This course explores critical sustainability and environmental policy paradigms and their practical applications in policy, management and civil society/social movement organizing across levels of analysis and scales, including: global, transnational, the state, regional, translocal and local. By delving into the theoretical and conceptual complexities that underpin environmental sustainability, economic development, the political economy and resulting policies, this course foregrounds how different knowledges have or can (re)shape the architecture of sustainability governance and the strategic and tactical horizons of collective action through environmental social mobilization. While providing rich historical and theoretical foundations, the course foregrounds related social-environmental issue areas and sectors through examining multiscalar policy frameworks. The course takes a critical perspective by examining institutional, governmental and organizational structures. Further, collective action strategies and tactics as they play out in real decision-making scenarios of environmental policy for and through social transformation are examined. These paradigms will be examined in their historical genealogies and contemporary manifestations as political-ecological and socio-environmental bodies of knowledge/power, and as frameworks that shape, legitimize, contest, disrupt or transform institutional design, organizational structures and movement formation. Attention will be given to how diverse paradigms relate to key moments in the unfolding history of environmental policy and sustainability management. Analyses of these key moments will combine scholar-activist insights with practitioners' and movement-based grounded knowledge that center critical, intersectional/depatriarchalizing, subaltern/decolonizing (e.g., Indigenous/BIPOC/Southern/frontline/grassroots/peasant/fisherfolk), and just transition horizons of change beyond the dominant “sustainable” and "green economy".