This course explores the economic and behavioural foundations of key environmental challenges, with a strong focus on identifying and evaluating policy solutions. It equips students with tools to assess sustainability problems and interventions, drawing from empirical research, economic reasoning, and real-world case studies.

In the first part of the course, we apply concepts from environmental and behavioural economics to understand how individual and collective behaviours contribute to environmental degradation. Particular emphasis is placed on consumption-related decisions-such as energy use, diet, and mobility-and on the psychological and institutional frictions that hinder more sustainable choices. Students focus on designing and evaluating behaviourally informed, context-specific interventions.

The second half of the course builds on this foundation, introducing more advanced economic tools to analyse systemic environmental issues such as deforestation, air pollution, waste, and global cooperation. We examine how command-and-control and economic instruments-such as taxes, subsidies, regulations, and market-based mechanisms-interact with governance structures, political incentives, and institutional constraints to shape policy effectiveness.

Students will engage with experimental studies, country-level comparisons, and applied policy design, with particular attention to contexts in developing countries.

A 2-hour lecture each week for 10 weeks.

A 2-hour revision lecture

ECON5103: Policies for Sustainability and Development (Food Security)

■ To develop an understanding of how everyday behaviours contribute to environmental problems and how economic and behavioural tools can be used to interpret them.

■ To equip students to design and critically assess behaviourally focused policy solutions that address environmental challenges at the individual level.

■ To extend students' understanding of environmental policy by introducing more advanced economic tools and applying them to more systemic environmental challenges.

By the end of the course students will be able to:

1. Diagnose the behavioural and economic drivers of key sustainability challenges in consumption or mobility using empirical data and theory.

2. Design and assess a policy intervention aimed at changing behaviour and propose an empirical strategy to evaluate its effectiveness and potential side effects.

3. Use insights from (environmental) economics to analyse policy responses to systemic issues such as air pollution, deforestation, and waste.

4. Evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of command-and-control and economic instruments (e.g., taxes, permits, regulation), using real-world case studies and cost-benefit reasoning.

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.