Summer Course - Summer Course 2026 Climate Change and the Limits of Public Administration

Course Description

Climate Change and the Limits of Public Administration is a summer course that examines climate change as a governance challenge to test the capacity and limits of public administration. Although governments have developed policies, targets, indicators, and coordination mechanisms to address climate risk, policy outcomes often fall short of formal ambitions. This course explores why climate governance frequently appears effective at the procedural level but remains weak in implementation and substantive impact. It discusses how fragmented institutions, annual budgeting cycles, political constraints, and linear planning models limit the ability of public administration to respond to long-term, uncertain, and cross-sectoral environmental problems. The course also critically assesses the role of performance indicators and reporting systems, which may improve monitoring but can also obscure inequality, vulnerability, and uneven climate impacts. Using a problem-oriented and case-based approach, participants developed the analytical capacity to distinguish between climate problems that can be addressed administratively and those requiring more adaptive, precautionary, and context-sensitive governance responses.

Course Features

• Admission: Apr 20 2026 - May 19 2026
• Course: Jul 7 2026 - Jul 28 2026
• Seats Available: 100
• Faculty / School: FACULTY OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCES
• Time: 01:00 PM - 04:00 PM
• Classes : Online

Website

Learning Outcomes

• (1) Explain why climate change should be understood as a limit-testing problem in public administration.
• (2) Analyse the effects of scale fragmentation and coordination failure in climate governance.
• (3) Evaluate the strengths and limitations ofindicators targets and performance-based approaches in addressing climate change.
• (4) Assess the implications of climate justice inequality and unequal administration in public policy and governance.
• (5) Examine the tension between administrative time cycles and the temporal realities of climate change.
• (6) Reflect critically on what climate change teaches about the limits of governing through conventional administrative institutions and practices.