Environment and Sustainable Development UCL

Overview

Environment and Sustainable Development MSc challenges mainstream approaches to development, focusing on developing strategic pathways to address environmental injustices and enhance collective capacities to act towards more just and sustainable futures.

Faced with the most severe environmental crisis in human history, with unprecedented degradation, displacements, disasters and the (re)production of inequalities, it becomes ever more pressing to acquire the capacities for effective action to restore, enhance and safeguard our planet.

This MSc from University College London (UCL) aims to equip participants to work effectively as development planners/practitioners to address these challenges through gaining a deeper understanding of the processes within urban environmental change and developing strategic capacities to respond within a framework of systems theory, environmental justice and sustainability.

What this course will give you

This programme offers an in-depth theoretical and practical understanding of socio-environmental change, equipping graduates with the skills required to face complex global challenges in urban regions while being sensitive to local contexts and remaining flexible in fast changing realities.

Employability

As this MSc is widely recognised, many of our graduates go on to help shape future sustainable development agendas in local government, international agencies (such as UN agencies and the World Bank), bilateral aid organisations from different countries. and civil society organisations.

The programme equips students with interdisciplinary and transferable skills. It develops reflective and ethical professionals with enhanced capacities as critical thinkers, researchers, team players, leaders, effective project managers and impactful communicators.

Specific skills that help students include:

• prepare balanced and critical analyses/arguments, attentive to the particularities of place, based on theoretical insights and empirical evidence
• undertake well-supported diagnoses of the problems and opportunities in given urban development contexts, in ways that reframe strategic opportunities for socially and environmentally just action
• formulate systematic and well-supported strategic proposals, aimed at responding to complex urban environmental change, including organisational and institutional development
• build presentation, advocacy and negotiation skills
• develop research skills including interviewing, conceptual framework formulation, and the ability to analyse a range of information sources
• deliver group projects, and negotiate the dynamics of working in diverse teams
• operate professionally in unfamiliar environments, including in Global South contexts