HP437      Half Unit
Health Equity, Climate Change and the Common Good

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

Whilst there are no formal pre-requisites for the course, the course does assume a familiarity with mathematical ways of thinking and a willingness to engage in groupwork.

Rising societal inequalities and climate change are two of the most important challenges facing the world today. “The cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor” are intimately related and together have immense implications for health and wellbeing in general, and even more so for the health and wellbeing of the marginalised.

In this course we examine the inter-related historical determinants of social inequality and climate change to understand how and why we have reached the contemporary crisis that we find ourselves in and the implications of this crisis for health inequality. We reflect on the ideas of social justice and the common good to understand what the current state of the world tells us about who and what we collectively value and use this as a framework to re-imagine how we would like our world to look. Finally, we apply tools from public economics, game theory and public choice theory to understand and model possible solutions to the collective action problems that lie at the heart of these crucial issues and can help us begin to progress towards our re-imagined futures.

The course will take a hands-on approach with students working in groups to build policy simulation models in the form of a board game to synthesise, draw insights from and critically engage with the key ideas covered in the course.

20 hours of workshops and 10 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the AT.

The formative assessment comprises a 500 word critical assessment of another groups modelling project with recommendations on how to improve it

• Donella Meadows (2008) "Thinking in Systems: A Primer"
• Naomi Klein (2016) “Let Them Drown. The Violence of Othering in a Warming World” LRB
• Amartya Sen (2016) “Collective Choice and Social Welfare: An Expanded Edition”
• Pope Francis (2015) “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home”
• Mancur Olsen (1965) “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups”
• Elinor Ostrom (1990) “Governing the commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action”
• Thomas Piketty (2021) “A brief history of equality”
• David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) “The dawn of everything: a new history of humanity”
• Amitav Ghosh (2021) “The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis”
• Andreas Malm (2021) “How to blow up a pipeline”

Video (70%)

Essay (30%, 1000 words)

The summative assessment for the course comprises a 5-7 minute video clip based on the group-based modelling project (70%) and a 1,000 word individual essay critically reflecting on the final model produced (30%).