Resource Management and Geography - Theses
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ItemJust adaptation at resource frontiers: climate and empowerment in post-Soviet northern Russia( 2018)Despite an emerging interest in integrating climate policy and development goals, little is known about the potential synergies and trade-offs in resource extraction regions, particularly for Indigenous and rural communities that host resource projects. This thesis explores the institutional and political context in two resource extraction regions that shape resource development and climate change outcomes and mediate planning and implementation of initiatives to support adaptation decisions. The aim of the thesis is to identify the potential of climate change adaptation to contribute to the development of more equitable outcomes and processes for host communities. I present a conceptual framework called ‘just adaptation at resource frontiers’ that seeks to explicate the cross-scale political economy and ecological forces acting in the context of a changing global economy and climate change. The framework is applied and refined based on an empirical study, using interviews, purposive observations, focus groups and document analysis, in four cases in the Republic of Komi and the Republic of Sakha in Arctic and sub-Arctic Russia. Here, Indigenous subsistence-based and rural livelihoods face 'double exposure' to expanding oil exploitation and the impacts of climate change. Host communities bear the impacts inequitably, and they lack recognition of their rights and effective participation in governance. Despite different contexts between case study communities in Komi and Yakutia, the findings show that a) the impacts of oil exploitation and climate change intersect and manifest in altering the dynamics of environmental degradation, resulting in adverse societal outcomes; b) community responses incorporate traditional orders, reproducing governance patterns from the Soviet era, hindered by the state and private interests that favour oil exploitation; c) expansion of oil exploitation is determined by power and politics cutting across the legacies of the past, imaginative geographies of hydrocarbon resources, struggles for resource rents, and struggles over authority and recognition; d) relational injustice mediates the power of communities to shape adaptation decisions in relation to oil projects; e) collective action to fight environmental pollution and inequitable outcome and processes has emerged, and increasingly using climate change narratives rather than opposing the hydrocarbon sector directly. The thesis argues that there is a need to conceptualise and develop adaptation pathways (and pathways towards development) that avoid 'double exposure' in resource frontiers, and this can be achieved by a more nuanced understanding of cross-scale power dynamics and justice as a starting point. The thesis contributes to knowledge by offering conceptual, methodological and policy insights into a more holistic understanding of adaptation in resource extraction regions, specifically in northern Russia.
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ItemProducing difference: the political economy of small-scale fisheries governance on Colombia’s Pacific coast( 2017)The importance of small-scale fisheries for coastal people has been largely overlooked. Governments have often framed oceans as open access spaces prioritising processes of capital accumulation that have had major socio-environmental impacts. Neoliberal approaches to fisheries and environmental governance have relied on territorialisation processes and market-oriented mechanisms to control and ensure the conservation and sustainable use of fishing resources. This thesis investigates how the political economy of small-scale fisheries governance has led to the production of difference and interacted with place-based institutional processes. I have studied the participatory process undertaken by nine coastal Afro-descendant villages along the Gulf of Tribugá in the Pacific coast of Colombia, that led to the creation of a marine protected area. Critically, I examine how difference materialises and manifests in multiple ways by way of: i) territorialisation processes; ii) commodification of fish; and iii) neoliberal biodiversity conservation. I draw on political ecology and geographies of the sea to analyse how the production of difference has influenced place-based institutional processes, social relations, and socio-natural interactions. I argue that the expansion of the political economy of fish and the processes that led to the creation of the marine protected area have enforced static, homogeneous, and atemporal images of reality at sea that fail to reflect the complex and fluid dynamics shaping the lives of coastal dwellers. Sea materialities, social relations, and socio-natural interactions are central in the production of place-based institutional processes. As such, this research highlights the need for legal and political instruments for the recognition of waterscapes as social spaces, and the inclusion of coastal fishing communities in the negotiation of fisheries governance and marine territorialisation processes.