Sustainable and resilient economies

Individual behaviour can collectively drive people and systems towards unsustainable and vulnerable states, where common resources are exhausted and collapse, competition erodes redundancies and systemic risks build up. In this specialisation, we will identify under what circumstances such dynamics arise, and how public and private risk management could be used to increase resilience and sustainability. Important concepts touched upon in this specialisation are asymmetric information, time inconsistency, self-fulfilling prophecies, and contagion. To analyse the causes and consequences of problems of sustainability and resilience, we will focus on three extremely important real-world cases: i) climate change and natural hazards, ii) management of the global commons, and iii) financial system fragility.

After you have studied this specialisation, you will be able to answer the following questions:

• What dynamics cause vulnerability and unsustainability of societies?
• How generalizable are these issues across different applications and fields?
• How can economic theory on the micro/meso/macro level be used to analyse real-life cases of unsustainability and vulnerability?
• How to choose and use the right methodology to analyse a specific case of unsustainability and vulnerability?