School of Geography - Theses
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ItemWhose home? A Malaysian public housing case study: in the revitalisation of the Kota Damansara PPR flats through the use of tenant participation and a sense of 'kampung'( 2018)Continued urban expansion in Malaysia has increased the demand for affordable housing in cities. Publicly funded, low cost housing known as PPR flats are now in high demand among many lowincome Malaysians. However, PPR flats are also problematic for their poor physical conditions, their stigma and association with crime and drugs, and a top-down governance approach that disempowers tenants. My study is focused on one block of PPR flats known as the Kota Damansara PPR flats, where revitalisation efforts have been made to address some of these problems. One prominent aspect of the revitalisation initiative has been the introduction of a new community garden that seeks to change how residents participate in the management and care of shared spaces and how they engage within their community. Hence this study seeks to investigate the impact of the revitalisation project, focusing in particular on the role of tenant participation in revitalisation initiatives, and its impact in fostering a sense of community among tenants. Specifically, I refer to the concept of "kampung" as a culturally specific form of communal relations in Malaysia. The study takes a qualitative approach to examine the dynamics of participation, belonging and community in revitalization programs in Kota Damansara PPR flats, through the narratives of residents from 19 semi-structured interviews conducted with 15 tenants and four other stakeholders involved in the management of the estate. The findings reveal the community garden's success as a revitalization initiative eliciting positive socio-cultural elements of kampung among residents. But the findings also demonstrate that other elements of kampung were not applicable to Kota Damansara, nor to urban public housing estates more generally. Furthermore, tenant participation efforts were limited due to barriers imposed by management, and tensions associated with social differences among the tenants themselves, including age, gender, ethnicity and income.
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ItemFish responses to enhanced instream detritus: using ecological theory to inform stream restoration( 2018)There is extensive effort put into restoring the condition of degraded streams. Many times, the aim of these projects is to bolster fish populations. One common method of restoration is the placement of structures, like wood and boulders, into streams. This relies on the assumption that when these structures are placed in the stream, fish will arrive and use them, which will increase their abundance. However, providing this structure may not overcome constraints on fish populations, and thus they will not recover. Firstly, there may be constraints on dispersal - fish cannot reach restored sites. Secondly, there may be biological constraints - the restored sites are still lacking some resource that the fish require, such as food or shelter. Thirdly, there may be environmental constraints - the environmental conditions at restored sites may be unsuitable, for example too hot or too cold. In this project, I investigated the constraints on fish distributions in Hughes Creek, a degraded stream in south-east Victoria. There is a history of erosion in the catchment surrounding the creek, and as a result, much of the natural instream structure has been smothered by sand. To investigate the biotic constraints on fish in the creek, I increased the amount of detritus in the creek, theoretically providing food and cover for fish. To do this, I placed pairs of wooden garden stakes in the stream. The stakes effectively trapped passing detritus, which locally increased detrital loads and invertebrate density. Fish responded to enhanced retention of detritus over the course of a year. More blackfish, pygmy perch and mountain galaxias were caught at sites with more detritus. The nature of this response suggests that fish are limited by biotic constraints in the stream. The collections of detritus around pairs of stakes provide shelter from predators and from flowing water, both important resources for fish. The body condition of fish did not increase at treatment sites, even though invertebrate density was higher. As invertebrates are important food for fish, this suggests that fish are not constrained by the amount of food in Hughes Creek. This positive response of fish, however, was contingent on the time of year, the life-stage of individuals, the age of the treatments and the broader stream conditions. Thus, fish distributions in Hughes Creek are further limited by their dispersal ability and the availability of other types of structure, like large wood. The complexity of these results highlights the importance of understanding the ecological constraints on a fish community before attempting to undertake restoration.
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ItemA northward shift of the Southern Westerlies during the Antarctic cold reversal: evidence from Tasmania, Australia( 2018)The Southern Hemisphere Westerlies are one of the most important components of the Earth’s climate system: they are the primary driver of Southern Hemisphere climate, they modulate global ocean circulation patterns, and they are a critical natural driver of atmospheric CO2 variation. Despite their clear importance, their dynamics in response to rapid changes in climate boundary conditions are poorly understood. Critical to this lack of understanding is (1) an absence of robust proxy-data from the Australian sector of the Southern Hemisphere, which hampers attempts at predictive modelling, and (2) a lack of consensus within the palaeoclimate literature as to how the Southern Westerlies have responded to past periods of rapid climate change. A case in point is the behaviour of the Southern Westerlies during the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR; 14,000 – 13,700 years ago), a millennial-scale climate event that punctuated the termination of the Last Ice Age in the Southern Hemisphere. A thorough understanding of how this critical climate component changed during the ACR is hampered by the only available proxy-dataset from the Australian sector of the Southern Hemisphere, which disagrees with records from other regions, and with the leading conceptual understanding of Southern Westerly dynamics. To address this discord, this thesis sought to reconstruct the dynamics of the Southern Westerlies in the Australian sector by developing two robust terrestrial proxy-datasets from Tasmania, Australia, covering the ACR. The results from this thesis demonstrate that the Southern Westerlies responded to the climatic changes of the ACR as predicted by the leading conceptual understanding of their dynamics, and also revealed that they responded symmetrically across the Southern Hemisphere, coincident with substantial changes in atmospheric CO2 variation. This thesis supports the hypotheses that the Southern Westerlies are the primary determinant of long-term Tasmanian climate variation and are a critical regulator of long-term global atmospheric CO2 variation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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ItemThe role of gardens in neighbourhood houses( 2018)While there is plenty of literature on most types of community gardens, there is none in the space of neighbourhood house gardens. Neighbourhood houses are places focused on community development, targeting the needs of residents in the local area, with a particular focus on disadvantaged groups. Gardens in these contexts are different to stand-alone community gardens due to their attachment to a service provider, in this case, one that provides for individuals and groups attending the neighbourhood house for programs, classes, assistance, and leisure. How the garden is in turn used may reflect what these spaces are trying to achieve for the disadvantaged community members they serve. This research investigated neighbourhood house gardens in Melbourne. The aim of this study was to understand what roles the gardens fulfil, their purpose, who uses them, and how they function. Comparing them to stand-alone community gardens reveals how these spaces deal with the issues associated with community gardening. A mixed-methodology was employed to uncover information about neighbourhood houses across Melbourne, using a desktop review and phone survey to provide an overview of gardens, and semi-structured interviews with four garden coordinators in four houses across Melbourne, to gain a more detailed look at how some of these gardens are used. Most gardens are governed by the house and operates both as an extended classroom and as a productive garden servicing the house and its attendees. Neighbourhood houses use gardens for purposes that extend beyond food production, most notably, as educational spaces for learning outcomes. People from culturally diverse backgrounds use them to learn about food in Australia, and to learn English. Produce is used to supplement the diets of severely disadvantaged groups. Gardens are also places of leisure and interaction between people who use the neighbourhood house but do not necessarily garden in the space. Gardens are operated with a communal system, with only a handful of houses using individual plots and paid memberships, like those found in most stand-alone gardens. Gardeners volunteer their time and labour in the space, and will harvest produce for their own use, for the house to use in its own programs or distribute to other house attendees, or produce is made available to the wider public by ensuring the garden is open access. Neighbourhood house gardens can potentially overcome some of the issues related to ownership and exclusivity found in stand-alone gardens due to their operation as communal and collective spaces. However tensions are ever present and are managed accordingly by staff. The house plays a major role in shaping the space, choosing what outcomes are to be prioritised, and deciding the direction of the space. Volunteers are often consulted when deciding plants, however this is mainly under the control of the house and its representatives in the garden: coordinators and employed garden staff. While much is intended for these spaces, the perspectives of house attendees who tend the garden would further shed light on what outcomes are experienced in these spaces, and as such, should receive ongoing research attention.
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ItemLaser fluorescence as a high-resolution method of analysis in speleothems: an exploratory investigation( 2018)Speleothems present a unique opportunity in palaeoclimatology to provide terrestrial, precisely dated and long timescale records that help to fill regional gaps in the understanding of the Earth’s climate systems. The sub-aqueous speleothem in this study is the oldest continuously growing cave record ever discovered, dating back ~1 million years and therefore holding critical climate information for the last 26 marine isotope stages. However current proxy techniques have been unable to unlock the information inside its calcite layers at a high enough resolution. Organic carbon content in speleothems is a relatively untapped palaeoclimate signal. Fluorescence techniques from the past have been effective at measuring organic carbon content, however all suffer from low-resolution ability. The use of a high-resolution laser- fluorescence device is a novel means of measuring organic carbon, however research is required to assess its accuracy and applicability for detecting glacial and interglacial variation. A multi-proxy comparison was conducted, which found that laser fluorescence correlated well with other proxy records from the same speleothem, as well as with other long timescale archives from around the world. However due to organic carbon responding to climate in different ways to other proxies, the relative magnitude of fluctuations in the speleothem was inconsistent with oscillations observed elsewhere, implying that laser fluorescence currently could not pose as a proxy method to be used on its own. Furthermore, the study provided important information about long-term environmental change in the Alpi Apuane in Italy, from where the speleothem was collected. This application of laser fluorescence provided further evidence for its usefulness in speleothem analysis.