This course examines environmental politics and policy in the global field. It focuses on challenges concerning global environmental justice and sustainability transformations in the context of persisting inequalities and power relations, and in the face of mounting sociopolitical pressures for radical change. We will focus on challenges concerning biological and cultural diversity loss, forests and biomass, land degradation and agrobiodiversity, oceans, marine life and fisheries, waters and rivers, mining and energy, waste, toxicity and hazardous substances, and infrastructure development and urbanization, among other emergent issues. By locating these challenges within the increasingly complex apparatus of Earth system governance and policy and the global political ecology of the so-called 'Anthropocene' epoch, this course underlines tensions between global/intergovernmental and trans-local/grassroots approaches to environmental crises. The course examines these challenges of environmental politics and policies by highlighting tensions between technocratic and democratic policy-making, reformist and transformational approaches, hegemonic and subaltern methodologies, North/South cleavages, modernist and indigenous knowledges, Western and non-Western ecologies, state-based and social movement-based proposals, issue-specific versus intersectional solutions, and market-based versus commons-based policies and collective actions towards sustainability. After revisiting the histories and structural drivers of global environmental problems drawing on a range of critical, interdisciplinary, intersectional, ecofeminist, intercultural, decolonial and indigenous accounts, we move to focus on specific issue areas. We underline how the ever-expanding agenda of environmental challenges has come to imply radical and epochal change across all sectors. We examine how diverse global actors—whether (inter)governmental, non-governmental, civil society, social movement or market-based actors, have responded differently to such increasingly encompassing and urgent pressures for radical change. We also explore divergent prognoses and futures stemming from contending approaches to policy and collective action across scales (local to global) and across borders—whether spatial, cultural, social, political or disciplinary. Students will conduct a collaborative research project in relation to organizations or institutions engaged in environmental politics and policy with a global focus.