Resource Management and Geography - Theses
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ItemTurbulence, habit and desire: life after two coal mine closures( 2020)This thesis investigates the experiences of workers and their families as they navigate disruptions to everyday life caused by workplace closure and job loss. Situated in the boom-and-bust world of extractive industry, it draws on qualitative fieldwork at two recently closed coal mines in Australia and China to explore the twists and turns of life after loss in restructuring economies. Picking up people’s lives several years after the mine closures, this thesis traces the cascading chain of changes catalysed by the event of closure. It explores how circumstances of life come to press upon bodies in the wake of loss, and how these intensities can come to reshape how people experience the world. It ultimately asks how people might weather the crisis of loss such that they regain a sense of life as an ‘ordinary’ timespace, reorienting from the past to the future. To do this, this thesis approaches loss as a non-relational force of interruption, showing how loss decomposes existing relations and exposes people to an unknown present. Drawing on postphenomenological theories of bodily change, it then tracks the shifts in concerns, anxieties, and orientations that emerge in this timespace of vulnerability and exposure. These processes of change are explored through three empirical chapters on the forces of turbulence, habit and desire. Turbulence shows how loss can bring ordinary life into disorder, leaving people exposed to the intrusions of unfamiliar and often unmanageable conditions. Habit suggests how melancholy durations of life can redraw everyday existence, allowing bodies to pick up different lines of the past to make sense of the present. Finally, desire describes how encounters after loss might begin to mobilise processes of repair, reorienting people from a lost past towards an unfolding future. By examining the relationship between self and other in the constitution of subjectivity, this thesis shows how transformations of the subject can come about through affective intensities that fold otherness into the self. It contributes to understandings of affect, embodiment, and relationality in geography, addressing how the turbulent circumstances of life after loss can speak to tensions in geographers’ understandings of connection and disconnection, presence and absence, relation and non-relation, activity and passivity. By focussing on how people come to live on after loss, this thesis moves beyond the melancholic tendencies of existing literatures on loss to foreground incipient processes of corporeal transformation. Its thrust is thus consolatory: it aims to recognise the gaps and tears that accompany ends, whilst refusing to forgo the vital and affirmative possibilities of life after loss.
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ItemCorporate Strategy and Ecological Modernization: Industrial Water Management in North China( 2020)In the ecological modernization of China, how firms respond to environmental constraints ought to be investigated to inform environmental reform in China. In industrial water management in particular, socio-economic development in China is boosting industrial water demand, yet water scarcity, severe in the drier north, has exacerbated the conflict between this natural resource and industrial need. While the Chinese government initiated various engineering projects, the largest being the South to North Water Transfer Project, to increase water supply in areas of demand, better management (e.g. changing consumption, reuse and recycling etc.) is argued to be of more urgency and sustainability in China. Positive changes in people’s values, attitudes and behaviours towards water could lead to efficient use of this limited resource. Therefore, this thesis takes a behavioural approach to investigate water management strategies in North China industrial organizations through the lens of ecological modernization. Empirical research is based on firms located in two regions, Beijing and Hebei. It investigates how industrial firms, one of the major market actors in ecological modernization, respond to both physical and regulatory environmental constraints. The methods used are primarily qualitative: semi-structured in-depth interviews and direct observation, supported by secondary data collection. The physical and institutional water availability in the study areas is firstly assessed. Then firm strategies in water management that patterned organizational behaviour are identified. Through analyzing strategies in different firms, the impact of firms’ own characteristics within their borders and the impact of locality attributes are disentangled. The thesis demonstrates ecological modernization a useful tool for understanding water management in China. It finds that North China’s industries are faced with both physical and regulatory water stress, though current prices fail to regulate industrial consumption. Environmental and institutional circumstances are driving environmental upgrading in this region. Firm-level adaptations featuring both upgrading and downgrading strategies include innovation, relocation, outsourcing, factory closure and rule breaking, depending on firm capabilities and orientations. I further argue that both firm characteristics (ownership, size/scale, financial status, market position, and sectoral character etc.) and locality factors (infrastructure and institution) play significant roles in shaping firm behaviour in water management, while interacting with each other. By building a tentative analytical framework to analyze the impact of firms’ own characteristics and locality on firms’ water strategy, this study contributes to both management and geographical theories within the framework of Chinese ecological modernization. And through the empirical analysis, water management suggestions for decision makers in both state and enterprise level are given.