Introducing key global development challenges

Global issues such as climate change and poverty transcend national boundaries and affect everyone.

This free course introduces four key ‘challenges’ as a spur to thinking critically and creatively about responding to development issues on a global scale. You will identify how the four challenges of conflict, governance, justice, and transformation cut-across all areas of global development and call attention to fundamental principles and concerns such as peace, equality and making ‘good change’ happen.

• In seeking to tackle pressing development issues, how do we negotiate the conflicting interests of different people and institutions?
• How can resources be managed in ways that are equitable and fair?
• How do we decide what ‘good change’ might look like and how can it be achieved?

Such challenges provoke deep questioning. They unsettle as well as promote alternative visions of what we mean by development and how it might be pursued.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• appreciate how the four key challenges are used in this course to explore and identify fundamental development principles
• acquire a basic understanding of the nature of the four key challenges, namely conflict, governance, justice and transformation
• engage critically with a global development issue, that of migration, through the lens of the four key challenges.