UGEC2253 Governance and Management Innovation for Sustainable Development

Time

Lecture: Thursdays 10:30 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Instructor

Professor LI Wei

Course Description

The course will teach students basic concepts and current topical issues related to achieving sustainability, and sustainable development goals (SDGs), from multi-disciplinary perspectives including (but not limited to) political economy, business and management, policy studies, sociology, social welfare services, financing, engineering, bio-science, public health, environmental resource management and urban planning. The students are expected to think critically of governance and managerial rules, norms and practices that stand as barriers and opportunities for resolving sustainability problems, and for achieving SDGs.

The course will help students to understand the “sustainable development” concept and the wickedness of sustainability problems, and explore governance and managerial strategies surrounding: 1) the relations between environmental hazards and extreme poverty; 2) economic development and environmental degradation; 3) economic development and social inequality; 4) regulatory and policy innovation; 5) financial system innovation; 6) organizational innovation; 7) technological innovation. The course will also train students skills and strategies in preparing program proposals, advocating governance structure and regulatory/policy changes, persuading internal and external stakeholders to support sustainable development.

Learning Outcome

The students are expected to think critically of governance and managerial rules, norms and practices that stand as barriers and opportunities for achieving SDGs.
The students can apply the framework learned in the course to analyse the challenges to realize multiple and inter-related SDGs in specific project/policy context (e.g. job creation versus reducing polluting consumption).
The students can appreciate different perspectives and contribution of other students from different country/disciplines, in their collaborative research projects.
The students can develop pro-active learning attitude and construct usable knowledge by questioning common beliefs, discovering new puzzles, reaching out to the unknown social groups and looking for novel solutions.