MA International Political Economy (Standard)

Fees for entry in 2027 have not yet been set. For reference, the fees for the academic year beginning September 2026 were as follows:

• MA (full-time)
  UK students (per annum): £16,800
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £30,500
• MA (part-time)
  UK students (per annum): £8,400
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £15,250

The fees quoted above are fully inclusive of tuition, administration and computational costs.

Fees for entry are subject to yearly review. The University reserves the right to increase your tuition fee by up to 7% each year for courses lasting more than one year, including to reflect rising costs associated with delivering our educational and wider student experience. Postgraduate fees information .

Always contact the admissions team if you are unsure which fee applies to your qualification award and method of attendance.

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

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• Graduates of The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University can receive a 10% discount on their master's degree tuition fees as part of our Manchester Alumni Loyalty Discount scheme.

This module will introduce you to the study of critical environmental politics in the contemporary world. It covers some of the most important environmental challenges facing societies, including climate emergency, biodiversity loss, unsustainable resource use, socio-environmental injustices, and food and water insecurity. It is called ‘critical’ environmental politics because it engages with a specific set of theoretical traditions within the humanities and social sciences that question dominant ideologies and power structures. The course is therefore not a general introduction to the politics of the environment but instead explores some of the concepts and frameworks that critical scholars have used to question, deconstruct and challenge mainstream interpretations of environmental issues, including biopolitics, environmentality, environmental justice, ecofeminism, eco-marxism, decoloniality, eco-imperialism, queer ecology, and more. The central challenges of the module will include: i)exploring relationships (of power, conflict and cooperation) within human societies and between humans, other species and environments (or ‘nature’) in contemporary politics and ii) debating the roles of diverse individuals, communities, movements, NGOs, elites, corporations, states and institutions in causing and/or responding to local and global environmental crises.

On completion of this unit successful students will be able to demonstrate:

1.   Understanding of approaches to the study of environmental politics within critical theory traditions;

2.   Familiarity with a range of cases of environmental issues, ability to apply critical theoretical approaches to those cases; and

3.  Understanding of the different drivers and responses to socio-environmental crises around the world. 

The course will be taught on the basis of ten one-hour lectures and ten one hour seminars. Seminars will be structured around student activities, involving group discussions of the set-reading. Students will be required to lead small group discussion on particular topics. The classes will also include some structured delivery of content by the tutors.

The Blackboard site for the course will contain relevant links to further sources and websites. Seminar material will also be posted on the site. Video and online resources will be used in some classes as a basis for discussion and analysis.

750 word book review (25%),

450 word handout (15%),

1800 word essay (60%)

Preliminary reading:The course has been designed with the following text in mind:

• Carl Death (ed.) (2014)Critical Environmental Politics(Routledge).

Supplementary texts include:

• Arun Agrawal (2005)Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Duke University Press).
• havnani, Kum-Kum, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, Debashish Munshi (eds) (2019) Climate Futures:
• Re-imagining Global Climate Justice (Zed Books).
• Brockington, Dan, Rosaleen Duffy Jim Igoe (2008) Nature Unbound (Earthscan)
• Sanjay Chaturvedi and Tim Doyle (2015) Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change (Palgrave).
• Nicole Detraz (2017) Gender and the Environment (Polity Press)
• John Dryzek, Richard Norgaard; David Schlosberg (2013). Climate-Challenged Society. (OUP).
• Giorgos Kallis et al (2020) The Case for Degrowth (Polity).
• Gabriela Kütting; Ronnie Lipschutz (2009) (eds) Environmental Governance: Power and Knowledge in a Local-Global World;(Routledge).
• Amitav Ghosh (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press).
• Sherilyn MacGregor (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment (Routledge).
• Joan Martinez-Alier (2002) The Environmentalism of the Poor: A study of ecological conflicts and valuation (Edward Elgar).
• Jason Moore (2016) Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism (PM Press).
• Peter Newell (2012);Globalization and the Environment: Capitalism, Ecology and Power;(Polity).
• Hayley Stevenson (2017) Global Environmental Politics: Problems, Policy and Practice. (Cambridge University Press).
• Xie Lei (2009) Environmental activism in China (Routledge).