Global Sustainable Development (MSc) 2027 entry

Course information may change. Module information and course content, teaching and assessment may change each year and after you have accepted your offer to study at the University of St Andrews. We display the most up-to-date information possible, but this could be from a previous academic year. For the latest module information, see the module catalogue.

• Compulsory

  • Interrogating Sustainable Development: introduces the origins of the concept, as well as its key critiques and alternatives, using ‘development’ as a broad entry point to a famously vague term. This provides solid theoretical foundations enabling you to identify and critically analyse different approaches to sustainability.
  • Portfolio for Graduate School programmes: The end of degree project takes the form of a period of supervised research where you will explore a topic in depth. The project topic must be agreed by the student, supervisor, and module coordinator.
  • Sustainable Development: From Principles to Practice: examines how doing sustainable development research with non-academic partners challenges us to engage with sustainability as an academic, policy and practical concern. We consider how inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to sustainable development stimulate learning and innovation to address socio-environmental inequalities and vulnerabilities.

• Optional

  • : will introduce concepts of environmental conservation and management and explores their implementation via different contexts and case studies.
  • Building Sustainable, Inclusive and Just Cities: studies tangible and hands-on efforts to build sustainable, inclusive and just cities around the world
  • Capitalism, Development and Environment
  • Coastal Processes: aims to enhance students’ understanding of coastal processes and management, with particular reference to the science and conservation of blue carbon stores.
  • Coasts and Seas: Conservation and Planning for Sustainable Futures: explores insights from planning, environmental geography, political science and other social science disciplines, drawing on examples predominantly from the marine and coastal environment.
  • Communication and Visualisation for Sustainable Development: explores the science behind effective communication through data visualization and the theories underpinning effective science communication and public engagement activities.
  • Coordinating a Humanitarian Disaster Response: explores how a humanitarian response is coordinated in practice, and how effective assessment and analysis of humanitarian data underlies most if not all decision-making in a coordinated humanitarian response
  • Critical Dimensions of Environmental Management: introduces students to the multiple dimensions of ecosystems, from the fundamental principles underlying their effective functioning to how contemporary land management approaches compromise this functioning and the provision of ecosystem services.
  • Diversity, Inequality and Place: provides the opportunity to think critically about diversity and inequality and how they are manifest in place, focusing particularly on local scales
  • Energy Inequalities and Climate Responsibilities: introduces energy ethics through an analytical approach that investigates how energy practices are informed by our individual and collective understandings of ethics.
  • Energy Markets and Finance: introduces the scientific approaches to energy that share a fundamental focus on quantitative methods, observation and experimentation.
  • Energy and Climate Change Policy: focuses on the key issues in energy finance and energy policy, focusing on contemporary UK within a global comparative perspective.
  • Environment and Health: explores how environmental factors such as pollution, waste management, climate change, and urban planning affect and shape the health of individuals in our societies
  • Extractive Environments: introduces SD honours students to resource extraction, as a conflictive arena for determining trajectories of sustainability and as inextricably tied to dynamics of colonialism, knowledge, development and citizenship
  • Geographies of Race, Racialisation and Racism: provides an introduction to theories and analyses of race, racialisation and racism in human geography
  • Green Politics: Theory and Practice: explores the theory & practice of environmental politics in issues of Sustainable Development.
  • Health, Inequality and Development: Examines how social, economic, political and environmental conditions interact to affect people’s opportunities to live secure, healthy and meaningful lives.
  • Housing, Home and Sustainabilities: This module will explore how housing and homes are experienced and imagined, and what this means for ideas of sustainability.
  • Migration and Sustainable Development: Displacement, policy and lived realities: explores the relationship between migration and a broad range of SD goals (including poverty, education, gender and work)
  • Practices for Sustainability Transformation: Towards Nature and Community Regeneration: explores how communities of place, interest, practice and value can contribute to multi-level governance for sustainability, but can also question dominant assumptions manifested at national or international levels.
  • Sustainable Catchment Management: offers a holistic science-based approach to co-manage coastal environments. It examines in detail current issues impacting catchments and coastal environments and the current policy and management structures designed to address these.
  • The Blue Economy and Maritime Security Intersections and Interdependence: explores the utilization of ocean resources in a way that takes economic growth, social equity and ecological conservation into account, and the threats presented to this
  • The Nature of Political Ecology: offers an introduction to political ecology - the study of the relationships and interactions between political-economic structures and ecological systems - and asks what it might teach us about the current climatic and ecological crises.
  • Valuing Environments: introduces students to conceptual and political challenges around valuing environments.

• End-of-degree project

  The final part of the MSc is the end-of-degree project. This takes the form of a period of supervised independent research where you will explore a sustainable development topic of your choice.

  Through the project you will develop your ability to undertake sustained critical analysis, improve your research skills, and produce an extended piece of written work that demonstrates a high level of understanding of your area of study.

  You can choose to present your end-of-degree project in one of the following ways:

  • a policy report and policy brief that emphasises your ability to critically assess sustainable development policy and make convincing recommendations for policy changes
  • a written dissertation that emphasises your ability to plan and execute academically rigorous research (open to students with appropriate methodological experience)