Journal of Earth Science & Climatic Change
Open Access

Abstract

How can Environmental Law education engage with the proposed Age of Humankind? While much environmental law maintains a business as usual tone, how might we train the so-called Gaian generation of environmental learners? This paper is largely a speculative attempt to answer the question. Focusing on interdisciplinary pedagogical frameworks established for a mixed body of students in earth sciences, geo engineering and environmental humanities, it discusses the practical and theoretical conditions under which integrated syllabi and innovative pedagogies may contribute to the progressive development of climate change law education in Japan. It considers the potential of courses designed at the interface of Disaster STS (that investigates the relations between disasters, science production and policy outcomes), global environmental governance (that addresses the need for institutional science-policy interfaces) and critical environmental legal studies (that seek to move beyond the human/environment unproblematized distinction by combining law and environmental sciences in a way that belongs solely neither to law nor to ES). Such courses should allow students to explore, through case studies and role-play simulations, the relevance of emergent boundary organizations for dealing with climate change and their legitimacy regarding the development of negotiated rulemaking processes in environmental regulation. By emphasizing the pedagogical value of complementary fields such as disaster STS, global governance and critical environmental legal studies, this paper seeks to shed further light on the significance of climate change law education for the progressive building in post-Fukushima Japan of a cross-disciplinary anthropocene curriculum.

Biography

E-mail: giraudou@global.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp