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New Master’s Program will Prepare Sustainable Development Practitioners
A newly designed graduate degree program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and up to 12 other universities around the world in the coming three years will prepare aspiring professionals to help address the complex social and scientific challenges of sustainable development. The two-year Master of Public Administration in Development Practice (MDP) program at Columbia University will be the first MDP program to be offered anywhere in the world and will begin in the fall of 2009 with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Study for the degree will include a rigorous core curriculum emphasizing practical, cross-disciplinary knowledge from the health, natural, and social sciences with a strong focus on training for leadership and management. Students will also reach out of their traditional classrooms to engage in intensive field training experiences.
Creation of the MDP programs worldwide is one of the core recommendations of a report from the MacArthur-supported International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice that will be released on October 10, 2008. The year-long Commission was co-chaired by Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and John McArthur, Executive Director of Millennium Promise, and comprised 20 top thinkers in the field of sustainable development.
This group of distinguished experts concluded that there is significant demand today for generalist development practitioner, individuals highly trained in a set of cross-disciplinary core competencies that prepare them to effectively address the complexities of sustainable development work. Leaders in the field need multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills to operate and problem-solve the increasingly complex development challenges.
“The field of sustainable development is growing rapidly and facing challenges of increasing complexity,” said Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Today's practitioners must confront the enormous and interconnected crises of climate change, extreme poverty, epidemic disease, hunger, rapid population growth, and environmental degradation. The new MDP program will train professionals with the multi-disciplinary knowledge, tools and management skills they will need for success.”
For this two-year, full-time program students will begin to study as a cohort in the summer semester and will need to take an intensive refresher course that would include physics, chemistry, biology, economics, math and statistics the summer prior to the beginning of their first fall term. To provide for a common set of skills and shared professional working knowledge, there is a significant component of core courses. Students will take core courses in the disciplines of health sciences, natural sciences, engineering, social sciences and management. Administered jointly by SIPA and EI, the program will also give students access to EI experts, seminars, internships and other student programs that EI supports, in order to engage students in its work.
In addition students must take at least one global course such as Columbia University’s Global Classroom: Integrated Approaches to Sustainable Development. This information technology, web-based, interactive course fosters cross-border and cross-disciplinary collaborations that enhance the MDP program and allows students and professors around the world the ability to participate in collective assignments and learning experiences. Students will also take courses in a foreign language or other electives and will be able to apply their linguistic, analytical and practical skills in places such as Africa, Asia or Latin America where they will gain first-hand experience of integrated development approaches within the real-world context.
While the new MDP program at Columbia University will train generalist sustainable development practitioners, the program also meets the demand of specialists like physicians and PhDs who require means to round out their knowledge base for the practice of sustainable development so that they can effectively contribute to cross-disciplinary teams. At the end of the two-years of study, graduates of the MDP program will be prepared to address sustainable development issues from a range of positions including government ministers of planning, UN resident coordinators, country directors or regional directors for international non-government organizations, bi-lateral and multi-lateral financial institutions.
To learn more about the new Master in Public Administration in Development Practice, visit www.sipa.columbia.edu/mdp.