both national and international scales. Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) [3], which led to the production of a large number of position papers and background reports on the topic [4] This growth in interest can be attributed to the perceived value of the green economy for concurrently addressing multiple global problems, including the recent financial crisis, increasing food prices, widespread poverty, and the environmental issues of anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss [5,6]. Rather than offering a template or blueprint for other such courses, our aim here is to identify the principal lessons learned from developing a postgraduate taught course that explicitly focuses on the green economy These lessons are presented in the hope that others planning to develop an educational offering on this theme, at whatever level, might benefit from our experience
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