Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

Mainstream development economics holds that nations must steadily increase their GDP in order to secure human well-being within their borders, particularly in light of population growth. But many theorists, policy scientists, legal scholars, and activists insist that this assumption is flawed. For not only have scholars and activists long questioned the distributional equity of infinite GDP-growth, without more. But many now claim that the Earth itself will no longer sustain unbounded GDP-growth. For toxic wastes are mounting while frenzied extraction is eroding the land and polluting the seas. Mega-cities, devoid of adequate infrastructure, are expanding on every continent. Growth-propelled inequalities are spiraling. Good work is in short supply and low-paid workers are undermined by shortcuts in job safety and speed-up on the production line. In the face of these converging challenges, theorists and activists from many sectors are pushing back against the mantra of growth at all costs through an exciting multi-disciplinary literature. This work maps the “trap” of infinite growth detail. It also points toward legal and policy formations, from local to global, that look beyond.

In this two-credit offering, we will start with several seminar-style weeks to review relevant literatures. We will start with Sustainable Development, the UN’s attempt to reconcile the GDP-growth mandate with climate and other challenges. We will then move to debates between the Degrowth orientations, which are common in former colonizing nations, and the Post-Development and North/South-Reparation orientations, which are widely espoused in the post-colonial world. Next, we will survey grounded alternatives to the infinite-growth mandate. These range from experiments in land use and commodity-production, marketing and distribution, regional-design, social-provision, locally-based financial institutions, and more. We will consider how well these experiments do with respect to social equity and human rights. Finally, we will consider the challenge of linking such experiments, which are typically local, into regional and global networks.

In the workshop part of the course will build on these literatures. Each student will do a collaborative Project on one of two themes. You might delve more deeply into a theoretical and legal tension, with a focus on innovations in policy and law that might move beyond it. Or you might explore a grounded experiment in more detail, perhaps designing a legal framework for it or linking it with wider legal, geographic, or communicative spheres. In either kind of Project, you are encouraged to liaise with scholars, lawyers, and activists engaging with your topic in real time, provided, of course, that such engagements comply with all requirements about human subjects research imposed by Harvard’s Internal Review Board (IRB), as well as all the laws and regulations which govern the HU IRB’s standards and procedures.

Course requirements include attendance at every session; for the Seminar, completing all readings and class preparation and posting 3 discussion questions prior to each session; and for the workshop (which will be 60% of your grade), preparing, completing, and documenting your collaborative Project according to instructions, and then facilitating the interactive class Workshop on your Project at the end of the semester.