The Niger Delta region is, indeed, not a stranger to attention and controversies. For more than a decade, it presented Africa’s most populous country with its most profound security challenge, a situation that was only recently changed with the emergence of the Boko Haram Islamic insurgents. It also threatened to undermine the flow of oil in Africa’s most important oil-producing country, a country which produces more than 2.5 million barrels of crude oil daily, with attendant implications for global energy supply. While different aspects of the Niger Delta controversy have been addressed by particular scholars, there remains an aspect that seems to have attracted only superficial attention. This is a detailed analysis of the role of ethnicity in the array of complications that have unfolded in the region. Indeed, beyond the platitudinous mention of the plight of the minority in the country’s zero-sum politics, not much attention has been given to the complex impact of ethnicity on the politics and intrigues’ of the Niger Delta. The purpose of this thesis is to interrogate the ethnic dimension of the perspectives of key groups in Nigeria on what their rights are in sharing natural resources wealth and the consequences of a natural resources conflict driven by these agitation for a fair share among different ethnic groups in the Nigeria Federation. This thesis investigates one of the most pressing, yet neglected issue in the Niger Delta conflict: ethnicity and who has right in the sharing and ownership of natural resource wealth in the Niger Delta. However, in light of the commonly stated thesis that corruption and miss-management of oil revenues is frequently said to be the causes of armed conflict in the Niger Delta, this study challenges the accepted premises and enter unfamiliar territory, and stimulate new ideas by arguing that corruption, lack of security, and miss-management of oil revenue is only a causal factor. Therefore, the role of ethnicity is the key factor regarding who will hold political power and thus control natural resource wealth—a factor hitherto underplayed in the Niger Delta case.

In order to understand why development projects fail on a regular basis - or at least fail to achieve their intended goals - it is important to investigate not only the apparatuses of development (work related aspects such as documents, reports, policies, programmes and projects), but also the social and cultural worlds of the different actors involved. This means expanding the analysis beyond critiques of development that focus on discourse analysis of project documents and interface analysis which produce in-depth ethnographies of those being "targeted' for development; it means also focusing attention on those who are doing the actual "targeting'. This thesis studies how different groups of actors engage in the same material reality - that of the natural environment in rural Madagascar. It is a multi-sited ethnography that explores the culture and lives of Betsileo farmers living and working in the Central Highlands of Madagascar, as well as various development practitioners living and working on development projects and programmes concerned with the management of those same natural resources and livelihoods. The research focuses on three inter-related sites and traces development relations and interactions from the central locations of the development machine to its extremeties: several villages around one rural town in the Central Highlands called Ambalavao, the provincial capital of Fianarantsoa, and the capital of the country, Antananarivo. And it maps out the social and work relations of various actors as they engage in rice cultivation and the management of dams and irrigation works with various degrees of knowledge, capacities and power. The focus is not on anyone development project or programme, but the various relationships - or lack thereof - between different actors, domains of science, knowledge and various meanings given to them. It is also a commentary on the wider global and bilateral political-economic relations that both limit and structure what development ends up doing - or not doing.

Quality of life (QoL) measures are useful in international development as they can be used to generate locally grounded and individualised understandings of people’s lives in contexts of social, economic and political uncertainty. Although the last decade has witnessed growth in research on urban youth goals and experiences in sub-Saharan Africa, studies which measure their QoL are surprisingly few despite suggestions from research in psychology that goal achievement contributes to QoL. This thesis develops a contextually grounded measure of urban undergraduate students’ QoL, defined as the gap between important goals and satisfaction with achievement, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. It draws on goals, satisfaction and weighted QoL (based on subtracting goal satisfaction from importance), which are operationalised using a goals-satisfaction framework. The study uses a mixed methods design with data collected through interviews, focus group discussions and a students’ QoL scale (SQOLS) instrument which taps into goals and satisfaction. The data was analysed using a partial grounded theory approach, and descriptive and inferential statistics. The goals identified through the qualitative analysis were developed into four categories: becoming somebody, making it in life, having valuable relationships and having a voice. When operationalised as items, the goals were endorsed as important, while satisfaction with their achievement was lower. Principal components analysis found a three factor structure for goals. This factor structure had good fit in confirmatory factor analysis using both goals and QoL items. The QoL measure correlated negatively with a measure of life satisfaction, indicating that it captures the extent to which students’ lives fall short of their desired states. The findings of the study suggest that items generated through qualitative work with educated urban youth can be used to develop a valid measure of their QoL while at the same time providing contextually grounded understandings of their lives.

The escalating imperative of climate change mitigation implies a substantial change in the technologies of electricity generation and supply in industrialised and industrialising countries alike. Understanding how to effect this technological change is therefore imperative if the challenge of climate change is to be addressed. The literature is replete with technology and policy studies investigating technologies, policy instruments and processes of technological change, however, surprisingly little research has addressed the broader political economy context within which any technological change will need to be realised. This research investigates linkages between the sort of systematic environmental technological change implied by the imperative of climate change mitigation and the broader political economy context. Firstly, considering evolutionary economics approaches to understanding technological change, we argue that evolutionary micro-foundations lend themselves to an analysis of political economy processes. Moreover, it is a direct consequence of evolutionary microfoundations that technological change, and particularly that linked with structural change in an economy, is likely to have important political economy implications. Secondly, we show how heterodox approaches to understanding structural change and development in economic systems are consistent with evolutionary micro-foundations and allow the development of an analytical framework based upon an understanding of the process of economic rent creation and preservation. Thirdly, we apply these insights to a critical reconstruction of the evidence on the development of the electricity services industry (ESI), illustrating the importance of political economy considerations in understanding technological and institutional change in that sector. Finally, we apply these insights to a detailed case study of the ESI in Vietnam, investigating the ways in which political economy factors have influenced the broader development of the sector, and examining how the choice of specific technologies is likely to be affected by political economy of the sector.

Incentives to manage ecosystem services have been heralded as important mechanisms to increase efficiency in biodiversity conservation and to facilitate greater equity in the distribution of natural resources. These interventions aim to control the use of natural resources by altering resource users’ land-use decisions and environmental behaviours. There is relatively little evidence, however, about the perceived benefits and societal values of incentives, and the institutional effectiveness of incentives to alter land-use behaviours to increase compliance. It is also unclear how incentive-based management institutions align with the local biophysical, social, economic, and political dimensions of the social-ecological systems (SES) in which they are implemented. The thesis examines the ways in which incentives are used to manage ecosystem services and their institutional effectiveness to alter landowner environmental behaviours in the complex reality of the world It is important to understand the drivers of land-use decisions and environmental behaviours to implement institutions that can address natural resource issues within specific contexts. This thesis contributes to the discourse surrounding the use of incentive-based management that aim to provide motivation for compliant land-use decisions. The research highlights the need to understand the contextual nature of societal values and institutional processes that drive behaviours and determine the ‘fit’ of natural resource governance mechanisms. The recognition of these values and processes enables sufficient ‘incentive effects’ to be provided that can motivate pro-environmental behaviours. The thesis also illustrates the reality of how incentive-based institutions can function on the ground makes it difficult to clearly attribute outcomes to theoretical assumptions on which incentive-based institutions are designed. Case studies from Lombok, Indonesia and Alta Floresta, Mato Grosso, Brazil were used to illustrate the significance of local participation in decision-making, incentive design, and landowner perception of the benefits of behaviours on compliance outcomes, equity in benefit distribution, and efficient conservation management. A mixed methods approach was used to compare different incentives, which included legal sanctions, religious beliefs, social norms, and economic rewards. The thesis examines institutional function, ‘fit’, and landowner perceptions that can influence compliant pro-environmental behaviours. Spatial analysis, semi-structured questionnaires, key informant interviews, and focus groups were conducted to determine the impact of religious, economic, and customary law incentives on land-use decisions in communities on Lombok. Spatial analysis was used to examine the impact of sanctions in the legal reforms of the Forest Code, Brazil’s forest conservation legislation, on farmer land-use decisions in Alta Floresta. Abstract -ii- This thesis finds that ‘incentive effects’ are strongly determined by landowner perceptions of the social and economic cost-effectiveness of compliant behaviour, and the ‘fit’ of incentive-based management to SES’s contexts and dynamics. Institutional ‘fit’ was greater when procedural justice was perceived to be higher. That was driven by stakeholder participation in decision-making, closer links to existing institutions and social norms, and higher community autonomy over incentives. Positive incentives, like religious values and customary laws, were used to generate collective action for pro-environmental behaviours at local levels on Lombok, Indonesia. This generated greater community cooperation when collective action was built on existing social norms, socio-cultural institutions, and ecological dimensions. Incentives for collective action had less impact when they were imposed by external organisations, did not align to the local SES dimensions, and were only focused on increasing efficiency to control natural resource use. When negative incentives, such as legal sanctions and economic fines, were used to increase compliance with pro-environmental behaviours to protect riparian forests in Alta Floresta, they were found to, in fact, reduce overall compliance. The cost of sanctions and the option to offset illegal deforestation were perceived to be lower than the benefit of non-compliant behaviours like continued deforestation. The ‘incentive effects’ of these sanctions had limited impact to alter environmental behaviours of landowners. The findings of this study have implications for policies that use incentives as mechanisms to alter land-use behaviour. These findings also have clear relevance for PES and incentive-based design. They move PES beyond its theoretical application to meet the realities of the ‘messy’ world in which they are applied. The application of incentives is highly context specific to the SES in which incentives aim to function. This approach includes a need for the understanding of local perceptions of equity and cost-efficiency, and the impact of SES subsystem dynamics. A more integrated SES approach to understand the required incentives of land-use behaviours can enable a greater ‘fit’ of incentive-based institutions to local contexts, which may address environmental issues that can lead to a more sustainable use and equitable distribution of natural resources.

This thesis explores links between mobility and resilience in the context of climatically driven environmental change. Using two villages in Anhui Province, China as a comparative case study, this paper investigates the impact of two types of climatically driven environmental change (a flood and a drought) with a specific focus on the role of mobility. The study employs a novel conceptual framework that uses an adapted version of Leach et al’s (1999) ‘Environmental Entitlements Framework’ to understand the processes, characteristics and outputs that contribute to resilience at different levels of analysis. Through the use of this novel conceptual approach, issues of power and social heterogeneity are explored within a resilience framing, the lack of which is a common criticism of many existing resilience studies. The analysis reveals that, for both communities, those who elected to stay tended to exhibit more resilience than those who were obliged to stay, highlighting the important roles that immobility and choice play in relation to resilience. Significant tension was found between resilience and wellbeing; increases in levels of resilience did not always appear to correspond to increases in wellbeing. The research also reveals interesting inter and intra level interactions between individuals of the same household and between households and the village that threatens the very existence of the villages themselves. The thesis concludes by highlighting the importance of (im)mobility and choice as important influences on resilience, urging for a more critical and cautious use of the concept of resilience with regard to development initiatives and the highlights importance of drawing out interactions between and within different levels of analysis to aid understanding.

No description available.

Studies of marriage and sexuality in India have generally focused on girls or women and although men are central to these relationships, they are often ignored. This thesis concentrates on this gap in the literature and focuses on how masculinities are shaped by the negotiation of love and sexuality, particularly in pre-­‐marital relationships. The few studies of masculinity that do exist have typically focused on urban men, whereas the focus of this thesis is on marginalised men in rural central Gujarat. For men, life stages and rites of passage are a significant feature governing their lives and aspirations, and so how these are negotiated within the secrecy of pre-­‐ marital relationships in contrast, and conflict, with a public normative discourse of marriage is a defining feature of this thesis. This research contributes to a better understanding of the different discourse and practice that men utilise in their approach to pre-­‐marital relationships and how this reflects divergent attitudes towards women and notions of love and sexuality. The thesis is based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork alongside the conducting of 38 interviews with men from the Muslim, Christian and Tadpada communities. The analysis highlights the significance of male peer solidarity that exists during a liminal period of relative freedom for young men during the transition between adolescence and the responsibilities of marriage and manhood. Pre-­‐marital relationships are framed as transgressive within a public normative discourse; in actuality multiple performances of sexuality are presented by young men dependent on context and audience. The consequences of discovery for transgressive relationships are typically discussed in terms of their effects on female transgressors, yet this research aims to explore the consequences that such a discovery has upon young men, particularly in relation to the distinctive, yet inter-­‐related, notions of credit and honour.

In recent years development aid (also commonly referred to as Overseas Development Assistance or ODA) has increasingly been allocated for the mitigation of climate change, often diverting funding from more traditional development purposes such as poverty alleviation. To the author's knowledge no other study identifies the determinants of the increasing provision of official mitigation finance and the patterns of its allocation across 180 developing countries. This PhD thesis includes three empirical studies and a theoretical discussion and seeks to fill this gap in the academic literature. The analysis makes use of fixed-effect, random-effect and two-part models, the institutional analysis and development framework and 1998-2010 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Rio Marker project-level data from 23 donors and 180 developing countries. This research finds that donors' emission levels, CO2 intensity, commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, political views and domestic environmental spending significantly influence their allocation of mitigation finance and the proportion of their total ODA that they designate to it, and that recipient developing countries' potential for mitigation, such as their environmental assets and emission problems, and their institutional and economic factors affect how mitigation finance is allocated to them. The findings show that donors tend to provide loans to recipients with large emission problems and grants to those with large environmental assets. Across donors, the determinants of mitigation finance tend to be heterogeneous. These findings lead to a discussion whether mitigation finance is a perverse incentive for developing countries' emission mitigation and whether it will permanently remain reliant on ODA. The overall research gives guidance and reflection of the future of official mitigation finance.

India’s gains in reproductive health and child development have been slower than anticipated, and significantly the country continues to bear a disproportionate share of the global undernutrition burden. Indian children do particularly poorly in the foundational foetal stage and in the first three years, and public programmes are especially ineffective in reaching this group. While it is recognised that reproductive health and child nutrition is determined complexly, having biomedical and social roots, positions from a policy perspective are oftentimes competing – on whether key barriers are primarily economic or essentially cultural. Additionally, an argument explaining the South Asian nutrition ‘enigma’ emphasises the mediating role of female power, often measured as female decision-making autonomy. I discuss based on research in a village in the rice-growing plains of Chhattisgarh the complex and interrelated cultural, economic and gender-based variables as they bear on reproductive health and nutrition for the different social groups in the village. I argue that this under-researched geography at the confluence of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian cultural streams has interesting insights to offer for social theory into the determinants of female power. Important elements of northern kinship based on exogamous principles, theoretically less favourable for female autonomy than ‘southern’ kinship systems, counter-intuitively go alongside relatively egalitarian gender relations, also evidenced by sex-ratios, and other telling indicators. Furthermore, not fitting with mainstream discourse on female autonomy’s positive demographic and health implications, relatively egalitarian gender relations and sex-ratios go alongside poor performance on other demographic, health and nutrition outcomes. For caste groups in the village, elements of northern kinship appear to bear on son-preference, and undermine a woman’s independence in fertility related decision-making. However, beyond an influence on fertility the influence of gender-inequality on reproductive and child development outcomes could not be read off from observations or expressions of decision making power. I argue that it may be useful to broaden the gender-lens beyond a narrow conceptual focus on decision-making autonomy to include structural dimensions such as rigidities in gender division of labour. Behaviours and practices relevant to reproduction and childrearing vary significantly from biomedical recommendations. These reveal both economic and cultural roots. Judged against biomedical norms, health and childcare behaviours shaped by ideational beliefs are at greater variance for the post-partum stage than during pregnancy. Cultural food proscriptions have little relevance during pregnancy, implying that concerns of ‘eating down’ in pregnancy for its influence on foetal growth are of little consequence for this geography. I argue that there are important economic barriers that place limits on diet quality in pregnancy, yet there is some scope for health-facilitating resource reprioritisation. Health and childcare behaviours in the post-partum stage diverge to a greater extent from recommended biomedical practice, and could be damaging to nutritional status of the mother and child. While these practices have a clear ‘ideational’ element, they are also rooted in fear of both ill health and economic distress, deriving perhaps from the historical experience of communities in a poor health environment. I discuss from the curious case of the nutritionally vulnerable Pardhi tribe, and their rejection of the public works NREGA programme that there are iterative cultural and nutritional factors that influence poverty for this community, notwithstanding oppressive social and political relations. Productive activity perceived to involve high energy expenditure, while seemingly economically attractive can be rejected in contexts where communities aim to preserve ‘body-capital’. Further conventional classifications of what is considered routine unskilled work under NREGA may be rejected because of cultural unfamiliarity and unfamiliar body techniques. The wider marginalisation of the community and oppressive social relations may further contribute to Pardhi rejection of public programmes. In addition, entrenched local political rivalries work against public interest to mediate the everyday welfare state and implementation of reproductive health and nutrition programmes such as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).