Our Mission: To prepare individuals to address the greatest challenges of the 21st Century: environmental sustainability, social justice, and economic well-being.

IDCE is a community of scholars and practitioners dedicated to advancing the goals of environmental sustainability, social justice, and economic well-being. Through research and teaching we deepen our understanding of major forces for social change, including: individual action, grass roots initiatives, social movements, markets, technology, government policy, and education.

We prepare our students to become agents of social change: locally, nationally, and internationally. We give them skills, tools, knowledge, understanding, and confidence necessary to be successful professionals in the globalized world, and to function effectively in the context of formal institutions, civil society, markets, and technology. Unifying themes of our scholarship include social justice, politics, power, institutions and policy, environmental quality, public health in relation to environmental and social conditions, impacts of climate change, community development, gender, race, and more.

The IDCE Department offers four distinct interlinked master's degree programs:

International Development and Social Change (IDSC)
Community Development and Planning (CDP)
Environmental Science and Policy (ES&P)
Geographic Information Sciences for Development and Environment (GISDE)

IDCE is composed of four distinct, yet interlinked programs and students earn an M.A. degree within each program by following a well-defined interdisciplinary curriculum. Each program offers flexibility to take classes from each program and courses offered by all faculty in the department. IDCE also maintains vibrant links with other educational programs at Clark, including the prestigious School of Geography, social science and humanities departments like sociology, government, women and gender studies, history, foreign languages, theater, with the physical and life sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and with the Graduate School of Management.

The IDCE Learning Environment

IDCE is dedicated to the intersection of theory and practice and to cross-disciplinary work. Our faculty is a diverse community of scholars committed to production of knowledge which is relevant to social change. Our student body comes from a variety of countries (60% are from the U.S.) and represents a very wide range backgrounds, skills, cultures, and interests. We often differ on problem definitions and strategies for action, but we always agree on a shared commitment to scholarship, critical inquiry from multiple perspectives, and open discussion. We help our students become professionals who can comfortably traverse the boundaries between the worlds of activists, civil society organizations, policy makers, business people, technical experts, and others.

The Forefront of Change

The IDCE education is unique in that the four master’s programs mutually enrich each other. Whether creating micro-finance opportunities in Asia, using GIS to predict impact of land use on watersheds, auditing environmental resource management, or organizing neighborhood revitalization in Massachusetts, IDCE graduates pursue careers on the forefront of change.

Eager to link theory and practice, IDCE graduates turn their ideals into action in projects that use an integrated approach. For instance, ES&P students have the opportunity to examine environmental degradation in Africa in the context of power relations in international development while IDSC students may study the role of technological innovation in poverty alleviation inside the developing world. Students in all programs may learn to use GIS and remote sensing techniques to study such issues as delivery of health services, refugee movements and human rights violations, or location of environmental health hazards in a local community.

Through the interaction with each other and with other Clark programs, in and out of the classroom, students in the four IDCE programs learn to grapple with complexity, to analyze problems, and contemplate real solutions from various disciplinary perspectives and societal priorities.