School of Geography - Theses
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ItemData synthesis and modern cave process studies in southeastern Australia: towards improving regional palaeoclimate records for the Common Era( 2019)Hydroclimate variability has profound socioeconomic and environmental impacts in Australia. Therefore, it is of vital importance to understand the influences and range of variability through time. The past 2,000 years is advocated as an appropriate period for establishing a baseline of recent natural climate variability. My research examines climate variability in southeast Australia during the last 2000 years through two objectives: (i.) The collation and systematic review of existing Australasian non-annually resolved palaeoclimate records and application of suitable records to reconstructing hydroclimate in southeast Australia during the Common Era, and (ii.) the construction of an informed palaeoclimate record for the purpose of expanding knowledge of the climate of the last 2000 years in southeast Australia. The findings of the first objective suggest that although there are few records that are ideal for examining climate during the Common Era, a small subset of quality controlled records is effective for examining hydroclimate variability in southeast Australia. Two regional modes of climate variability demonstrate an increase in effective moisture between 900CE and 1750CE and suggest that seasonality of rainfall and the influence of Southern Hemisphere circulation patterns affect effective moisture on multi-decadal time scales. Outcomes of the second objective indicate that oxygen isotopes in Kangaroo Island precipitation reflect rainfall amount on daily to monthly time scales, but moisture source controls seasonal amount-weighted averages. Changes in rainfall seasonality may distort the rainfall amount signature in amount-weighted annual mean isotopic values. Speleothems (i.e. cave formations) from Kelly Hill Cave on Kangaroo Island predominantly reflect rainfall chemistry, which is influenced by both the rainfall amount and temperature-controlled effective moisture. Overall, the two palaeoclimate reconstructions presented in this thesis furthers our understanding of hydroclimate variability in southern Australia during the last two millennia, and highlights the importance of the temperature component in determining regional and local effective moisture.
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ItemThe morphology and evolution of rock coasts over eustatic cycles in temperate, wave dominated environments( 2019)Rock coasts comprise 80% of the world’s shorelines and about 50% of the Victorian coast. Their morphology and evolution over time is the result of marine and subaerial erosional processes that carve features such as sea cliffs, shore platforms, and sea stacks out of the landscape. Rock coasts, therefore, evolve over multiple sea level cycles and create dynamic landscapes on an interglacial timescale. Sea level has risen and fallen over geologic time, with coastal features being formed during sea level high stands. While most coastal landforms found along the modern coast were formed over the past 6,000 years, older coastal features have also been preserved over multiple eustatic cycles, both above and beneath modern sea level. As coastal landforms are formed at or very near sea level, preserved paleo-shoreline features can be used as proxies to reconstruct past sea levels on a regional scale, which had not previously been done for the coast of Victoria, Australia. In this study, an integrated aerial LiDAR and bathymetric multibeam dataset from +20 to -80 m water depth was used to precisely map and quantify the morphology of the rock coast features along the coast of Victoria from Port Fairy in the west to Wilsons Promontory in the east and to analyze the relation between the features’ elevations and the sea levels at which they first formed. This was completed for both the modern coastline as well as paleo-shoreline landforms found 50-60 m below modern sea level, where the offshore geology reflected the onshore geologic units, allowing for an analogous study. These preserved features are believed to have formed during the MIS 3 high stand, during which time sea level most closely matched their average present depths. The culminating results provide not only the first study of the precise morphology of these submerged features in Victoria but also have wider applications for modelling sea level and rocky coast evolution in other temperate, wave dominated environments.
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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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ItemChina’s intra-rural migration and its influence on rural modes of production: a case study of Lian Hua Village, Hunan province( 2019)This thesis aims to understand how intra-rural migration is associated with changes to the production activities of migrants in rural China. Extant research on intra-rural migration is highly limited. Moreover, the majority of studies on migration were conducted from an individual or household perspective and fail to directly reveal the influence of migration on rural production. In order to provide more evidences of intra-rural migration and its influence on rural production of migrants, this thesis tries to address three research questions: 1. What changes occurred in the production activities in which migrants partake? 2. What factors prompted migrants to escape their previous production activities and initiate emerging production activities? 3. How did intra-rural migration connect the escape and initiation process? This thesis examines intra-rural migration with a focus on changes to the production activities of migrants and posits that intra-rural migration influences rural production activities of migrants by mediating their access to production factors and changing production conditions they faced. This thesis primarily uses qualitative methods to collect and analyse data. Semi-structured interviews and direct observation was utilised in a case study of Lian Hua Village which is situated in Hunan Province. This thesis finds that intra-rural migration helps destroy the persistence of self-sufficient production activities remained in rural areas in post-reform China, and post-migration production activities of intra-rural migrants are capitalised from whichever aspect of their production. Separation of labour and the means of production and combination of labour and capital are the ultimate reasons prompting capitalisation of production activities of intra-rural migrants. Intra-rural migration acts as a bridge connecting the process of separation and combination. It is concluded that intra-rural migration leads to rural capitalisation and proletarianisation, and that rural labour chases capital. Both are important yet neglected means of realising the transformation of modes of production in rural China.
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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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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.
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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.