School of Geography - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 12
-
ItemResistance is fertile: disruptions in urban politics( 2018)Political narratives move across space and time in iterative cycles, while actions on the local level are framed and inflamed through webs of multi-scalar political and economic influence. All these actions generate outcomes that restrict the rights of some while privileging others, generating tensions between community and corporate interests in forms of development that privatise publicly-owned resources, assets and services. Four cases of contestation in the public housing and unconventional gas sectors in Australia and the UK are examined to reveal the relations of influence between development policies and protest action. Using a follow the protest methodology the research studies the movement of political narratives within and between each sector and jurisdiction, mapping key moments of interaction in each case study site. The research shows that as traditional modes of protest are met with increasingly militarised policing tactics, in turn, dynamic modes of resistance and prefigurative politics emerge. The implications of this are a trend towards regulation and control of political expression in public space, enforced through punitive measures and the redefinition of ‘lawfulness’, ‘public safety’ and ‘national interest’ in public policy. The response from activist groups is a movement towards horizontal models of political engagement centred on principles, practices and narratives of commoning. The mobilisation of diverse publics working towards a common political goal results in the generation of alternative ways of doing politics. The research finds that even as policies of economic extraction rend permanent changes in communities and landscapes targeted for development, what emerges from these fracked geographies are alternate articulations of social-ecological relations that hold the capacity to shift and catalyse current political structures away from neoliberal economic logics.
-
ItemFloodplain avulsion channels: understanding their distribution and how they reconnect to the parent channel( 2018)This study is concerned with new river channels that develop on floodplains. These channels can develop gradually, or they can develop more rapidly (avulsions). This study concentrates on the relatively more rapid channel changes known as avulsions. An avulsion specifies the gradual abandonment of an existing river-channel and in response to this, the processes of development of a new channel on a floodplain nearby. The study addresses two specific knowledge gaps: 1) how common are river floodplain avulsions globally, and 2) what are the detailed processes that occur at the up and downstream points where avulsions connect to the main channel? Using random sampling from a global spatial layer I discovered that developing avulsions are extremely common on alluvial floodplains globally, wherever the floodplain is wider than several channel widths. Avulsions are most common on single thread meandering floodplain types, but a review of avulsion literature shows that research is biased to relatively less common floodplain types. Avulsions increase the rate of valley widening, particularly in narrow floodplains. There is a relationship between floodplain width and the number of avulsion channels. The rest of the thesis is focussed in the major process knowledge gap which is how avulsion channels connect into the main channel at the up and downstream ends. The focus of the process component of this study is the broad Murray river floodplain from Yarrawonga to Echuca, SE Australia. I mapped and classified developing channels on the floodplain and found that the avulsion connection point here develops in an unusual way, involving the development and coalescence of low points (depressions) on the levee (this mechanism is very different from normal crevasse splay development). The chain of low points on the alluvial levee coalesce to form a levee channel. Rather than forming by erosion as expected from the literature, form progressively by locally reduced vertical accretion. This identifies a new process by which topography is developed on floodplains. Initially the levee channels are not connected with the Murray main stream and slope away from the river. The connection occurs by lateral migration of the river bank into the levee channel, but also by progressive upslope (river ward) migration of the deepest part of the levee channel towards the river, narrowing the gap between the river and the levee channel. Following connection, the levee channel captures flow from the river, and hydraulic modelling shows that shear stress is sufficient to erode the upstream end of the levee channel. As the channel erodes the shear stress declines, but the proportion of back-flow from the flood recession increases. The result is that the slope of the levee channel reverses to slope towards the river. This is a new mechanism, and it is critical in the sequence of avulsion development. The final stage of the development of avulsion is when a knickzone moves up the levee channel joining another levee channel that is leaving the river upvalley. This is new mechanism of avulsion likely to operate in low energy river systems dominated by fine-grained sediments.
-
ItemPlacing theories of governance: a political geography of American Samoa( 2018)This thesis concerns the study of ‘governance’, which is understood as the process of interactions between actors operating within and through institutions, with the power to steer society, for the purpose of achieving collective goals. Theories of governance are constrained by a lack of empirical research outside of large, continental, liberal democratic and sovereign states, yet on the basis of research in these places universalising claims about governance are made. In contrast, the literature on small states and islands suggests that scale and place mediate governance in important ways, so that studies that look for difference in anomalous geopolitical spaces are important counterpoints for dominant narratives in the governance literature. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to understand how the dynamics of governance in American Samoa (a non-sovereign Pacific island U.S. territory) compare to the key claims of the governance literature. It does this by analysing the history of political relations in American Samoa, assessing the dynamics of governance during and after the 2009 tsunami in the territory, and observing governance processes and practices in the field. Data were collected from over 50 interview and participant observation over four months of fieldwork. This study of governance in American Samoa finds three key points of distinction to the dominant Anglo-European claims about governance. First, there is a mismatch between the type and influence of actors outlined in the governance literature (which are the state, NGOs and market actors) and those with the power to govern in American Samoa (which are the state, the church and chiefs), and this has significant consequences for the nature of governance in place. Second, the political and cultural history of the territory, combined with its size and scale, has served to mediate relative authority of these actors in ways that are quite different to those that the mainstream literature suggests prevail in most places. Third, and in turn, in American Samoa there is a complex mode of governance that differs from the dominant account of a shift from hierarchies to networks. These findings represent a new perspective on the assumptions and rationalities of the governance literature, and contribute to more geographically nuanced theories of governance.
-
ItemGlobal climate governance: the politics of terrestrial carbon mitigation in the Paris Agreement( 2018)Emissions from land have been only partially included to date within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations have committed to preventing dangerous global warming with an objective to ‘balance emissions from sources and removals from sinks’ in the second half of this century, raising the possibility of unprecedented reliance on land-based mitigation. The objective further requires that this balance must be achieved ‘on the basis of equity and in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication’. Modelled scenarios for achieving the ‘balance’ objective of the Paris Agreement rely on drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis and storing it in land-based sinks or underground, potentially reducing the availability of productive agricultural land, and encroaching on natural land. However these issues are poorly recognized in the policy-uptake of modelled outputs. This thesis analyses the contested politics of including (and accounting for) land-based mitigation in a post-2020 climate agreement, and the consequences for future mitigation pathways over the course of this century. Science enables better understanding of climate change causes and impacts, with climate policy heavily reliant on scientific legitimization. This thesis takes a threefold approach to understanding the legitimization of policy through practices of science: first, by analyzing land-use accounting rules as a site of politics under the climate regime; second, by using a co-production lens to explain the legitimization of negative emissions as key mitigation options; third, by assessing the synergies between land-based carbon removal and sustainable development goals, using a risk evaluation framework. It finds that the legitimization of a technical or ‘expert-led’ approach to climate governance in the context of the Paris Agreement has so far led to an expectation for unprecedented reliance on the land sector to meet the ‘balance’ goal in the long-term mitigation objective, implying strong trade-offs with other societal goals. The thesis concludes that the Paris Agreement institutionalizes similar dynamics to the Kyoto Protocol, taking a technocratic approach to land-sector governance, where the perception of model-based knowledge as ‘objective science’ lends authority to outcomes that might otherwise be more critically debated and contested. Closer engagement between modellers and policy experts for mitigation scenario development would allow for more negotiated forms of knowledge production, that might better clarify and represent the multiple objectives and interests at stake in the utilization of limited land resources. These findings highlight the need to make explicit the values and assumptions embedded in the co-production of science and policy, and how accounting for societal values becomes a mutual responsibility for scientists and policy-makers.
-
ItemNeoextractivism in hydrosocial territories: The case of the páramo of Kimsakocha, Ecuador( 2018)The Ecuadorian government has defined extractivism as the basis of the “strategy for accumulation, distribution and redistribution” to alleviate poverty and to secure development since 2013. The expansion of extractive activities, mining in this case, and the mechanisms adopted to translate extractive rents into development is called neoextractivism. This thesis examines an ongoing conflict in Kimsakocha, province of Azuay, ignited by neoextractivism and the incursion of mining in a life-sustaining and sensitive socio-ecosystem called the páramo (Andean wetlands). I argue that neoextractivism is not only a development model, but it also has the power to reconfigure existing socionatural configurations—conceived as ‘hydrosocial territories’—through asymmetrical power relations, legitimizing discourses and knowledge systems; while undervaluing its impacts on the interdependencies between peasant lifeways and the páramo. This has occurred when ‘other kinds of knowledges’ are neglected and demands for participation in environmental decision-making, or protest, are perceived by government officials as a threat to their authority over exploitation of natural resources as a means to support Ecuador’s economic growth. In consequence, development strategies based on large-scale exploitation of Nature cannot be analyzed independently from the potential modifications of the relationships between the state, Nature, society and the new actors it brings at play, in this case the mining industry. With this purpose, this thesis proposes an analytical framework informed by relational ontologies and political ecology (PE) for the study of socio-ecological conflicts derived from resource-based development. It is based on the following premises: i) The territories of influence of resource extraction projects are socionatures: The territories where ‘resources’ are located are spaces where Nature and communities have developed in close interdependence, thus, extractivist projects are not bounded by physical limits of the mine site but these expand as far as society and Nature are engaged in those socionatures in general. ii) Development strategies based on resource-extraction are (hydro)territorial projects that reconfigure the relationships within socionatures: Extractivism is a political, economic, social and environmental project that interacts, even overlaps, with other projects lived and envisioned in the same territory. (Hydro)territorial projects reproduce the interests and values of all the actors or groups of actors involved; while discourses and knowledge systems are used to legitimize and impose dominant projects. iii) Impacts on socionatures cannot be understood if relational epistemologies are disregarded: The people actively co-producing socionatural configurations feel their actual or potential modifications. Only by being sensitive to the embodied knowledge emerging from the engagements between people and their socionatures, which are threatened to be modified by extractivism, can a PE approach get a deeper understanding of socio-ecological conflicts. I conclude that resource conflicts are not only struggles over control of, access to and decision-making over resources, or only over meanings and knowledges either, but they are also struggles over different relationships co-producing different worlds. Relational ontologies offer insights over these multiple ways of living in and co-producing plural worlds and PE as an epistemological and analytical approach is sensitive of these understandings.
-
ItemFollowing pesticides in disposal: a chemical geography( 2018)The world is overflowing with the discards of twentieth century chemistry. Industrial chemicals are unruly materials, transgressing spatial and temporal boundaries – found accumulating even in the vast depths of the Mariana Trench. Yet geography has largely taken the materialities of these chemicals for granted. The discipline has a long tradition of researching materials and material cultures, however, the things examined are largely limited to stuff that is visible, stable, touchable, familiar, and coherent. This thesis aims to extend conceptualisations of materiality within human geography by examining the material geographies of pesticides in disposal. It pursues an object of analysis that is incoherent, volatile, mobile, highly distributed, and persistent. This thesis considers the after-lives dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane – better known as DDT. This Nobel Prize-winning pesticide is both celebrated and condemned for its persistence and toxicity. This thesis assembles the material biography of an obsolete DDT stockpile: 250 tonnes of banned, expired, and damaged pesticides with an elusive origin. Obsolete pesticides have been identified by environmental organisations such as the Green Cross as one of the most toxic threats to life on earth. Yet the disposal of pesticides has been overlooked within the social sciences; questions of how stockpiles emerge and what processes are involved in their management have yet to be considered. This thesis uses a follow-the-thing methodology to trace the residues of this DDT stockpile across space and time through unending processes of disposal. The multi-sited ethnography spans five countries and two continents, assembling the material biography of an object that extends over three decades. In following the life of this stockpile, three key processes of disposal emerged: storage, removal, and incineration. This thesis is structured around these three hotspots of activity. The life of the stockpile is narrated through process stories that are attuned to the everyday practices of pesticide disposal. Two broad interconnected arguments are forwarded in this thesis: first, that disposal is always incomplete; the residues of this stockpile linger and accumulate in the bodies and places they come to inhabit. And second, that although disposal is materially impossible, pesticides can be erased representationally – in ways that conceal the ongoing and uneven material histories of industrial chemistry. This thesis expands human geography’s material repertoire, and in doing so enables new sites, practices, processes, and material politics of disposal to emerge. It ontologically re-imagines pesticides and offers a methodological approach for considering industrial chemicals through their residues, in both material and representational terms. This thesis ultimately demonstrates how representation comes to matter in material geographies, and the ways that the repetitiveness of disposal has cumulative effects with significant ethical repercussions.
-
ItemCompensation inequity in resettlement: a rural construction land transfer project in Shanxi, China( 2018)Land has long been a source of conflict in rural China. In pursuit of land for development, local authorities have initiated resettlement projects, some of which have led to social unrest and mass incidents. In response, the central government has intervened with policies such as the Farmland Redline for food security and quota controls for land provision in local jurisdictions. The most recent intervention is Rural Construction Land Transfer (RCLT in short), a policy that provides local governments with quotas for converting farmland to construction land by resettling farmers from their spacious farmhouses to relatively small apartments. Officially it is claimed that RCLT is entirely voluntary and does not encroach on resettlers’ interests. However, the existing resettlement literature suggests that those resettled usually receive inadequate compensation after resettlement, and that compensation is not equally distributed among the affected. This thesis aims to understand how RCLT has been implemented and to examine the factors that shape compensation. To achieve this aim, two main research questions are posed: 1) How has the RCLT policy been implemented in China?; 2) To what extent does household compensation differ among the resettled, and what factors contribute to any divergence? The thesis draws on Allen’s multiple modalities of power to examine the interactions between state actors and three groups of resettled farmers. It responds to the research questions through an investigation of policy implementation in a rural county - Zezhou - focusing on the resettled households’ bargaining process with policy initiators. An in-depth case study is presented, drawing on semi-structured interviews and direct observation, as well as questionnaires and secondary data collection. This thesis first finds that RCLT was easily distorted through a lack of effective supervision and monitoring from higher-level government agencies. It also finds that heterogeneous compensation among resettled households largely resulted from divergent power relations amongst state actors and the resettled households over the period of compensation distribution. Further, compensation regulations were influenced by rural politics, such as guanxi and kinship in the village, which played an important role in compensation design and distribution. On a practical level, these findings suggest that higher levels of government should refine policy regulations for improved social justice and equity in such resettlement projects, and also that those affected should play a more influential role in designing compensation. On a theoretical level, this case shows how multiple modalities of power feature in rural politics and state-society relations, including manipulation, seduction, and persuasion.
-
ItemImpact of large instream logs on bank erosion( 2018)Bank erosion is a fundamental geomorphic process that also has management implications. A substantial body of research has demonstrated that trees act to reduce rates of river bank erosion. However, when trees fall into a river, they can continue to influence bank erosion rates. This influence of fallen trees on bank erosion processes has not been well researched and is the topic of this thesis. Qualitative observations in the literature suggest that large instream logs can cause local bank erosion by deflecting flow towards the bank, whilst multiple large logs can act as roughness elements that could potentially reduce the bank erosion rate at reach scale. The aim of this research is to develop a more quantitative understanding of the effect of large instream logs (large, dead, fallen-trees) on near-bank flow velocity as a surrogate for bank erosion, considering the form, position, orientation and distribution of the logs. The study achieves this aim by using a combination of hydraulic models, flume experiments, and field surveys of velocity and erosion rates. I developed a predictive hydraulic model to estimate the near-bank velocity changes caused by a single log, and the model produced good agreement with measurements from flume experiments. The two main control variables of the near-bank velocity change, caused by a single log, are distance between the log and the bank, and the blockage ratio. The model estimates the mean velocity in the gap between the log and the bank by solving equations for continuity and equal head loss of flow. The model results suggest that the root plate has more influence on velocity than the log diameter. The findings suggest that a hydraulically isolated log can accelerate the near-bank flow and increase bank erosion. This increase in bank erosion can be reduced by the hydraulic interactions between multiple logs. The effect of multiple logs depends on their spacing and distance between the log and the bank. Logs spaced more than 50 root plate diameters apart behave in the same way as an isolated log. As the logs are spaced more closely together the hydraulic interactions between the logs eventually suppress the accelerated flow. When the logs are close to the bank and spaced less than 17 root plate diameters apart, they can reduce general bank erosion rates. The general predictions of the flume models were supported by measurements of velocity and erosion around logs in anabranching channels of the Murray River in SE Australia, with large, dense, Eucalyptus camaldulensis logs. The field measurements identified more complex interactions between logs and bank irregularities. Finally, these measures and observations were combined to propose conceptual models of the interactions between riparian trees and bank erosion in a reach, as logs decay.
-
ItemNail households' heterogeneity in housing demolition and relocation in urban China: motivations, strategies and consequences( 2018)Conflict caused by urban housing demolition and relocation is a major issue brought about by the rapid economic and urban development in China. Such an issue is widespread and is a significant threat to urban China’s social harmony and stability. Dingzihu (nail households), that resist housing demolition and relocation in urban China, are at the centre of these conflicts. The aims of this thesis are to analyse nail households’ motivations and strategies in their bargaining in situations of conflicts, and to understand how nail households arrive at the ultimate consequences in the bargaining. To achieve the aims, three research questions are raised: 1) What motivated households to become nail households at different stages of conflicts? 2) What led nail households to make certain strategic choices in their bargaining in situations of conflicts? 3) What contributed to the ultimate consequences for nail households in the bargaining? This thesis builds comprehensive theoretical framework to explain nail households’ motivations and strategies: why do nail households behave in the way they do during conflicts, how conflicts related to nail households either escalate or de-escalate, and the ultimate consequences of these motivations and strategies with discussions of a list of factors. The research questions are addressed through the analysis of data collected in a housing demolition and relocation project that has been ongoing since 2010 in Dalian, a highly developed city located in northern China. Research methods used in this thesis are largely semi-structured interview, supported by site direct observation and secondary sources. By discovering nail households’ various motivations and strategies, this thesis views conflict induced by housing demolition and relocation in urban China as dynamic process, with changes or remaining static of nail households’ attitudes, behaviours and bargaining strategies. The findings indicate that the ultimate consequences for nail households are also various. The consequences depend on the duration of nail households’ resistance, nail households’ initial motivations of resistance, the emergent bargaining strategies that nail households apply as the conflict evolves, power resources that nail households hold, and other various internal and external factors occurred during the negotiation processes, such as relationship, face/image, endurance, determination/hesitation, greed and fortune. As the major finding, this thesis reveals four profiles of nail households in the way in which how they are motivated to become nail households at various stages of conflicts, how they make and change strategic choices at different times during the conflicts, and how they arrive at various ultimate consequences in the bargaining. Such findings are theoretically and practically significant in contributing to the knowledge of nail households in urban China: nail households take on heterogeneous profiles and follow four resistance trajectories and modes throughout the bargaining process.
-
ItemDirect and indirect effects of long-term climatic change on terrestrial-aquatic ecosystem interaction in Tasmania( 2018)Climate influences aquatic ecosystems through two important pathways: (1) directly through temperature or changes in the precipitation/evaporation balance and/or (2) indirectly mediated by changes in the terrestrial environment. However, the indirect impacts of climate on aquatic ecosystems are poorly understood. The aim of this thesis is to better understand how aquatic ecosystems respond to past climate change, using two lakes in western Tasmania as case studies. Palaeoecological research on two multiproxy lake sediment records (Paddy’s Lake and Lake Vera) were used to reconstruct chronology (radiometric dating, i.e. 14C); fire regimes (charcoal); vegetation dynamics (pollen); nutrient dynamics (C%, N%, C/N, δ13C, and δ15N); catchment geochemistry (µXRF scanning); and aquatic response (diatoms and cladocerans) to determine the impact of climate change on these aquatic ecosystems. Results from Paddy’s Lake reveal long-term changes in the cladoceran community are indirectly driven by climate through changing vegetation productivity and available 14N altering the trophic status of the lake. Following the invasion of sclerophyll vegetation caused by increased fire frequency, the indirect climate influences on the aquatic system break down and the cladocerans appear complacent to changing vegetation productivity. At Lake Vera, diatoms respond indirectly to climate through changes in the acidity and dystrophic conditions of the lake with catchment peat formation. An increase in climate variability at ca. 5 ka caused declines in lake level resulting in a shift to a direct response in the diatoms to climate. During a period of increased drying at ca. 2.4 to 0.7 ka, increased fire activity adversely impacts the aquatic system causing a non-linear transition in the diatom community. The findings from this thesis show aquatic ecosystems of Tasmania are predominantly indirectly driven by climate through the formation of thick organic peats. Shifts in vegetation composition alter the surrounding soils and catchment dynamics impacting aquatic ecosystems trophic status and pH. Fire is another important driver of aquatic ecosystem response that causes changes in vegetation composition, altering the nutrient profile of soils and increasing erosion and sediment delivery. Aquatic ecosystems respond with increased pH, disturbance taxa and a shallowing of lake mixing depth in the diatom community. These terrestrial-aquatic ecosystem interactions have the potential to be more widespread across Southern Hemisphere biomes and temperate peatlands worldwide that share similar vegetation-soil dynamics.