Postgraduate Taught

Climate change is as much a political issue as a scientific one, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Those able to understand and address the social, ethical and political challenges it poses will be highly valuable citizens and employees.

This new MA, unique in the UK, draws on both natural and social sciences to set these challenges in context. Core modules cover international agreements, national regulation and policymaking, NGO campaigns, and grassroots activism. Formal and informal responses to climate change are examined from economic, business, scientific, governmental, and civil society perspectives. Students develop an in-depth understanding of the complex relationships between climate politics and related areas of concern such as peak oil, resource depletion, biodiversity, gender, food sovereignty, and environmental security.

The course is hosted in the School of Politics, International Relations and the Environment (SPIRE) and primarily taught by members of the Centre for Environmental Action and Thought (CREATe), the UK’s pre-eminent cluster of environmental politics specialists. Additional expert input is drawn from other academic departments and from experts outside the University.

Keele’s large campus is undergoing a major redevelopment programme with sustainability at its heart. As a student on the MA in Climate Change Studies you will be able to see these exciting developments at first hand.

The aims of the course are to enable students to: Think, talk, and write about climate change, and the ways in which it is represented, in a systematic, critical and well-informed way. Understand, evaluate and apply a range of theories about the political consequences of climate change, and appreciate the theory and empirical reality of responses to climate change in their social and political contexts. Develop the ability to conduct and report on their own research using appropriate techniques of scholarship in the social sciences. These research skills are essential for the dissertation, but also give a good grounding for future academic or professional work.

In order to apply you must have a first degree (UK second-class honours degree or equivalent or above). Where English is not a first language, proof of English language competence will be required (IELTS 6.5 or equivalent, with a minimum of 6 in each sub-test).

Completion of the MA requires 180 credits, obtained through four 30-credit modules and a 60-credit dissertation of 15,000 words. Each module is delivered once a year as an intensive four-day block of seminar classes, bringing the course within reach of students whose commitments prevent them from living at Keele. Students completing the four modules but not the dissertation will be awarded a diploma rather than the full MA.

Indicative Content of Modules

Climate Change: Science, Power, Policy & Economics (Module Co-ordinator: Dr Philip Catney)

• Climate change science for non-scientists
• Climate policymaking in specific countries including the UK, the EU, the USA, India and China
• Market-based instruments and regulation
• Carbon trading and offsets
• The EU and emissions trading
• The science-policy interface
• The economics of climate change

Climate Change: International Relations, Adaptation, Mitigation and Security (Module Co-ordinator: Professor John Vogler)

• The UNFCC and the IPCC
• The ozone and climate regimes compared – determinants of effectiveness
• Effectiveness and implementation of climate agreements
• NGOs and international climate politics
• The EU as an international climate leader
• The trade-environment problem
• Business interests and international climate politics
• A North-South deal on mitigation, adaptation and development?
• Climate and security

Climate Change: Citizenship, Activism, Democracy and Justice (Module Co-ordinator: Professor Andrew Dobson)

• Changing environment related behaviour I the UK government’s strategy II, citizenship-based alternatives
• Contesting climate change – activism and its impacts
• Protesting climate change – justifications and prohibitions
• Gender and climate change
• Democracy and climate change
  • an authoritarian imperative?
  • the democratic alternative
• Climate change and justice
  • frameworks
  • principles

Climate Change: Strategic Futures, Policy Challenges (Module Co-ordinator: Dr Steve Quilley)

• Futurology
• Climate change scenarios: scientific facts, scenarios and best guesses
• Climate change, peak oil and the Transition Towns movement
• Climate change and post-apocalypse fiction
• Climate change and limits to growth
• Climate change and shifting green priorities: landscape, ecology, survival
• Plan B: green capitalism and climate mitigation
• Plan C: Geo-engineering and planetary management

Dissertation (Module Co-ordinator: Dr Brian Doherty)

15,000-word dissertation on any aspect of climate change politics, to be agreed with supervisory staff. Students may be able to undertake relevant fieldwork to research the work of an organisation working in the field of climate change.

Each module is assessed by a coursework essay plus a range of skills-training exercises. Students demonstrating an outstanding level of work will receive their degree with distinction.

SPIRE is a thoroughly international school, and is particularly welcoming to international students, as well as providing plenty of opportunities for home students to broaden their horizons.

We have staff with educational backgrounds in a wide variety of countries, such as Columbia, Canada, Bulgaria, Italy, Austria, Romania, and Turkey, who present their research all around the world. Students have the opportunity to hear visiting lecturers from various different countries, arranged through our ERASMUS partnerships.

International students will join established international communities at Keele, and will find plenty of support mechanisms in place to help them make the transition to study in the UK (see the ‘International Applicants’ button above).