• Develop an understanding of how the heterogeneity of human development intersect with social, economic and environmental issues and their effect on promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship in the developing world.
• Identify and consider the unique challenges as well as commonalities faced by individuals and communities in specific localities across the globe, and how specific innovations may be identified to harness these differences to achieve climate resilience, environmental justice and sustainable development outcomes.
• Identify and consider the impact of the racialized history of development institutions and development discourse, and their impact on contemporary development policy.
• Integrate heterogeneity in community, identity and sensitivity to racial issues into business plans to offer more specialized and individualized solutions.
• Identify ways of measuring impact investment opportunities and applying the Gender Lens Impact Investing approach (GLII) to reflect critically on both business plans and its development process.
• Identify the role of social innovation and social entrepreneurship to tackle community-based approaches and gender specific solutions.
• Critically analyze relevant cases of economy, society and environmental global inequalities embedded in: work, employment, migration, informality, poverty, gender and sustainable development and in the climate and ecology inclusive solutions.

Sustainable development, the improvement of natural ecosystems to enhance absorption of greenhouse gases and the provision of innovative and just solutions that build resilience to vulnerable groups to mitigate and adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change all require harnessing innovations that depart from and impact communities and individuals in different ways. Among businesses, decision-makers and investors seeking ways for implementing the Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement Climate Goals there is increasing recognition of the need to understand the communities they are based in and incorporate gender and race into investment analysis and development policy. A failure to understand the significance of heterogeneity of communities and relationships can interfere not only with the fulfillment of policy objectives but also with achieving sustainability goals and effective climate action. In this class, we will work to explore a variety of country and regional case studies to understand how conditions of community and identity, race, income, and gender heterogeneity across different global regions impacts the prospects for individuals and groups to participate in the creation of common innovative entrepreneurial activities.

This course consists of three modules. The first module cover scholarly and policy debates about the relationship between human, social, environmental and economic development respectively. The module covers feminist and postcolonial scholarship on development, women’s relationship to the economy and environment (including the centrality of reproduction and reproductive health), and the significance of the historical legacies of race and racism in the origins of major development institutions for the legitimacy and effectiveness of these institutions today. This module will consider the intersectionality of race and gender in development, for example, through a focus on the labour of low-income women in the global South and its place within development approaches.

The second module covers a series of country and regional case studies that draw attention to different issues at the intersection of community, individuality and development. These might include community-based approaches, individual gender dynamics in a specific locality; access to resources; survival strategies; reproduction/fertility and population; ethical human relationship with the environment; cultural tensions between development practitioners and the recipients of development aid. The course will aim to include examples and cases from all continents to demonstrate how heterogeneity in community and individuality impacts innovative solutions across the globe.

The third module turns to practice, and considers alternatives to mainstream development and investment models that have the potential to be more inclusive and sustainable on community and individual approaches across diversity and environmental justice lines. These will include impact investments and gender lens impact investing and participatory development. These models and others will be examined to consider both their implications for generating financial gains as well as specific social and environmental beneficial effects.

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