A master's degree is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice. A master's degree requires previous study at the bachelor's level, either as a separate degree or as part of an integrated course. Within the area studied, master's graduates are expected to possess advanced knowledge of a specialized body of theoretical and applied topics; the master's degree dates back to the origin of European universities, with a Papal bull of 1233 decreeing that anyone admitted to the mastership in the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach in any other university. The original meaning of the master's degree was thus that someone, admitted to the rank of master in one university should be admitted to the same rank in other universities; this became formalised as the licentia docendi. Masters and doctors were not distinguished, but by the 15th century it had become customary in the English universities to refer to the teachers in the lower faculties as masters and those in the higher faculties as doctors.

The Bachelor of Arts was awarded for the study of the trivium and the Master of Arts for the study of the quadrivium. From the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, the pattern of degrees was therefore to have a bachelor's and master's degree in the lower faculties and to have bachelor's and doctorates in the higher faculties. In the United States, the first master's degrees were awarded at Harvard University soon after its foundation. In Scotland, the pre-Reformation universities developed so that the Scottish MA became their first degree, while in Oxford and Trinity College, the MA was awarded to BA graduates of a certain standing without further examination from the late seventeenth century, its main purpose being to confer full membership of the university. At Harvard the 1700 regulations required that candidates for the master's degree had to pass a public examination, but by 1835 this was awarded Oxbridge-style three years after the BA; the nineteenth century saw. At the start of the century, the only master's degree was the MA, this was awarded without any further study or examination.

The Master in Surgery degree was introduced by the University of Glasgow in 1815. By 1861 this had been adopted throughout Scotland as well as by Cambridge and Durham in England and the University of Dublin in Ireland; when the Philadelphia College of Surgeons was established in 1870, it too conferred the Master of Surgery, "the same as that in Europe". In Scotland, Edinburgh maintained separate BA and MA degrees until the mid nineteenth century, although there were major doubts as to the quality of the Scottish degrees of this period. In 1832 Lord Brougham, the Lord Chancellor and an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh, told the House of Lords that "In England the Universities conferred degrees after a considerable period of residence, after much labour performed, if they were not in all respects so rigorous as the statutes of the Universities required it could not be said, that Masters of Arts were created at Oxford and Cambridge as they were in Scotland, without any residence, or without some kind of examination.

In Scotland all the statutes of the Universities which enforced conditions on the grant of degrees were a dead letter."It was not until 1837 that separate examinations were reintroduced for the MA in England, at the newly established Durham University, to be followed in 1840 by the new University of London, only empowered by its charter to grant degrees by examination. However, by the middle of the century the MA as an examined second degree was again under threat, with Durham moving to awarding it automatically to those who gained honours in the BA in 1857, along the lines of the Oxbridge MA, Edinburgh following the other Scottish universities in awarding the MA as its first degree, in place of the BA, from 1858. At the same time, new universities were being established around the British Empire along the lines of London, including examinations for the MA: the University of Sydney in Australia and the Queen's University of Ireland in 1850, the Universities of Bombay and Calcutta in India in 1857.

In the US, the revival of master's degrees as an examined qualification began in 1856 at the University of North Carolina, followed by the University of Michigan in 1859, although the idea of a master's degree as an earned second degree was not well established until the 1870s, alongside the PhD as the terminal degree. Sometimes it was possible to earn an MA either by examination or by seniority in the same institution, e.g. in Michigan the "in course" MA was introduced in 1848 and was last awarded in 1882, while the "on examination" MA was introduced in 1859. The most important master's degree introduced in the 19th century was the Master of Science. At the University of Michigan this was introduced in two forms in 1858: "in course", first awarded in 1859, "on examination", first awarded in 1862; the "in course" MS was last awarded in 1876. In Britain, the degree took a while longer to arrive; when London introduced its Faculty of S

Graeme Clement Dunstan is a prominent Australian cultural and political activist. He is an engineering graduate of the University of New South Wales, where he was President of the Students' Union and twice co-editor of its newspaper, Tharunka. In 1966, while President of the UNSW Labor Club, he was active in organizing anti-Vietnam War protests; as organizer of the LBJ Welcome Committee he stopped US President Lyndon B. Johnson's motorcade in Liverpool Street, Sydney by lying under the president's car, upon which NSW Premier, Robert Askin, was reported to have said "run over the bastards". In 1973 with Johnny Allen as director of the Aquarius Foundation of the Australian Union of Students and Dunstan, as director of the Foundation's biennial Aquarius Festival, together they produced the Aquarius Festival which took place in Nimbin, New South Wales. Dunstan was the first community arts officer employed by the City of Campbelltown and in that role set up the Friends of the Campbelltown Art Gallery which lobbied to found the Campbelltown Regional Art Gallery.

In 1985–89 he was a Festivals Consultant to the Victorian Tourism Commission and in that role he was one of the initiators the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Ltd serving as its founding Secretary in 1987. As a freelance event organizer, Dunstan has helped produce celebrations including the Byron Bay NYE, Bondi Beach Christmas and NYE celebration 1996, Nimbin'Let It Grow' Mardi Grass, the Sunshine Coast Schoolies Week, the annual Eureka Dawn Walk and the annual Independence from America Day Parade in Byron Bay, he is captain of Peacebus.com, a website and a campaign vehicle from which he organizes Cyanide Watch and other actions of witness for peace, justice and a sustaining Earth. Graeme Dunstan Curriculum Vitae

Christine Maria Jasch is an Austrian economist and accountant. Christine Jasch completed secondary school in Vienna, where she matriculated in 1979 to study at the University of Vienna's Department of Economics, at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. In 1984 she applied for a Studium Irregulare for Ecological Economics, she became a certified public accountant in 1989 and lead verifier according to the EU EMAS Regulation in 1995. In 1989 she founded the Vienna Institute for Environmental Management and Economics, IÖW. In 1999, she habilitated in Environmental Management and Economics at the Austrian University for Agriculture. Since 2011 she has been responsible for the auditing of sustainability reports and certification of environmental management systems for Ernst & Young Climate Change and Sustainability Services, Vienna. Jasch's work focuses on the combination of environmental and sustainability issues with economic instruments, including environmental cost accounting and sustainability reporting.

Her IÖW work has included methodological development as well as practical implementation guidelines for environmental management tools. Working areas include environmental performance evaluation and sustainability indicators, integrated information and management systems and sustainability accounting, material flow cost accounting, impact assessment, ISO standardization for environmental management, sustainability reporting, sustainable product service systems and responsible investing, cleaner technologies. On behalf of the Austrian environmental ministry since 1993 she negotiated the ISO standards ISO 14001 environmental management systems, ISO 14031 Environmental Performance Evaluation and ISO 14041 Material Flow Cost Accounting. In 2000, via the Sustainability Group of the Austrian Chamber for Accountants and Auditors, which she chairs, she founded the Austrian Sustainability Reporting Awards, ASRA, which are granted annually since in cooperation with partners. From 2000 – 2006 she was member of the United Nations Working Group on Environmental Management Accounting.

For them she wrote a book on principles and procedures for environmental management accounting, the basis for her work on the IFAC Guidance document on environmental management accounting, released in 2005. UNIDO is using this approach to combine it with Cleaner Technologies and Environmental Management Systems and thus establish arguments and a baseline for environmental protection and related cost savings by improved resource efficiency. In Austria the national law for the implementation of the EU emission trading scheme requests a separately qualified accounting expert for data monitoring in the audit team, in addition to a process engineer and a chemist. Christine Jasch has qualified as such in 2005 and works on CO2 audits with TUEV Austria. On April 2008 she was voted into the board of directors of oekostrom AG where she served till 2013. Lecturing engagements exist or existed with the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, the University of Klagenfurt, the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt Campus Wieselburg, the University of Applied Sciences Kufstein, the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien and the Danube University Krems.

"Environmental Management Accounting for Cleaner Production", Schaltegger, S. Bennett, M. Burritt, R. L. Jasch, C. M. Springer 2008, ISBN 978-1-4020-8913-8 "Life Cycle Design A Manual for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises", Behrendt, S. Jasch, C. Peneda, M. C. Weenen, H. van, Springer 1997, ISBN 978-3-642-64551-8 Ecologic Institut EU University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna