The Winnebago Sustainability Project: Sustainability in the Classroom
Druscilla Scribner
Political Science 326: Politics of Development
May 2009
My goal in participating in the 2009 Winnebago Sustainability Project (WSP) was to fundamentally retool an
existing course, The Politics of Development, which I will be offering this Fall-09 term. The Politics of
Development is a Political Science course that is cross listed with International Studies and is a requirement
for the International Development concentration in the IS major. Development Studies is a wide ranging
inter-disciplinary field. Central questions in development from the political science perspective focus on the
causes and consequences of social, economic and politics inequality at both the domestic and international
level, as well as the conditions under which development policies (international aid or domestic government
efforts) are more or less effective in addressing a wide range of issues. These issues include economic reform,
corruption, democratization, urbanization, deadly conflict, retributive justice, environmental degradation,
gender inequality, poverty (to name a few). The previous two times I taught this course at UWO I felt that I
did not succeed in integrating the concept of sustainability into the whole of the course. Instead, I taught
“environment and development,” as a discrete week long topic toward the end of the course. The WSP was
an opportunity to rework the course such that sustainability, as a concept and theoretical lens, could be
utilized to think systematically about the ways in which many of the core issues in development (environment,
resources, rights, gender, conflict, state capacity, ethnicity, law, etc.) are intersecting.
I thoroughly enjoyed my two days with the WSP; and my interactions with faculty and facilitators were
invaluable to reconstructing the course with a greater emphasis on sustainability. The new syllabus reflects
several core changes. First, I have redesigned the course to focus on three basic human needs (Food, Water
and Health). In the first weeks students confront the history of development and competing approaches to
development theory and practice. They are introduced to the concepts of sustainability and sustainable
development in the context of contemporary development theory. Across the course students will be
gradually building on their knowledge and understanding of theory and country case studies to create a
fictitious non-governmental organization (NGO) (they present a poster on their organization at the end of
the course). Their first assignment associated with their NGO project is a concept map (also termed a
concept web) of sustainability in the context of the issue area in which their NGO will work (gender rights,
micro-banking, agricultural development, judicial reform, primary health provision, sanitation, etc.). This
assignment is designed to have students internalize the intersectionality of the concept of sustainability,
multiple issues in development, and the UN millennium development goals (MDGs) which are based on a
human capabilities approach to development. Students come back to these concepts in the preparation and
presentation of their NGO poster. The concept map completes the theory section of the course.
The course is then centered on the politics of development policy (at the local, national, and international
levels) in three key issue areas: water, food, and public health. After engaging common readings in each of
these units, students present case studies of national level development policy. For example in the case of
water, students will research and present case studies of domestic and international politics of water
privatization in Argentina, Bolivia, India or South Africa. In each of these areas, inequalities in access to
natural, political and economic resources have structured the policies of national governments and the
political responses of local populations.
The final thematic section of the course is concerned with international aid for development and its
effectiveness. We consider the international and domestic political factors accounting for the failure of aid,
particularly in Africa; and then turn our attention how domestic and international politics of aid giving
countries (including the United States) shape the availability of aid for development. The course comes full
circle when students present their NGO posters, evaluate each others projects, and collectively discuss how
aid could be effectively given and utilized (and under which political conditions) to meet the goals of student
projects.
This course is wholly different from the original, in both readings (only a few of the core theoretical texts
remain the same) and content. It would have looked very different if I hadn’t had the benefit of the WSP and
the creative sounding board of colleagues I meet there. I am really looking forward to the course, to working
out the details of the assignments and to the students’ ingenuity.