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Course Descriptions
The Core Curriculum
ENVP U8200
Public Management
The course translates academic study in organization theory, bureaucracy,
and public management into practical lessons for public managers.
We develop a framework for understanding and applying tools that
can be used to influence organization behavior and obtain resources
from the organization's environment. Memo-writing, group process
and communication skills are taught through hands-on assignments.
Earth system-related case studies present a set of problems for
public managers to address. The focus is on state and local environmental
management cases, and treatment of local land use and NIMBY (not
in my backyard) issues. Cases will deal with public, private, and
nonprofit environmental management, and will include U.S. and international
cases. Each week students are either briefed by a group of their
colleagues on a case or submit a two-page memo on the week's case.
ENVP
U6310-U6311
Quantitative Techniques and Systems Analysis in Policymaking and
Management I and II
This two-semester course concentrates on the
quantitative techniques of organizational decision-making. Students
learn how to formulate and design policy questions amenable to empirical
inquiry, as well as how to identify and apply specific measurement
and analytic methods appropriate to particular questions. Students
are also introduced to the foundations of systems analysis: how
to model and understand the design, operation, and impact of a system.
The course begins with a discussion of the formulation of policy
questions, the collection and organization of data, and the analysis
and presentation of facts. Basic concepts of measures of central
tendency, descriptive quantitative measures, and advanced inferential
statistical techniques are covered. These techniques include multiple
regression, time series and factor analysis, as well as the organization
and presentation of advanced statistical analyses. Students are
introduced to the use of computer-based data analysis and the rudimentary
modeling of systems.
Early in the fall semester, the class is divided into several groups
to work on specific earth systems policy problems. The groups draw
samples, design survey instruments, conduct surveys, code, clean,
set up, and analyze data. They also write and present analytic reports,
as the course places a heavy emphasis on presenting information
to decision-makers.
ENVP U6310
ENVP U6311
ENVP
U8213-U8216
Microeconomics and Policy Analysis I and II
This two-semester course shows students that
it is both possible and useful to think about public policy rigorously
to see what assumptions work; to understand how formal models operate;
to question vagueness and clichés; and to make sophisticated
ethical arguments. An important goal of the class is to have students
work in groups to apply microeconomic concepts to current public
policy issues having to do with urban environmental and earth systems.
The course includes problem sets designed to teach core concepts
and their application. In the spring semester, the emphasis is on
the application of concepts to analyze contemporary policy problems.
Some time is also devoted to international trade and regulation,
and industrial organization issues. Students not only learn microeconomic
concepts, but also how to explain them to decision-makers. Student
groups take on specific earth system policy issues, analyze options
through the use of microeconomic concepts, and then make oral presentations
to the class.
ENVP U8213
ENVP U8216
ENVP
U8201
Financial Management
The course provides an introduction to budgeting
and financial control as a means of influencing the behavior of
public organizations. Concepts include the budget process and taxation,
intergovernmental revenues, municipal finance, bonds, control of
expenditures, purchasing, debt management, productivity enhancement,
and nonprofit finance. Students learn about the fiscal problems
that managers typically face, and how they seek to address them.
Students also gain experience in conducting financial analysis and
facility with spreadsheet programs.
Case materials utilize earth systems issues as well as other policy
issues. A computer lab section is an essential aspect of the course,
as it teaches students to use spreadsheet software to perform practical
exercises regarding the budgeting and financial management of a
hypothetical state environmental agency.
ENVP
U6320
Political Context of Public and Private Management
This course is recommended but not required.
This course focuses on the role of politics, interest groups, elected
leaders, public opinion, and governmental
institutions in the formulation and management of public policy
and programs. It includes a discussion of agenda setting, political
management, and political-executive relations. The course also
discusses
campaign finance rules, the changing role of the media in public
policy, and the development of international environmental regimes.
It will analyze the impact of citizen participation and the media
on public policy with an emphasis on environmental policy.
The Workshops in
Applied Earth Systems Management and Applied Earth Systems Policy
Analysis
The chief advantage of this workshop experience
is the practical training gained by working on real problems where
student analyses and reports may have an impact on actual public
sector operations. The basic objective of the Workshops in Applied
Earth Systems Management and Applied Earth Systems Policy Analysis
is to teach students how to integrate their understanding of natural
science, social science, policy studies, and management in a problem-solving
exercise.
Summer and autumn semesters:
ENVP U9229-U9230
The Workshop in Applied Earth Systems Management I and II
In the summer and autumn semesters, the Workshop
emphasizes management issues. Students enroll in small, faculty-advised
project teams and design a detailed operational plan for addressing
an important public policy problem. Each Workshop faculty member
selects a piece of proposed but not yet enacted state, federal,
or local environmental law (or a U.N. resolution) and students are
asked to develop a plan for implementing and managing the new program.
In the summer semester, the Workshop groups write reports explaining
the environmental science aspects of a management problem to political
decision-makers who are not scientists. During the autumn semester
the Workshop completes the operational plan for implementing the
program. Both the summer and autumn Workshop projects will be on
issues central to the two earth systems problem themes that the
cohort will focus on throughout their course of study.
Summer Workshop ENVP U9229
Autumn Workshop ENVP U9230
Spring semester:
ENV U9232
The Workshop in Applied Earth Systems Policy Analysis
In the spring semester, new groups are formed
to undertake analytic projects for real-world clients in government
and nonprofit agencies. These teams, working under the supervision
of faculty members, write a report analyzing an actual environmental
policy or management problem faced by their clients. Again, projects
selected will be relevant to the cohort's two earth systems problem
themes.
Spring Workshop ENVP U9232
The Environmental Science and Earth
Systems Concentration
The Environmental Science and Earth Systems
Concentration
The Environmental Science and Earth Systems Concentration is
comprised of both natural and social science courses.
The five natural science courses are:
•Environmental Chemistry
•Environmental Toxicology
•Climate
•Water
•Ecology and Biodiversity
The three social science courses are:
• Earth Systems and Environmental
Politics, Policy, and Management
• The Economics of Sustainable Development
• Ethics, Values, and Justice
The science component of the concentration is
designed to enable students to understand enough science to manage
the work of science experts. Our goal is for students to be capable
of more than passive consumption or understanding of environmental
science. However, we do not expect MPAs to become producers of
scientific research. The focus of the environmental science taught
in the program is on understanding the ecological processes that
directly effect human health and well being.
The policy and management issues our
graduates are being trained to address include global change issues
such as global warming but more frequently focus on:
• the provision of safe drinking water;
• environmentally-sound sewage treatment and disposal;
• solid and toxic waste management; and
• the control of local sources of air pollution.
The science courses required in this
concentration are designed to support global and local environmental
decision-making and management.
ENVP U6220
Environmental Chemistry
The course teaches basic techniques for
getting to know an environment and understand key chemical processes
central to environmental science. Students build an understanding of
the key chemical processes related to pollution generation and
control. The focuses of this course are the processes that affect
the fate and transport of specific compounds that act as
contaminants on local- to global-scale levels. The behavior of
contaminants is influenced by physical, chemical, and biological
processes naturally occurring within various ecosystems. This course
describes these processes and the extent to which they affect
different classes of contaminants. Students learn how to analyze
chemical information they will encounter as environmental managers.
ENVP U6221
Environmental Toxicology
This course will explore the effects of
different contaminants on the health of all organisms within an
ecosystem, with a particular focus on human health. While
toxicologists study a wide variety of toxicants, from naturally
occurring poisons (venoms) to synthetic chemicals, this course will
emphasize anthropogenic toxicants, in the context of how (and
whether) exposure to such toxicants should be controlled: risk
assessment. The main goal of this course is to foster an
understanding of how environmental scientists think and solve
environmental issues and most importantly to develop an expertise in
assessing the validity of scientific research and its conclusions.
ENVP U6115
Climatology
Students learn how the atmosphere, oceans, and
freshwater systems interact to affect climate. Causes of greenhouse
warming, energy production and alternatives are studied. A local
case study focuses on planning for climate changes on interannual,
decadal, and centennial time scales. A goal of the course is to
teach an appreciation of uncertainties and predictability in earth
systems. A particular emphasis
will be placed on the role of humans, in the last centuries, on the
perturbation of the natural climate and how these perturbations can
be characterized and discerned from natural fluctuations. Other
concepts examined include an integrated view of the Earth’s energy
budget, structure and circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean,
interaction between oceans and atmosphere.
ENVP U6116
Hydrology
Students are introduced to the hydrologic
cycle as well as processes governing water quantity and quality. Students
learn how the atmosphere, oceans, and freshwater systems interact to
affect the hydrological cycle and climate.
This course focuses on basic physical
principles (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, runoff, stream
flow, percolation, and groundwater flow), as well as environmentally
relevant applications based on case studies. Most specifically,
students will be exposed to water quantity and issues from global to
regional scales and how human and natural processes affect water
availability in surface and groundwater systems.
ENVP U6110
Ecology and Biodiversity
One of the major goals of our science
curriculum is to provide students with the scientific concepts that
must be understood by environmental policymakers. In the final
analysis this involves sustaining the renewability of life and land.
This course focuses on the applied science of maintaining the
earth's biological diversity, its landscapes, and resources. The
course will focus on the biological principles relevant to the
conservation of biodiversity at the genetic, population, community,
and landscape levels. Due to the cross-disciplinary nature of
ecology and biological conservation, some of the social,
philosophical, and economic dimensions of biological conservation
will also be addressed. This course focuses on applications and
problem-solving in conservation biology, including understanding how
human populations affect the environment through land use and
changes to the ecological make up of the earth.
ENVP U6241
Earth Systems and Environmental Politics, Policy, and Management
This is the first social science course in the
earth systems concentration. Its goal is to take a system-level
approach to environmental policy problems. Issues presented include
defining the environmental problem; the politics of the environment;
environmental agenda setting; pollution prevention; U.S. pollution
control through regulation, public works, and market incentives;
cross-media and cross national environmental problems; and the
response of societies, economies, and political systems to
environmental issues. The course also discusses international
environmental regime development, conflict resolution, and citizen
participation in environmental decision-making.
ENV U6230
The Economics of Sustainable Development
This course is recommended but not required. This course builds on the first half of the
core microeconomics course and addresses issues of environmental and
resource economics. It focuses on the interaction between markets
and the environment; policy issues related to optimal extraction and
pricing; property rights in industrial and developing countries and
how they affect international trade in goods such as timber, wood
pulp, and oil. The use of the world's water bodies and the
atmosphere as economic inputs to production are also examined. The
economics of renewable resources is described and sustainable
economic development models are discussed and analyzed.
ENVP U6225
Ethics, Values, and Justice
his course examines the way in which the earth
has been viewed by various societies and cultures today and over
time. Differing views of the relationship of humans to the
environment are discussed and debated, and the impact of ethical
systems on environmental policy and practices are described and
analyzed. Environmental values, perceptions, norms, and behaviors
are studied and analyzed. Environmental justice and the impact of
racism on environmental outcomes are discussed in detail. The course
also discusses the environmental policy and management process from
the standpoint of ethics, as distinct from efficiency,
effectiveness, expertise, cost, or other organizational
considerations. Attempts are made to discover some guidelines for
ethical stewardship of the planet and for formulating policy
decisions with ethical considerations factored in.
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