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A unique new international development degree at The University of Western Australia aims to equip students with the skills needed to tackle the increasingly complex array of global challenges facing aid and development agencies.

Issues including the Taliban's disruption of polio eradication efforts in Central Asia, anti-austerity movements in Greece, and global debates over climate science and inequality are just some of the complex problems now being faced by those working in international development research and practice.

Those in the field now require not only an understanding of the economic and social processes underpinning development, but also a scientific understanding of areas including climate science and agricultural science.

UWA's new Master of International Development is the first course of its kind in Australia to explicitly recognise and cater for such demands.  The course will take a unique multi-disciplinary approach, with the faculties of Science and Arts - across the Schools of Earth and Environment, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Social Sciences - working to ensure students graduate with a well-rounded capacity to effect global and local change.

The postgraduate course, which commenced this year, will offer a choice of specialisation - Development Policy and Practice, International Development, or Economics of Development - and is designed to prepare students for careers in areas including government agencies, aid and national development agencies, non-government development organisations (eg Oxfam), private industry (including consultancy services), and international development organisations (eg the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations).

Professor Graham Brown, head of UWA's School of Social Sciences, said the challenges of international development were becoming ever more complex and inter-related.

"For instance, apparently straightforward efforts to eradicate polio in Central Asia through vaccination are colliding with local political contestation in the form of the Taliban, with tragic results," Professor Brown said.

"Likewise, climate science and ecology is increasingly recognising that identifying ecologically damaging behaviour is insufficient to combat environmental degradation unless we understand the social and cultural systems in which such behaviour is rooted.

"Also, issues which used to be seen as ‘Third World problems' - debt, impoverishment, inequality - have become global issues, whether in the form of the anti-austerity movements in Greece and elsewhere, or in the new global debate over inequality.

"This degree provides the knowledge and skills to begin to tackle these issues in a more comprehensive way, whether through working with local communities in the developing world, or with national and international aid agencies."

For more information about the Master of International Development please call the Faculty of Arts Student Office, UWA on (+61 8) 6488 2853, or email [email protected]

Media references

Ashleigh Franklin (Faculty of Arts Marketing Officer)  (+61 8) 6488 2124 / (+61 4) 17 128 336
David Stacey (UWA Media and Public Relations Manager)  (+61 8) 6488 3229 / (+61 4) 32 637 716