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.
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ItemTransitional environmentality: conservation as territoriality in Timor-Leste( 2016)This thesis investigates conservation as a process of state territorialisation amongst customary communities in Timor-Leste and argues for a more nuanced understanding of environmentality that reflects an observed transitional nature. While conservation has been critiqued as a territorialisation process, coherent examination of the rhizomatic form of its interrelated components in an assembled whole is lacking. Furthermore environmentality, the governing of environmental behaviors central to this practice, has been given little critical attention as a dynamic process of transitory uncertainty. In addition to these gaps there has been little examination of livelihood impacts regarding conservation implementation in Timor-Leste. I work to interrogate these issues and in doing so illuminate the socio-environmental and political complexity of resource contestation across different scales and multiple stakeholders in the fragile half-island state. Analysis in this endeavor utilizes a political ecology framework that is equally attentive to the material and discursive dimensions of environmental change in relation to power. Attention is firstly drawn to the political-economic and environmental history of forest management in Timor-Leste. It is demonstrated that the colonial and occupational legacies have strongly shaped current environmental conditions as well as the local social institutions that inform them, while state appropriation of land for ‘conservation’ has historical precedence. At two case study sites (including Timor’s first national park), I explore the similarly significant livelihood impacts occurring despite different intended management approaches. These impacts stem largely from a ‘displacement of access’ to essential resources and customary practices. Through bans on essential livelihood practices including swidden, livelihood opportunities have diminished. Resulting outcomes have been food insecurity; increased land conflicts; marginalization of customary ontology; and a greatly increased susceptibility to disaster events. Analysis shows that while conservation management strove to improve environmental conditions in protected areas it also exacerbated degradation, translocating it to remaining villager land and thereby acting to reproduce demands for itself. The logic of territorial expansion is revealed to occur through a state assembly of multiple new discursive articulations of landscape. These include: landscape as wilderness, the state as technical expert, local users as resource degraders, neoliberalisation of the environment and nationalization of local natures. Central to this are state aspirations of political subjectivity and villager eco-rationalising of the environment which is unsettled by the aforementioned livelihood impacts, weak governance and poor consultation. This unsettling threatens to fracture the very legitimacy of state conservation claims. I argue that this juncture of uncertainty where such processes pool and coalesce, illuminates a new mode of environmentality practiced; one whereby villager environmental behaviors warily reflect adherence to the state’s concerns, but only transitionally or temporarily. Adherence to the demands of state conservation is perched precariously on unstable discursive undergirding by the friction and tension of weakly produced environmental truths. In such a position local acquiescence is sensitive to further experiences of livelihood impacts or state fallibility. These may potentially rupture claims of authority causing slippage, unless the state is able to effectively argue otherwise. It is at these junctures then that local resistance emerges and articulation begins.
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ItemA critical history of forest conservation in Sierra Leone( 2015)In this thesis, I unravel the complex forest conservation history of Sierra Leone during the 20th century, providing a better understanding of how contemporary forest conservation practices and discourses in the country have been framed and developed. Using an interpretative analytical approach, grounded in a political ecology framework, I develop a critical history which is not simply concerned with recounting policies and initiatives to manage Sierra Leone’s forests, but rather attending to the complicated social, economic and political contexts that have shaped approaches to forests over time. The thesis’s empirical chapters are divided along the lines of key colonial and post-colonial forest conservation programs adopted by the country’s Forestry Department: 1) Forest Reservation; 2) Afforestation; 3) Exploitation; and 4) Wildlife Conservation. Such a division provides an analytical approach to unravelling the genealogical foundations of colonial forest conservation ideas and praxis that have been developed in the country. To this end, across these chapters, I examine how ‘forest conservation’ has been defined temporally – in what ways, for what ends, and through what means. This includes developing an understanding of how historical events, processes, and individuals have shaped forestry practices and policies in the country over the past century. Ultimately, through such a process, I am able to develop a critical space to formulate an appreciation of how many contemporary forestry policies and approaches in Sierra Leone are a deeply grounded in past colonial policies and ideas.
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ItemThe political ecology of the Japanese paper industry( 2002-11)The Japanese paper and paperboard industry has grown to be one of the largest in the world. It manufactures a range of products for sale primarily within Japan, and consumes organic fibre for these products from dispersed domestic and foreign forests, plantations and cities. This dissertation examines the links between the development and structure of the industry and its use of papermaking fibre. It takes a political ecology perspective and uses an industrial structure/consumption-production chain approach to show how the industry’s development and structure continue to depend on company control over fibre flows and the restructuring of products, product distribution and manufacture, the fibre supply chain and fibre resources. As with the modern global paper/board industry, the recent growth of the Japanese industry has been characterised by cycles of capacity expansion, market collapse, excess capacity and low prices and profits. Manufacturers and general trading companies involved in the industry have tried to support growth in the use of paper/board and counter these cycles by restructuring production, distribution, ownership and fibre supply. This restructuring helps protect the flow of fibre through the industry and concentrated it in particular companies. Obtaining increasing quantities of suitably-priced fibre has been at the base of the industry’s development.
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ItemA political ecology of Warlpiri water rights: a denial of access and land alienation to perennial water sources on leased lands in the Western Desert( 2008)This thesis analyses an environmental conflict over water in the 20th century and the radical land and water transitions of the Western Desert, Australia. It investigates the direction and causes of environmental change through exploring both customary and statutory Warlpiri water rights. An ethnographic analysis of Warlpiri spiritual and cultural values of water shows that Warlpiri traditional knowledge ensured the sustainable management of their water sources. However this thesis argues that Warlpiri knowledge on sustainable land and water management continues to be ignored by the Western System. Contrasted with European production and consumption values, there are racially opposed worldviews on water management approaches in this arid environment. These pose major threats to sustainability. European land and water transitions emerged in the early 20th century, in which political and legal influences led to a water rights framework that ensured lessees' exclusive control of water sources and alienated Warlpiri people to the driest parts of the region. This analysis interweaves two underlying themes that underpin the lack of protection of Warlpiri water rights: land alienation and denial of access to perennial water sources on leased lands. The thesis explores the biophysical and socio-cultural consequences of the lack of protection of Warlpiri water rights. This is explained through social processes influencing environmental change: the decline in Aboriginal land management practices, the absence of Aboriginal presence on pastoral leases, legal and political precedence given to lessees, their open grazing management practices and the proliferation of artificial watering points. These are suggested as some of the causes of land degradation and the marginalisation of the Warlpiri. The thesis provides counter narratives on the historical and cultural context of Warlpiri water rights that incorporates both traditional and modern frameworks, underwritten by a Warlpiri social movement that is trying to ensure the protection of rights. The emergence of a Warlpiri social movement opposing unsustainable livelihoods and productivism, is now part of a post-productivist transition. The reinvigoration of a Warlpiri social movement in the new millennium has emerged through scholarship and the engaged practices of political ecology. A political ecological critique of Warlpiri water rights shows that their protection is critical to the sustainable management of Western Desert water sources. This emerging water management transition converges racially opposed worldviews that draw on both Warlpiri and Western knowledge systems and diverse belief systems to achieve economic, social and environmental sustainability.