Teaching students to think ecologically about the global political economy, and vice versa

Global warming, biodiversity decline, and other global-scale environmental changes associated with the Anthropocene are profoundly reshaping and being reshaped by the global political economy. This pedagogical intervention argues that today’s students of International Political Economy (IPE) would benefit from a deeper appreciation of the dialectic between IPE and Global Environmental Change (GEC). We thus call for a re-think in the way environment is usually taught in the field of IPE, first by emphasizing the importance of the underlying GEC-IPE dialectic, and second by encouraging critical pedagogical methods which help students to integrate global ecosystems thinking into their analyses of the global political economy. Through our proposed pedagogical framework, students of IPE are prompted to critically examine taken-for-granted assumptions about the socio-ecological banality of business-as-usual capitalism, and apply this critique to their own personal experiences, identifying ways in which their differing personal struggles and privileges are shaped by the unfolding dialectic between environmental change and the global political economy.