The Master of Energy Transition (MET) program covers a lot of ground. Students move through coursework spanning infrastructure and technology, economics, policy, and social equity—building the broad fluency necessary to lead in a highly dynamic field.
In Community & Global Resilience in Energy Transitions, MET students explore how energy transitions are shaped by resilience, governance, equity, and community decision-making. The course emphasizes how technical energy solutions are deeply connected to communities, institutions, and social outcomes.
The course is taught by Christa Daniels, Lecturer in the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. Daniels, PhD and AICP, is a nationally recognized expert in land use, climate resilience, and community engagement. On the subject of resilience, she is clear: "It's not just about bouncing back from disruption. It's about how to bounce forward—how to become more resilient, more equitable, more adaptive, and more prepared."
That concept—bouncing forward—is the lens through which Daniels asks students to examine everything they're learning in the program. Where many other MET courses build the technical and analytical toolkit of the energy transition, hers focuses on who that transition is for, who it might be leaving behind, and how to design solutions that address interconnected social, economic, and energy challenges.
Daniels' career has spanned city planning in Keene, New Hampshire, statewide environmental work, and advising at the United Nations. Experience across those scales shapes how she structures the course.
"Working across different scales reinforces how interconnected resilience is," she explains. "You can have a global goal, but implementation comes down to local decisions. So much needs to happen at the local level—land use decisions, infrastructure, housing, emergency preparedness."
The course is organized around two core themes—resilience and energy justice—and draws heavily on systems thinking, a tradition with deep roots at Dartmouth through the work of the late Donella Meadows, PhD, a Pew Scholar, MacArthur Fellow, and longtime Dartmouth faculty member whose writing and teaching spanned ethics, environmental systems, and journalism. Daniels also incorporates the work of Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, who collaborated with Meadows and has written extensively on multisolving: the idea that well-designed interventions can address multiple challenges simultaneously.
"The energy system isn't stand-alone," Daniels says. "It's the economy, it's governance, it's people. If you look at the energy system alone, you could get stuck with unintended consequences for another system. You have to look at everything around it with an embedded lens of equity."
For students who have spent other parts of the MET curriculum exploring financial models, engineering specifications, and policy frameworks, this course offers an expansive perspective—a way to see how the technical, economic, and human dimensions of the energy transition play out together in the real world.
Across the MET program, courses are deliberately designed around transferable frameworks—tools and ways of thinking that apply whether a student goes on to work in energy finance, corporate energy procurement, nonprofit leadership, or policy advocacy.
"I want them to think holistically about resilience," Daniels says. "To understand the connections between systems, and to think beyond the energy transition as a finance issue or a tech issue."
The practical toolkit she builds includes system mapping, community engagement methods, adaptive capacity frameworks, and strategies for identifying leverage points—the places within a system where a targeted intervention can produce outsized change.
Underlying all of it is a set of questions Daniels returns to consistently—questions she wants students to carry into every professional context they enter: Whose voices are being heard? Who is benefiting? Who is bearing the risk? Can we build authentic empowerment?
The course is grounded not just in frameworks but in partnerships with working organizations. Drawing on her extensive network, Daniels places student teams directly inside organizations grappling with real challenges.
Groups of four to five students are currently working with partners including the Island Institute in Maine, Norwich Solar, the town of Hartford, Vermont, and Florrent, a battery storage company. Projects engage different organizational types—nonprofits, local governments, and businesses—giving students exposure to a spectrum of where energy transition work can happen.
"All of the projects revolve around resilience," Daniels notes. "Students are exploring how energy transition decisions interact with broader social, economic, governance, and environmental systems, and how those interactions shape both intended and unintended outcomes."
The course also engages some of the most pressing emerging tensions in the broader energy transition—topics that connect directly to what students are encountering in other parts of the MET curriculum. Critical minerals, for example, are examined not just as a supply chain question but through the lens of geopolitics, community impact, and global equity.
"If we address these issues early, we can avoid repeating past mistakes," Daniels says. "Communities can benefit economically while still protecting people and ecosystems."
In a moment when federal energy policy is less supportive of clean energy sources like wind and solar, Daniels offers students something more durable than optimism tied to political outcomes: a conviction that local action is powerful and largely independent of Washington.
"So much can be done without a federal initiative," she says. "So much happens locally, through regional utilities, cooperatives, local policy, land use regulations, and community partnerships." Through her course, students are inspired to see what can be achieved regardless of political trends.
Daniels points to concrete examples that rely on local decision-making: burying power lines, creating redundant infrastructure systems, and building resilience hubs that strengthen communities day-to-day while also providing critical support during disruptions.
"Trust is built at the local level. Political will can develop with trust. There are so many tools at the local level to effect real change."
That perspective complements other coursework in the MET. Alongside the importance of federal policy and market-level action, understanding the full ecosystem of opportunity, including what's possible at the local and regional level, opens up a wide range of possibilities for impact.
When asked what she hopes students take away from the course, Daniels describes not a checklist of competencies but a shift in how they see the world and their role in it.
"If students come away with a fundamentally different way of seeing systems and resilience—the understanding that systems are larger than their individual parts, that actions create ripple effects across communities, and that communities should not only be heard but meaningfully included in decision-making—that's success," she says.
She also finds no shortage of inspiration in the students themselves, who arrive at Dartmouth with rich and varied experience.
"The cohort is so motivated. They come from different backgrounds and bring a wide range of experiences and knowledge into class," she says. "In many ways, the classroom becomes a living lab for systems thinking and resilience—the ability to learn across differences, understand how social, environmental, and energy challenges are deeply interconnected, and build more just solutions through collaboration."
Christa Daniels is a Resident Scholar at the Irving Institute, a Lecturer at Dartmouth's Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, and a Senior Advisor to the Telosa Community Foundation. She is the author of City for the Future: Resilient, Equitable, and Regenerative and co-author of Centering Equity in Climate Resilience Planning and Action: A Practitioner's Guide. She teaches Community & Global Resilience in Energy Transitions in the Master of Energy Transition program.