Neoliberalism, as the influence of economic considerations within the political process, has impacted environmentalism on a variety of levels. Without regulation, the neoliberal capitalist drive to maximize production, consumption, and profits is antagonistic to environmental sustainability. The influences that corporations and economic elites have within modern democracies holds substantial implications for the rigor and enforcement of environmental policies. Particular to the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency offers numerous illustrations of neoliberal influence within its history and policy practices. These influences inevitably impact the Agency's ability to accomplish the goals of their mission and purpose statements. As seen through regulations such as the Clean Water Act, neoliberal pressure has altered the priorities of government on a federal level to prioritize economic well-being over that of other social goods, such as environmental protection. The Clean Water Act prioritizes economic profitability over environmental protection through cap and trade policies, such as NPDES permits, and legitimizes pollution-causing behavior through TMDLs. Further, the act was weakened by neoliberal forces with the non-point source exemption created for the sake of avoiding economic harm to large industries and its shortcomings are visible within many of the nation's waterways, including the Chesapeake Bay. Through a case study, this project demonstrates how the neoliberal influences impacting the Environmental Protection Agency has resonated in its policies, like in the abilities of the Clean Water Act to sufficiently clean-up the Chesapeake Bay within its proposed timeline. / Master of Arts

This thesis will address the impacts of Chilean neoliberal education reforms on students access to primary and secondary education. Across three body chapters, I will conduct a historical, policy, and comparative analysis, as well as case study on the Mapuche population within Chile, to exemplify neoliberal reforms' impact on students across differing socioeconomic statuses. Ranging from the 18th century to 2017, this thesis will provide a comprehensive image of how Chile's national education system has transformed from Catholic, missionary schools with majority state influence during heightened colonial practices to increasingly decentralized and marketized institutions during the 1980s. Through a series of analyses, I hypothesize neoliberal education reform has negatively impacted vulnerable students' access to education through exacerbating discriminatory, financial elements at the hands of the rise of privatized education. To support this, I will initially analyze neoliberal dictator Augusto Pinochet's education policies and reforms starting in 1980. To fully understand these lingering impacts, I also analyze 2005 socialist president Michelle Bachelet's education reforms as a method to further understand which 1980 neoliberal education policies were preserved during the restoration of democracy in Chile during the 1990s and early 2000s. The thesis closes with a final case study of the Mapuche population, the largest indigenous population in Chile. With the use of the methodological frameworks deployed in chapter two and chapter three, I attempt to expose the disproportionate impacts of neoliberal education policies on the Mapuche even as modern education and government administrations attempt to transform the education system away from oppressive and discriminatory policies implemented during the 1980s. Riddled throughout the entire thesis are discussions of social movements advocating for greater education equity, amplifying the call for increased attention on justice for students, teachers, and families. / Master of Arts / This thesis will address the impacts of Chilean neoliberal education reforms on students' access to primary and secondary education. Chile is widely known as the "neoliberal experiment" state, making it a prime region to study how neoliberal reforms have impacted the development of the country. I will argue the creation and maintenance of neoliberal education policies have negatively impacted students' access to education, especially focusing on disproportion impacts on students of differing socioeconomic statuses and demographics. The thesis is split into three main chapters, which cover from the 18th century to around 2017. Across these chapters, I will analyze the beginnings of the education system in Chile, studying the main factors that ultimately shaped it into its current system. The second chapter will take on a narrower focus and will examine the main similarities and differences between Augusto Pinochet's 1980s neoliberal dictatorship and early 2000s socialist president Michelle Bachelet's education policies and restructurings. To demonstrate how impactful neoliberal education reforms, the thesis will close with a case study of the Mapuche in Chile. The Mapuche are the largest indigenous population in Chile, and the case study of them aims to show the uneven effects of neoliberal policy creation and preservation within Mapuche education structures. Overall, I work to shed light on the negative elements in education and academic environments, which are drawn out or amplified through neoliberal restructurings.

Neoliberalism once started as an economic theory but overtime has developed into an arm of state social control. This thesis asks if neoliberal economic policies have affected civil liberties in the United States and sets out to understand this relationship in several ways. Firstly, by investigating the shift from Keynesianism to market fundamentalism. Secondly, by evaluating the growth in the prison industrial complex. Third, by asking questions of growing social insecurity from an increasingly privatized social safety net. This thesis explored four hypotheses, each one finding support. The overall argument is that the economic sphere and the free market has obstructed the social sphere. Finally, the thesis concludes with a brief discussion of toxic individualism as it relates to socialization after a long period of extreme market privatization. / Master of Arts / Ever since the 1980s, the United States has experienced an increase in incarceration rates, and simultaneously a more substantial shift in economic practices, from Keynesianism to what became colloquially known as "trickle down economics." This thesis argues that the economic change, defined in this work as neoliberalism, subsequently affected how welfare and social services manage social insecurity in the United States, including the criminal justice system. This paper will discuss the tenets of neoliberalism and how these core tenets, i.e. privatization, affected the welfare state and the prison industrial complex.

This study explores the problems facing the African continent in general and Gambia in particular. Specifically, it examines The Gambia\'s dependence on foreign aid, as a result of the Bretton Woods Institutions and the neoliberalization of Africa, and it juxtaposes the aforementioned with microfinance, as an alternative method for fighting poverty. Empirically, this work examines the potential effectiveness of Reliance Financial Services in Gambia\'s microfinance institution who are engaged in this burgeoning enterprise and that of the VISACAS, a grassroots microfinance organization in The Gambia. / Master of Public and International Affairs

The Calgary School, a group of conservative academics at the University of Calgary including the historian David Bercuson and the political scientists Barry Cooper, Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff, and Ted Morton, has been recognized as an important intellectual formation on the Canadian right since the early-1990s. These Calgary Schoolers have been associated closely with the political rise of Stephen Harper, who was Prime Minister of Canada from 2006-2015. They have also been associated more generally with histories of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in Canada. This dissertation is the first comprehensive history of the Calgary School; it traces the intellectual history of the group from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s. The Calgary Schoolers were united most of all by their outlook on the proper role of states in socio-economic life. In their critique of the intentional state, which they inherited from various thinkers in the transnational orbit of conservative ideas, the Calgary Schoolers opposed the notion that states can purposely direct civil society towards acknowledged goals and outcomes. To seek outcomes like economic equality, for example, was to engage in what Calgary Schoolers often maligned as “social engineering.” Sharing in this perspective as they did, the Calgary Schoolers then sought to extend the influence of their views, doing so in various “modes of influence.” The Calgary Schoolers established their authority as scholars, used that authority to undergird ventures into public view as polemicists, and associated themselves with people and institutions that could give practical weight to their positions. While resisting the idea that the Calgary Schoolers somehow made the neoliberal era in Canada, this dissertation shows how they made influence from within the confines of that era, recognizing the opportunities it afforded them and leveraging those opportunities for their ends. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The goal of this research was to explore the relationship between the undergraduate degree profile (practical vs. liberal arts) and environmental factors (institutional and state level) at regional comprehensive universities (RCUs) from 2006-2020. Neoliberal policies have dominated the higher education environment for the last 40 years and this has increased the pressure on institutions. RCUs represent a subset of the higher education population that have historically been responsive to environmental changes. They also tend to be more tuition dependent. This study examined the changes in the degree production and funding at RCUs and utilized a fixed effects panel analysis to estimate the relationship between changes in the degree production and environmental factors at the institutional and state level. RCUs have experienced an increase in the percentage of practical arts degrees awarded and in their tuition dependence. However, tuition dependence was not shown to have a significant impact on the degree production. Several institutional factors and state factors were shown to be significantly related to increases in practical arts degree production. Institutions with the highest increases in the percentage of practical degrees also had increases in tuition revenue per (full time equivalent) FTE 12-month. At the state-level, unemployment rate, the percentage of college education people and increases in personal income were correlated with increases in practical arts production.

This dissertation explores how internationally educated youth in contemporary Egypt negotiate issues of national identity, postcoloniality and belonging while participating in globalizing class practices. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in and around for-profit international schools in Cairo, it focuses on how this privileged youth group constructed, experienced and enacted belonging at the intersection between class and nation. I argue that internationally educated Egyptians were caught in a cultural bind between competing constructions of class and national belonging. On the one hand, globally-oriented socialization practices and international education reproduced a historically-specific and colonially-inspired configuration of social distinction that linked elite belonging to a cosmopolitan-inflected distance from local culture. On the other hand, these markers of elite belonging excluded internationally educated youth from a materially embodied conception of Egyptianness that tied national belonging to essentialist constructions of local culture and identity. I suggest that the tension between class and national belonging expressed a single dialectical process that was rooted in colonial binary conceptualizations of culture and difference, which split ‘elite’ and ‘local’ into mutually exclusive cultural and symbolic repertoires. My analysis challenges dominant theoretical approaches that conflate the reproduction of class and nation by exposing the educational, gendered and linguistic gaps between class and national culture in contemporary Egypt. I present a bottom-up approach to understanding national attachment that highlights the embodied and moral labor that goes into the production of local selfhood in a transnational postcolonial setting. This approach also shows the differential gendered dynamics of class and national reproduction. The burden of maintaining cosmopolitan-inflected class boundaries falls squarely on the girls while boys are expected to embody the nationally-inflected skills and dispositions necessary for personal and professional trajectories that transcend class boundaries. In telling this story, I expose the sociohistorical dynamic by which colonial/postcolonial categories are reconfigured through globally-oriented class practices and highlight the unexpected ways that neoliberal globalism can become the incubator for intensely and irreducibly local gender and cultural norms.

The primary objective of the international initiative, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), is to conserve carbon by protecting forests and/or planting trees. The World Bank's Forest Partnership Carbon Facility (FPCF) introduced the REDD+ program to Costa Rica in 2008 and consultation with key stakeholders has been ongoing since. The major participants involved in the program include small landowners, representatives of the timber industry, and indigenous nations. Notwithstanding some native groups' opposition to and misunderstanding of the REDD+ program, the Costa Rican government signed an agreement with the World Bank (WB) in 2013 guaranteeing the sale of up to $63 million in carbon credits through the REDD+ program (World Bank, 2013). The government of Costa Rica has plans to continue implementing the initiative, despite the intense opposition of a number of Bribris, an indigenous group located in Talamanca in the eastern portion of the country near the border with Panama. The Bribri are also the largest native population in Costa Rica. This inquiry samples indigenous peoples' perspectives, specifically the Bribris from Talamanca and the Ngäbes from Abrojos Montezuma, concerning key elements of the REDD+ program to understand more fully why they perceive the program the way they do. The principal findings of this study concerning those views include the following: the government has violated indigenous people's rights throughout the REDD+ implementation process, many interview respondents remarked that they lacked information about REDD+, feared privatization of their land, and were opposed to the initiative's commodification of natural resources. These results illuminate key policy and implementation concerns that could inform government and World Bank policy, while also providing study participants an opportunity to exercise individual agency concerning the topic. This research contributes to the growing body of literature about REDD+ by providing the first-hand perceptions of members of Costa Rican indigenous communities of the initiative and their stated reasons for those views. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning / The main goal of the international initiative, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), is to conserve carbon by protecting forests and/or planting trees. The World Bank’s Forest Partnership Carbon Facility (FPCF) introduced the REDD+ program to Costa Rica in 2008 and has engaged in a process of consultation and information sessions with small landowners and representatives of the timber industry and indigenous nations. The Costa Rican government signed an agreement with the World Bank (WB) in 2013 guaranteeing the sale of up to $63 million in carbon credits via the program and the government appears to be relying on indigenous peoples’ land because indigenous territories comprise some 20% of the country’s forested lands (Government of Costa Rica, 2015; World Bank, 2013). Moreover, some native groups, including the Bribris, the largest indigenous group in the nation, located in Talamanca in the eastern portion of the country near the border with Panama, have publicly opposed doing so (World Bank, 2013). This study explored indigenous peoples’ perspectives, specifically the Bribris from Talamanca and the Ngäbes from Abrojos Montezuma, concerning key elements of the REDD+ program to understand better why they perceive the program as they do. Key findings from those interviews include the fact that the government has violated indigenous people’s rights throughout the REDD+ implementation process and that many native residents lacked information about the program and feared privatization of their land. In addition, many of those interviewed were opposed to the initiative’s basic premise; the commodification of natural resources. These results highlight key REDD+ policy design and implementation concerns in Costa Rica that could inform both government and World Bank policy in that nation. More generally, this research contributes to a growing body of literature concerning REDD+ and indigenous peoples. The findings offered here may now be compared to those of other analyses investigating the purport of this initiative from the vantage point of native peoples of other developing nations.

In 1991, India adopted neoliberalism, a system of political economic practices that promotes private property and free trade, as its political and economic system to promote development in their country. India's neoliberal reform has created issues surrounding human development, resource accumulation, and power struggles. Eleven years later, in 2002, Bt cotton was introduced to the Indian agricultural sector. This research examines how the genetically modified organism Bt cotton is being used to commodify nature in the context of agriculture under neoliberalism. The research focuses on the dispossession of the rural farmers through the commodification of agriculture using Bt cotton. Dispossession of the rural farmers happen through the implications that arise from the commodification of nature. Through Marxist theory of primitive accumulation, this research analyzes accumulation by dispossession and how it neglects the working class and its struggle in rural India. Through this examination, the research will argue alternatives to the dispossession of the working class and the commodification of nature through Bt cotton. Dispossession, in this research, is examined both through working class, but also through the dispossession of biodiversity. Through the loss of biodiversity, the rural farmers are becoming dispossessed from a more sustainable environment. Along with these goals, the research will also incorporate themes of food security through changing landscape of agriculture due to the incorporation of Bt cotton. This research argues the contradictions that are presented through the commodification of agriculture under neoliberalism and provide a contribution to social justice literature, and our understanding of the relationship between technology and the commodification of nature.

EU is today one of the largest aid donors in the world and the debate regarding their intentions is well nuanced. This study’s main focus lies in examining the motives within the action plan between the EU and Morocco, and was conducted with the intention to contribute to the debate of EU’s external actions. By using key-terms from neoliberalism and neoliberalism and applying it on the actions by using a motive-analysis, they can be defined and tied to one of the theories state, as well as represent the generalized idea of the theories external action. The results of the study shows that EU, in cooperation with Morocco, though the ENP acts with the means of absolute gain.