Major Courses and Plans of Study
With the nongovernmental organizations and civil society concentration, you will choose from a range of core courses tailored to you interests as well as taking a set of required degree courses. Explore a few of the concentration courses below, or download a full plan of study as part of the MID program.
- PIA 2508 - NGO Advocacy & International Coalitions
NGOs play powerful advocacy roles at national, regional, and global levels to help solve wide-ranging human rights and international development problems. As influential critics, idea entrepreneurs, and forces of social change, advocacy NGOs have expert skills sets which they use to expose problems, uplift marginalized voices, shape policies, politics, and social norms, and mobilize implementation. To "scale up" or maximize effect while ensuring advocacy is rooted in local realities, NGOs often collaborate through coalitions involving local, regional, or international partners, and tap into broader civil society networks and social movements. To avoid risks and generate long-lasting positive outcomes, their analysis, strategic planning, and practical skills must be rooted in core concepts and values such as ethical and inclusive advocacy, empowerment, and "transformative solidarity" - that is, "standing in solidarity with people, taking their agency as a starting point, rather than acting for people" (Jackson 2020). Students in this course engage with these foundational NGO advocacy concepts, approaches, and skills. We learn to assess the benefits and risks of advocacy in different contexts, and to examine how NGO advocacy campaigns relate to diverse stakeholders, build alliances, handle sensitive issues, and convey powerful messages. We learn what responsible and ethical advocacy, and their opposites, look like over the life cycle of campaigns. We become adept at analyzing NGO advocacy strategies in a variety of campaigns and contexts. And we learn to apply the advocacy strategy framework, analytical tools, and practical advocacy skills perfected by experienced NGOs/INGOs and practitioners, by participating in a term-long simulation in which students work collaboratively as NGO representatives to develop a professional and innovative NGO coalition campaign proposal on a topic of importance.
- PIA 2551 - Gender & Development
This course seeks to critically examine how development processes affect women, men and gender relations. By doing so it aims to contribute to an ongoing policy discussion on the meaning and operationalization of diverse, inclusive, and equitable development. The course begins with theoretical approaches to gender and development, development economics, feminist critiques, and their methodological implications for mainstreaming gender into development practice. In the second half, the course studies how gender relations are impacted by social change in the form of positive or negative development. In this policy applied section, the discussions focus on a set of policy issues including reproductive health, migration, climate change, ITCs, work, citizenship and leadership. The overarching goal in both sections is to encourage students to review and debate what we already know and what we still don't know about policies designed to close gender gaps globally. The course concludes with a discussion in the form of a mini-conference on the progress record of the United Nation's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
- PIA 2552 - Managing Organizations in Development
This course examines the management of organizations working in international development and humanitarian assistance with a focus on NGO management. This course has three key objectives. The first is to introduce students to the work and environment faced by development organizations. The second is to provide theoretical and practical frameworks for the analysis of management challenges and generation of relevant recommendations. Big questions we investigate include: why are NGOs fundamental for development? How can NGOs improve their accountability and effectiveness? How to best approach a complex decision problem? What are the key opportunities and dangers in organizational "partnerships" between governments and NGOs, northern and southern organizations, etc.? How can NGOs leverage community participation? The third objective is to help students develop transferable management skills, which will help them get a job in international development. Assignments emphasize primary research and focus on building critical writing, analytical, and presentation skills that demonstrate a broad understanding of the key management challenges facing development organizations.
