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Understanding land-use change in developing countries, particularly those situated in environmentally vulnerable and and semi-arid zones, is crucial given the considerable pressures arising due to rapid population growth, climate change and desertification. The purpose of this research was to investigate the main drivers affecting land-use change in the eastern part of the Nile Delta, Egypt in the last two decades. Two contrasting cities in the region were selected for detailed analysis. Almansourah is an ancient settlement relatively close to the Damietta branch of the Nile whereas Alzaqazig is a recent development and the surrounding area was reclaimed from the desert. The DPSIR (driving forces, pressures, state, impacts and responses) model was adopted as the conceptual framework for organising and categorising the factors affecting landuse change in these two areas. It is a linear, `formulaic' approach, based on the concept of causality chains which connect human activities with environmental information. The case study approach was used as the main methodology, although both qualitative and quantitative techniques were employed throughout. A range of sources were consulted throughout the investigation to ensure that the evidence was internally consistent: remote sensing data, questionnaire data, interviews, participant observation and census data. More than 180 farmers were interviewed in the two study areas and the majority of these (71%) farmed less than 2ha. Using remote sensing data it was found that crop patterns had changed considerably in the two areas both with regard to their geographical distribution and extent. In the Almansourah study area, the key changes during the past two decades were the increase of cotton area and the decrease in rice, maize and other crops. In contrast, the Alzagazig study area experienced an increase in cotton and rice area with minor increase in maize fields. There was also an expansion of urban and rural-urban settlements into agricultural land in both the study areas.One of the critical physical factors for land-use change was found to be the need for irrigation water. Regarding the two study areas, Almansourah currently enjoys greater availability of irrigation water because of its proximity to the Nile compared to Alzagazig which facilitated land-use change in Almansourah. On a more general level the aridity of the Nile Delta region makes water a limiting factor in agricultural production. Analysis of the driving forces showed that land-use change was highly dependent on economic factors such as transportation availability and cost as well as the contribution of women. Land-use change was significantly influenced by transportation availability in Almansourah but not in Alzaqazig possibly because of the greater need to transport agricultural produce to market. Social drivers were also found to be significant. One significant pressure was caused by population growth; in Almansourah the lack of alternative sources of land led to the expansion of urban and rural urban settlements onto fertile agricultural fields. The study confirmed that a farmer's educational level plays an important role in agricultural production. Almost 25% of farmers in Almansourah and 30% in Alzaqaziq had no formal education and this difference led to variations in land-use change between the areas. Education level was found to have a considerable influence on crop rotation and manure use in the Almansourah study area. Conversely, subsidies from private financial sources and rural women's contribution to agricultural production were among the key drivers for land-use change in the Alzaqazig study area. One of the innovative aspects of this study was the application of the DPSIR framework. Although it has been used to advantage in the developed world, it has not been applied to study land-use change in an arid, developing country. The study confirmed that the framework worked well in such a context. Notable strengths included its comprehensive nature, ability to deal with uncertainty and handle different types of data. A further advantage was that it could incorporate sub-models to investigate individual driving forces, for example, the need for irrigation water. Overall the use of DPSIR was flexible enough to highlight the major causative drivers affecting land-use and also to take account of the action of more subtle and complex factors.

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There is a growing debate on the theoretical basis, how it could be conceptualised, as well as the utility and meaning of regional competitiveness. This is associated with various attempts to measure regional competitiveness with the help of composite indices for coming-up with league tables. However the measurement of regional performance has run ahead of the academic debate, such indices receive a lot of media attention, and in some cases are even used by policy-makers to support their arguments. It is therefore instructive to look at such indices in more detail to evaluate their utility from a practical standpoint. This is done by working out the theoretical framework for six indices, deconstructing these and analysing the single indicators. Methodologically, issues such as normalization, standardization and the aggregation into a single number are also included. In addition to this, since many authors claim that their indices can function as a proxy for future growth, a statistical analysis of the predictive quality with respect to economic performance has also been carried out. This thesis, therefore, for the first time, sheds light on the utility of regional competitiveness indices and contributes to the discussion of the meaning of benchmarking regional performance based on the regional competitiveness hegemony that can be observed. The findings suggest that indices of regional competitiveness can be of only limited help for policy-decisions besides although they are a source for a wealth of information on certain regional indicators. This is primarily because of the lack of a theoretical basis for measuring regional competitiveness, and secondly because of the poor performance in functioning as a proxy for future economic performance.

Libye has few resources and poverty is rife along its million inhabitants. It is not surprising thorefore that it has a permenant adverse trade balance and budget deficit, both being covered by foreign aid. Arieulture seems to offer the only prospect of overooming these financial difficulties and at the same time raising the living standards of population. The sandy plain round Tripoli is the most important agricultural area and here the conditions are most favourable for an extension of agriculture. The plain known by the Libyons as the Jefara, is composed mainly of unconsolidated deposits of Tertiery, Pleistocene and recent ages these all dip gently northwards and sometimes contain reserves of underground water. They afford very sandy soils which are deficient in organis material. clay and plant nutrients. The climate is a very dry Mediterranean type and Saheran influences result in high temperature and unreliable rainfall. Prior to the 1939/45 war, there were two basic types of agricultures Arab and Italian. Arab subsistence agriculture was either was either irrigated cultivation in small coastal cases or shifting cultivation of barley further inland. Italian agriculture was largely concentrated on the growing of dryland tree crops, such as clives, vines and almonds, and usually associated with winter cereals. There has been radical change in the aricultural pattern in recent years. This has been due largely to the increased importance of irrigation which is dependant on underground water. Groundouts, tobacco, cereals and potatoes, olive and citrus tree, are all irrigated. The numbers of dryland tree crops, particularly almonds and vines, are declining. The expansion of irrigation has increased the productivity of the plain and irrigation now forms an integral part of Jeferan agriculture. Future development should be a combination of dry and irrigated farming with both field and tree crops.

The nature of e-waste, which is environmentally disastrous but economically precious, calls for close policy attention at all levels of society, and between state and non-state actors. This thesis investigates the roles of state and non-state actors in e-waste governance in Malaysia. This is undertaken through analysis of e-waste governance, particularly focusing on the locally generated industrial and household e-waste, from the perspective of multiple actors, levels and modes of governance. From the perspective of multiple actors governance, this thesis recognises three main actors of e-waste governance in Malaysia – the state actor, and two types of non-state actors – the Private Sector Actors and the Civil Society Organisations. Although it appears theoretically simple to classify actors of governance into one of these categories, in practice the line separating these two categories is blurry. From the multiple modes perspective, empirical evidence from this research has shown that state and non-state actors are involved in four modes of governance – the hierarchical, persuasion, self-governance and co-governance mode; with the roles of state actors being more prominent in the hierarchical modes, while the roles of non-state actors are more significant in the persuasion, self-governance and co-governance modes. State and non-state actors are jointly involved in one variant of co-governance which is the public-private partnership (PPP). Although the inclusion of non-state actors in governance is usually on ‘acutely constrained terms’ (Murdoch and Abram 1998: 49), they may influence the process of decision making. From the perspective of multi level governance, it is apparent that power and authority in e-waste governance transcend beyond the boundary of sovereign states with the introduction of supra-national legislation such as the Basel Convention, WEEE directive and RoHS directive. This has direct implication on Malaysia as she is a party to Basel Convention, and produces electrical and electronic equipment for global market.