The curriculum is a series of courses designed to help students develop and strengthen interdisciplinary breadth and communication and to build program identity and a sense of community. Please note that courses offered in semesters 1 and 4 will be offered in person, on campus. Courses offered in semesters 2 and 3 will be offered online. Note that all of the courses below have been developed and approved specifically for this masters program and will be offered specifically to these students in a cohort. Online courses can be available to students in the MDP network.

DPP 901 - Integrative Approaches to Development Policy and Practice

Instructors: Joe Lugalla, Michael Swack

This course aims to provide students with a general introduction to the basic core competencies and practical skills required of a “generalist” development practitioner and serves as the foundation course for the MADPP curriculum. Case studies will be used to demonstrate the interconnectedness of natural sciences and engineering, social science, health sciences, and management, especially as they relate to communities. In the first part of the course, faculty will present case studies related to their own experience and lead students in an exploration of the various interrelated dimensions of development practice. In the second part, students will work in multidisciplinary teams, using the primary natural and social science literature, available economic, demographic, and ecological data, and current information from government agencies and the popular press to describe and define the practical problems facing a specific community within their historic, ecological, cultural, economic, and policy context. Throughout the course, we will also examine development practice within the context of various development theories, controversies, and debates.

By successfully completing this course, students will

1. Develop a shared understanding of the MADPP problem areas
2. Cultivate a familiarity with and understanding of the terminology, practices, and methods of disciplines outside those they have brought to the program
3. Explore the challenges and possibilities of chronically poor communities
4. Be able to articulate the difference between disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary approaches to development problems and the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches
5. Gain experience working as a team to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of communities and ecosystems and to develop overarching policy and practice questions framing various development approaches

• Understand the core concepts and technical skills required to solve professional problems within the field of sustainable development
• Develop practical problem-solving skills through the analysis and diagnosis of complex development challenges
• Develop a spirit of collaboration both inside and outside the classroom through increased communication skills and social networking tools in order to prepare them for such environments in the professional world of development practice
• Be able to identify, create, and reflect upon “integrated approaches” and appropriate interventions that may lead to poverty alleviation and sustainable development

Course topics will be grounded in a practical, multidisciplinary approach that will focus on the inter-relationship of each of the following core fields of study:

• Health Sciences—Primary health and nutrition
• Natural Sciences—Agriculture, climate change, energy, engineering, environmental sciences, including biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, technology, and water
• Social Sciences—Economics, education, ethics, gender, policy and foreign aid
• Management—Project management, community development, global cooperation and governance

DPP 902 - Economic Analysis for Development

Instructor: Richard England

This course provides the practitioner with tools of economic analysis that are necessary for effective development practice. Drawing upon principles of macroeconomics and microeconomics, the course explores how markets, property rights, political institutions, government policies, environmental conditions and cultural values interact to produce development outcomes.

DPP 903 - Global Health

Instructor: Rosemary Caron

An analysis of the public policy process, the development of public health policy in developing countries, and a discussion of specific public health policy issues with cross-country comparisons. This course begins with an analytical framework for analyzing a public health system and process. It is followed by a general introduction to effective health policies in developing countries with examples of specific policies and programs that have been effective.

DPP 904 - Environmental Sustainability and Development

Instructor: Mark Ducey

Provide students working at a graduate level but lacking specific background in ecology with an applied perspective on challenges at the interface of rural development and environmental science. By the end of the course students should be conversant in the languages of large-scale ecosystem ecology and conservation biology, and should have a basic working knowledge of the science of carbon and climate change, land use change and deforestation, and the impacts of land use on biodiversity and water quantity/quality.

DPP 905 - Fiscal Management for Development Organizations

Instructor: Robby Vanrijkel

This course is geared towards building financial management capacity at all levels within a community development organization. It is not just for accountants, finance officers, and/or finance managers. While at one level, some basic financial skills are needed to keep accounting records and provide financial information that is required by law, financial management capacity can be achieved by non-finance people as well and is essential for the success of an organization.

The aim of this course is to ensure that there are sufficient and effective internal controls in place within the organization to facilitate sound management over resources, management, and administrative duties within your organization. This course will assist in establishing good financial practices needed to build a strong organization capable of implementing effective programs. It will cover the following topics:

• Planning
• Tracking funds by different donors/programs
• Financial Reporting
• Building sound internal controls within your organization
  • US Government (USG) rules and regulations and how they pertain to financial management of NGOs
• Sub-granting

DPP 906 - Leadership, Collaboration and Communication

Instructors: Jim Varn, Bill Maddocks

This course examines theories, concepts, research, and practices in collaborative leadership. The course is designed to promote creative and innovative policy leadership among emerging leaders in sustainable development and the environment and is directly connected to MADPP competency IV Management, including leadership, collaboration, communication, and ethics.

By successfully completing this course students will:

1. Increase self awareness—unique qualities of one’s own leadership style
2. Explore new research and literature on leadership and policy advocacy through books, articles and internet searches
3. Cultivate a broad range of strategies to accomplish policy goals, including effective negotiation and communication strategies
4. Understand strategies to harness resources (people, funds, etc.) to move policy agendas
5. Practice taking risks, gaining experience with ambiguity, chaos, confusion, and change, within one’s organization and community
6. Deepen understanding and use of cultural competency skills
7. Apply new knowledge through an individual or collaborative team policy project
8. Apply ethical considerations to policy decisions

DPP 907 - Sustainable Engineering for Development Practice

Instructors: Kevin Gardner, Shannon Rogers

Course begins with exploration of the precept that we live in a world where we must design and engineer products with a finite supply of natural resources, and with limited life support capacity. Tools for sustainability engineering related to development practice (e.g., health, energy, housing) are the major focus of the course, which include life cycle, analysis and life cycle impact analysis, the metrics and mass and energy flow analysis used in the field of industrial ecology, and environmental management systems.

DPP 908 - Policy Analysis, Policymaking and Sustainable Development

Instructor: Stacy VanDeveer

This seminar will reinforce the multidisciplinary breadth and trans-disciplinary perspective of the MADPP program, providing students with the opportunity to sharpen critical policy analysis skills. Guest speakers will be specifically selected to highlight international and intercultural dimensions of development policy challenges. Students will be evaluated based on engagement and on a final policy paper in which they analyze a key policy issue facing their home country. The goal of this course is to help students understand the sources of public policy, that is, why we have various public policies and to how to produce professional policy analysis whether you are working for decision maker in government, an NGO, or the private sector. Developing policy expertise requires general understanding of policymaking and policy analysis approaches and the ability to apply these in differing institutional contexts. These tend to be messy, imprecise and dynamic across time and issue areas.   Students will learn how to produce professional analyses, focused on specific policy questions and goals applicable to specific country.

DPP 950 - Current Issues in Microfinance and Microenterprise Development

Instructor: Malcolm Harper

Microfinance (m-f) and microenterprise (m-e) development are powerful instruments, but they are in many ways only rather distantly connected with one another, and microfinance in particular is the victim of exaggerated expectations. This course is designed critically to examine certain vital questions about these two topics, to temper wishful thinking, to identify problems and to generate remedies for them.

DPP 951 - Nuts and Bolts of Microfinance

Instructor: Malcolm Harper

This course is designed to provide the participant with an overall understanding of the microfinance institutions including management, planning and monitoring strategies, tools and systems. Sessions will seek to develop skills and capacity to examine various areas, such as competition, expansion, growth, product development, service delivery and human resource, marketing, and information management systems.

DPP 952 - Balancing Resource Management, Land Use and Development

Instructors: Charlie French, Joel Hartter

Without an understanding of the dynamics behind land-use change – including human behaviors, the need for people to meet their basic needs, the role of decision-makers and institutions (including corporations), baseline land cover conditions, local-global policy frameworks, as well as interactions among these and other factors–we cannot come to understand changes in land cover, nor can we estimate the utility of policy intervention.

The most critical element in land use is the human agent. It is the agent (an individual, household, or institution) that takes specific actions, according to their own decision rules, which drive land-use change and, in turn, change the physical landscape. Furthermore, landscapes are not simply agglomerations of individual pieces (e.g., vegetation, buildings, roads, water bodies), but rather, they are collections of environmental, socio-economic, and institutional components interacting within and among one another at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The landscape is better examined as a whole.

By studying the whole landscape and learning the land use context (forms, history, scale, etc.), we can move beyond narrow prescriptions to larger, place-appropriate development strategies that meet the livelihood needs of people. Successful solutions are attained by balancing the long- and short-term needs as well as the intended and unintended consequences. In this course, we will explore how land use, resource management, and development are balanced within the context of three case studies: Africa, Central America, and New England, USA. Students will apply the methods and concepts learned in the class to develop a local New Hampshire case study/policy analysis.

DPP 953 - Community Medicine and Epidemiology

Instructor: Rosemary Caron

This course covers nutrition, reproductive health, environmental health, women's health, child health, complex humanitarian emergencies, natural disasters, global partnerships, and how we assess these public health issues by using the science of public health called Epidemiology

DPP 954 - Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems

Instructor: Drew Conroy

The course reviews the historical, ecological, economic, social and political aspects of agricultural sustainability principles and practices. Examines the sustainability of various agricultural systems and practices. Examines specific commodity chains – vegetables, grains, meat – in comparative global context. Reviews general concepts governing the functioning of tropical agro-ecosystems in relation to resource availability, ecological sustainability, and socio-economic viability

DPP 955 - Sexuality and HIV/SIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa

Instructor: Joe Lugalla

This course brings together a range of different social science perspectives on HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. During the course we will discuss the history of AIDS in Africa; the social, economic, political, cultural and biological contexts in which HIV/AIDS was able to spread so rapidly on the continent, especially in Eastern and Southern Africa. HIV/AIDS appeared in African societies at a time of social and economic transformations, we will discuss how HIV/AIDS can be interpreted as part of these transformations, as well as the profound effects HIV/AIDS itself have had on families, kinship, moralities and notions of gender and sexualities. The AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa has also been the center of international attention and intervention. The course deals with how HIV/AIDS in Africa has been conceptualized as a problem of international development interventions and of global health governance; we will discuss how representations of ‘African AIDS’ are connected to a longer history of representing Africa, how to analyze global and local interventions to address the AIDS epidemic in the context of international & national politics and economics, and how the international AIDS interventions and discourses have fed into and influenced local political, moral and cultural debates on how to address the AIDS epidemic.

DPP 956 - Housing Development

This course covers market analysis and housing needs assessments, site selection and control, financial feasibility reports, the selection of a development team, methods of obtaining approval from various government entities, identification of private and public funding and subsidies, and various forms of ownership, including cooperatives and land trusts. Students also learn about the policy framework for affordable housing development, and the legal, institutional, economic, political and environmental factors that shape that framework.

DPP 957 - Negotiation Strategies

Instructor: Michael Swack

This course will help participants develop a "method" for preparing and carrying out negotiations across a range of community development situations. This course will also examine important negotiations issues for the community development practitioner such as: valuing non-financial assets; negotiating with larger, more powerful entities; and, dealing with uncooperative parties. The course will focus on case studies and debriefing as the primary learning technique. Participants will examine their assumptions about negotiations and work to improve their negotiating skills.

DPP 958 - Financing Development

This course examines the role of capital in promoting development. The course details the need for and importance of capital for development activities, the nature and limitations of traditional private and public sources of capital, and the policies and institutions needed to increase the availability and effective use of capital for development purposes. The course examines various sources of capital (public and private, traditional and non-traditional) and the benefits and problems associated with using each source. The course will also examine various types of capital, financial instruments, and address the difficulties and problems of financial packaging. Finally, the course will examine specific models and mechanisms (Community Development Financial Institutions) for financing community economic development projects and ventures. We will also review a number of case studies throughout the course, including specific cases brought by the participants.

DPP 959 - Workforce Development

Skilled workers are the backbone of a productive and efficient economy. This course explains the relationship between economic and workforce development through case studies, practical examples and current research. Topics include: reviewing the core components of the workforce development system; understanding occupational data analysis and career pathways; assessing qualifications, skills and abilities of current workforce; recruitment and retention of a skilled labor force; target industry clusters; the role of higher education in workforce and economic development; and, new alliances, models and best practices in regional & local workforce initiatives.

DPP 960 - Social Enterprise

Instructors: Yusi Turell, Fiona Wilson

Social Enterprise is a course examining innovative organizations that are created to improve people's lives and that contribute to improved social, economic and environmental conditions. These organizations adapt various aspects of the market model emphasizing both financial viability and social (including environmental) goals – measuring achievement in all of the areas. Social enterprises are often launched to address problems where government, the private sector and the traditional non-profit sector fail to provide a public good. The course emphasis will be on how such organizations are started, the business models they develop, and how they are sustained. We will have a wide-range of social entrepreneurs presenting in the class.

The class will focus on case studies that give students an understanding of various approaches to social enterprise and illustrate the general strengths and weaknesses of different social enterprise business models. The course will examine a number of social enterprises, including for-profit, non-profit and cooperative models. Students will become familiar with real-life organizations and entrepreneurs through the case method and guest lecturers who will describe their own experiences as social entrepreneurs, and by examining and analyzing a specific social enterprise.

DPP 980 - Project Design

Instructors: Curt Grimm, Bill Kaschak, Jolan Rivera

Project 1 (first semester): During this semester, students will identify a community problem or issue, research and analyze the issue in consultation with colleagues and community stakeholders, and design a project. A preliminary project design will be submitted at the end of the first semester.

DPP 981 - Project Implementation

Instructor: Jolan Rivera

Students will begin implementation activities in field placement communities. Regular progress reports and online postings will be required.

DPP 982 - Project Management

Instructor: Jolan Rivera

Studies how project plan inputs are accurately gathered, integrated, documented and managed; the tools and techniques used in project management; and the outputs of a project plan to viable stakeholders. Considers the development of project scope, work breakdown structures, and the importance of quality, risk, and contingency management in planning development.

DPP 983 - Project Monitoring and Evaluation

Instructor: Jolan Rivera

This semester, students will conduct and evaluation of their project and manage closure processes. At the end students will submit a written final report and present it to the faculty and peers. This final project and the final report detailing the project will serve as the capstone course of the program.

[planned for 2013-2014] Law and Development

This course provides an overview of the relationship between law and development work and some of the basic legal issues facing development practitioners. The course will touch on the historical use and impact of the law, aspects of property and corporations law, and some basic issues of planning law. The course will also focus on general tax law issues; economic development policy including the Community Reinvestment Act, credit issues and microlending; and constitutional issues in community control of benefits.