Download Management and mismanagement of environmental resources

Management and mismanagement of environmental resources: Historical
approaches and contemporary debates
Ryan Burg, Ph.D.
Katja Bruisch, Ph.D.
Recent debates on the limits of growth, climate change, global warming, land grabbing,
water shortages and ecologically driven migration remind us that humans are part of the
natural environment. The possibility that air, water, fuel, wood, and soil might not be
sufficient to secure human well-being in the future is considered to be a major challenge to
societies, local communities, producers, and consumers. Even if sufficient resources can be
secured, the risk that much of what makes ecosystems beautiful, reliable, and livable is
under threat looms on the horizon. Finite and fragile resources make salient the temporal
dimension of business, a dimension that is often neglected in management research. While
managers are often eager to look forward to identify the next opportunity or to find a novel
strategy, ecological sustainability seems to require us to look backwards as well.
The management and mismanagement of environmental resources are unfolding within a
contingent social, political, and economic history. Environmental awareness and attempts
to use natural resources sustainably are not recent inventions. In Russia, as in other
countries, local communities, experts, and the state have acted as stewards of the natural
environment and its resources. At the same time, the country has also seen significant
anthropogenic environmental decline. Past human-nature encounters affect the way that
business depends upon and takes (or fails to take) responsibility for natural resources in the
present.
This course is an invitation to think about the relationship between the economy and the
environment by bringing together the approaches of business ethics and environmental
history. We apply a broader understanding of management which refers to the use of
environmental resources by firms, local communities, societies, and states. Looking at the
interplay between these various actors the course discusses past and present ways of
coping with resource exhaustion and provides a critical survey of concepts, such as
consumerism, community, justice and development. We pay special attention to
ecologically-centered product design, environmental approaches to accounting, and
stakeholder theory as an environmental theory of business. These strategies are
developing in the context of collective action for sustainable development. With case
studies from Russia, this course develops a model of thinking about business from an
environmentally conscious perspective and reflects on the historically conditioned
constraints and opportunities for sustainable economic action.
The course will be organized into sessions focused on the key resources that have defined
the environmental history of Russia: soil, water, air, forest, and fuel. These resources are
strategic for the Russian economy, and they play a central role in the global political context
as well. But their abundance does not prefigure the way that they are used. Instead, state,
society, and business face important choices about how best to manage resources amidst
changing circumstances.
Bringing together business ethics and environmental history helps us to move beyond
fatalistic narratives of Russian environmental degradation. By locating business within the
natural environment and its history, management students will learn some of the basic
features of a more sustainable economy.
Prerequisites: Introduction to management.
Objectives:
 Assess the priority of environmental resources and processes in management theory
and practice.
 Understand the interplay of key stakeholder groups in the exploitation and
stewardship of the natural environment.
 Explore basic normative frameworks for environmental ethics.
 Integrate historical accounts into contemporary descriptions of environmental issues.
 Recognize the special characteristics of public, private, and civil society organization
in Russia, and their historical anticedents.