This thesis is the first empirical study of an emerging concept, vector-agriwater. Vector-agriwater is common pool water resources that are allocated to urban centres, instead of irrigation, in order to increase the overall agricultural output of a system. In semi-arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa, urban centres are connected to a large hinterland of rainfed farming communities and farmers depend on urban services for their agricultural production. Vector-agriwater enables urban services to flourish with a safe, reliable water supply and supports a diverse urban economy, potentially facilitating farmers’ access to services and urban markets. This study reports findings from comparative case study research in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is experiencing rapid urban growth and irrigation expansion resulting in fierce competition for common pool water resources. There is a favourable policy environment for increasing irrigation for food security and poverty alleviation since Ethiopia’s macroeconomic policies are based on agricultural development-led industrialisation. This thesis challenges a dominant focus on irrigation by revealing that, under certain conditions, meeting urban water demands may support small increases in the productivity of rainfed agriculture which can produce more agricultural output overall than if those water resources are allocated to irrigation. It draws on evidence collected during a period of fieldwork from 2014-15 with mixed methods: surveys, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. Conceptually, this thesis bridges existing theories of rural development and water resources management to make an original contribution to improve our understanding of the most prudent use of water resources in semi-arid environments for increasing agricultural output. Empirically, it finds that: 1) rainfed farming households are highly underutilising urban services for different reasons, 2) an urban water supply is a limiting factor for the urban economy, 3) urban water supplies play a role in sustaining rural-urban linkages and 4) allocating water resources to urban centres instead of irrigation is politically viable but requires strong, enforceable institutions and integration of water governance actors.

In Peru ́s Callejón de Huaylas, the physical and social dynamics of water use and management are changing rapidly. A shift from subsistence to commercial crop production in comunidades campesinas is leading to intensive water use, compounding the impacts of glacier retreat on water availability. The 2009 Water Resources Law aims to address water scarcity and conflict though ‘formalising’ water use and management, bringing increased state control over water user organizations. This study explores how villagers in a water user organization in Huashao interacted with state discourses and practices of ‘formalization’. It uses discourse analysis to examine ‘formalization’ and its relationship to changing policies at the national and global levels. Through an ethnographic case study, it explores villagers’ everyday water use practices and the outcomes for social and institutional relationships. It investigates changing water use and management, the role of water users in shaping these changes and the influence of historical interactions with the market and NGO initiatives. The thesis shows that globalized discourses of water scarcity and climate change adaptation travel from global to local levels to subtly disperse state control over local water use and management. Yet, local water users interact with wider processes of social, historical and economic change in ways that respond to new commercial opportunities outside global management discourses. By asserting ways of thinking and acting around water based on flexible, opportunistic judgements to reproduce livelihoods, they challenge understandings of water and life in comunidades campesinas in ‘formalization’ policies. An ethnographic approach appreciates that people live with and negotiate contradictions in everyday life as they react to new water governance arrangements that defy simple interpretations of change in such contexts. I argue that understanding water users’ interactions with wider social change, and the outcomes for water use practices and management institutions, illuminates apparently contradictory behaviour.

China, the world’s second-largest economy, has witnessed a miracle in its economic growth. With lifestyle changes and rapid economic growth in China, China’s CO2 emissions have tripled during the past decades. China is now the world leading energy consumer and CO2 emitter. China is playing an increasingly important role in global emissions reduction and climate change mitigation. The accurate account of CO2 emissions is the foundation of any emission analysis and further reduction actions. However, there are no official published emission inventories in China. All the previous studies calculated China’s emissions by themselves, making the emissions inconsistent and incomparable with each other. The first part of this PhD thesis compiles the time-series Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) territorial CO2 emission inventories for China and its provinces from 1997 to 2015. The multi-scale emissions inventories are constructed in a uniform format (by 46 socioeconomic sectors and 17 fossil fuels). An open-access database “ceads.net” is built based on this PhD study. CEADs is the first open-access emission database providing self-consistent and transparent data for China. Chapter 4 finds that the total CO2 emissions of China increased rapidly during the past 16 years with an average increase of 7.8% per year. The emissions peaked in 2013, at 9,534 million tonnes (Mt). The detailed analysis of the CO2 emissions by sectors and fossil fuel sources finds that coal-related fuels and the manufacturing sectors, especially the “power and heat”, are the primary contributor to the national emissions. Chapter 4 also examines the per capita CO2 emissions and the emission intensity of China. The results show that the per capita emissions increased quickly from 2.4 (2000) to 6.7 (2015) tonnes, while the emission intensity keeps decreasing during the period. Both comparison and Monte Carlo uncertainty analyses are conducted to China’s emissions. The result shows that the uncertainties of the national CO2 emissions are roughly (-15%, 25%) at a 97.5% confidential level. Similar analyses are conducted at the provincial level in Chapter 4 as well. The results show that Shandong emitted the most CO2 cumulatively among the 30 provinces, followed by Hebei, Jiangsu, Guangdong, and Henan. The fossil fuel and sector-specific analysis of the provincial CO2 emissions describe detailed emissions of each province. The per capita emissions and emission intensities of each province are also presented in this study. In order to have a better understanding of China’s CO2 emissions, Chapter 5 provides further analysis of emission characteristics of the lime industry and petroleum coke for the first time. The lime industry is the second largest process-related emission contributor followed by the cement. The results show that, in 2012, the process-related CO2 emissions in China’s lime production accounted for 141.72 Mt, while the electricity and fossil fuel-related emissions accounted for 55.95 and 4.42 (Mt) respectively. Further discussions of the reduction policy recommendations of China’s lime industry are presented in this study based on the economic and environmental assessment of different lime kilns. As for the petroleum coke consumption, its combustion produced 26.2 Mt CO2, 807 tonnes CH4, and 137 tonnes N2O in 2014. The petroleum coke-related emissions are increasing fast. During the past five years, its emissions increased by 87%, which is remarkably high compared to the 19.4% growth rate of total CO2 emissions in China. Considering the petroleum coke is a dirty and un-environmental friendly fossil fuel type, the quick growth of petroleum coke consumption should be of serious concern to the government. Further to the national and provincial emission inventories, Chapter 7 examines the CO2 emissions from Tibet and its cities. This is the first study to quantify Tibet’s emissions. The results show that Tibet emitted a total of 5.52 Mt of CO2 related to fossil fuel combustion and cement production in 2014. The per capita and emission intensity of Tibet are much lower than the national average level. The city-level analysis shows that over half of Tibet’s CO2 emissions are induced in Lhasa city. The second part of this PhD thesis examines the CO2 emissions from Chinese cities and discusses the possible low-carbon development pathways of cities at different industrialisation and development stages. Being the basic units for human activities and major contributors to emissions, cities are major components in the implementation of climate change mitigation and CO2 emission reduction policies. Increasing attention is now being paid to city-level emission reduction and climate change mitigation in China. Chapter 3 firstly develops a series of methods to compile CO2 emission inventories for Chinese cities with different data availabilities. The emission inventories of cities are constructed with the consistent scope and uniform with the national and provincial emission inventories calculated above. Chapter 6 then applies the methods to examine emissions characteristics in 182 cities. The results show that the top-emitting cities represent a disproportionately large fraction of the total emissions from the 182 cities. The top five emitting cities (Tangshan, Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanyang, and Chongqing) accounts for 11% of the total emissions. More high-emitting cities can be found in northern and eastern China compared with other regions. Chapter 6 further applies the cluster analysis to cluster the 182 case cities into five groups with distinct pillar industries describing their different industrialisation stages and development pathways. The results find that there is labour division among Chinese cities, the most developed cities (service-based and high-tech industry cities) are supported by nearby manufacturing cities. In turn, the manufacturing cities are supported by nearby energy production centres. In this way, different cities should have different low-carbon roadmaps designed based on their current industrialisation stages and development pathways. Chapter 6 also finds that efficiency gains could be a practical and effective way to reduce CO2 emissions. The sectoral-based calculation of the cities’ emission reduction capacities via technical improvements show that up 31% of the 182 cities’ emissions can be reduced if the strongest reduction strategies been applied. The results suggest that China’s near-term goals of reducing its emissions intensity may be feasibly accomplished by targeted technological improvements, buying time for the longer-term strategies of shifting to non-fossil energy and a more service-based economy. Moreover, improving and optimizing the energy and carbon efficiency of industrial production processes and operations could help lower the costs of advanced technologies and thus facilitate their deployment in less-developed cities and countries beyond China. This PhD study has great real-world significance and has filled in several research gaps in China’s emission accounts and cities’ low-carbon development. The research also provides solid and robust data support for future academic research on China’s emission topics and emission reductions policy-making in China. First of all, this PhD study provides the first open-access China emission database providing the multi-scale CO2 emission inventories. Secondly, this PhD study analyses the detailed emission characteristics of China, its provinces, and cities, as well selected key industries. Specific and efficient emission control policies targeting the major emission sources are discussed based on the analysis. Also, based on the city-level emission accounts, this PhD study analyses the low-carbon roadmaps for cities at different industrialisation stages and development pathways. Furthermore, considering the wide ranges of Chinese cities’ industrialisation maturity, the cross-section analysis of China’s cities may disclose the emissions characteristics of the whole industrialisation process. The emission reduction roadmaps designed in this study for cities at different industrialisation stages also provide references for other developing countries at similar stages of industrialisation.

This thesis explores how gender influences local access to resources through a case study of an upland community in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. It also teases out the implications of these gender dynamics for the implementation of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) in Vietnam. To address the complexity of the chosen topic and case study, I employ a theoretical framework that fuses both Ribot and Peluso’s (2003) theory of access and Feminist Political Ecology (Rocheleau et al. 1996). The qualitative methods encompass interviews, participant observation, life histories and photovoice. My findings show that gendered access to resources is shaped by various factors including gender, ethnicity, age, culture and social status. Gendered access to resources can also be negotiated through social relations including kinship, conjugal relationships and political connections to local authorities at the household and community levels. Resource access, however, is not only concerned with local actors. When it comes to decision-making regarding resource access, both national and local actors are involved. Accordingly, the legal systems of resource management imposed by the Vietnamese state and the customary ways of resource use practised by local villagers in Kala Tongu are both brought to bear in decision-making in different ways at different levels. These national-local dynamics of resource access might take different forms. On the one hand, the politics of decision making at the national level often results in gender policies being less prioritised and being limited to women’s participation, which might contradict local understandings of gender. On the other hand, everyday politics within the village also feed into the wider debates about what is actually happening around resource access and reflect local expectations of how these forestry policies should be implemented.

Land Tenure changes, resulting from rapid urbanisation, population growth and contested access to land, have resulted in shrinking farming land for Ghanaian pineapple farmers. This has contributed to the conversion of traditional farming pineapple lands into non-agricultural use. Pineapple farmers are therefore confronted with the problem increased tenure access costs, land expropriation and contested tenure access rights. However, research in this area is very limited in Ghana making it difficult to understand important dynamics and implications of land tenure changes. The research uses the example of pineapple farmers in two peri-urban areas in Ghana to examine the links between pineapple farming and land tenure. Field work data was gathered in Ghana (Nsawam district, Eastern Region and Awutu-Senya District, Central Region) using key informant interviews, household survey, and focus group discussions. The chosen context offered an excellent backdrop in which contestations over tenure access between farmers and real estate developers is contributing to increasing land scarcity. However, the research focuses attention on understanding how pineapple farmers manage and adjust to land tenure change. The study was presented in a summary and three research papers. The results of the research provided evidence to suggest that accelerated development of land markets is driving increasing processes of tenure individualisation. This is causing land to shift gradually away from customary control. Consequently, vulnerable groups such as poorer farmers and migrant groups are finding it increasingly difficult to access arable farming land securely. Wealthier farmers such as contracted groups with assured markets and higher incomes are taking advantage of their position to claim more land while poorer farmers are increasingly driven to look outside farming to gain employment and access income.

In Western academic research China is usually viewed as a homogenous entity. However, it is a vast country with significant regional differences in environmental conditions, economic development and the population’s standard of living. The energy system is a reflection of the socio-economic and environmental disparities that exist between different regions. Large amounts of electricity are generated in pollution intensive coal-based power plants in the poorer inner provinces to support rising consumption in the more affluent urban centres on the East coast. The main objective of the thesis is to examine the effect of a national carbon market on these regional differences through a qualitative and quantitative case study of the residential electricity sector. The study also aims to provide methodological insights on how to identify and evaluate alternative energy futures in a complex world. In order to cope with the uncertainty of future developments and the plethora of partly contradictory social preferences, a participatory approach is combined with the application of a system analytical toolset that considers complex system interlinkages. The empirical analysis consists of three stages: First an exploratory stage with stakeholder engagement, second a systems modelling stage simulating different carbon market scenarios and third an evaluation stage ranking of these scenarios based on public opinion. The main empirical insight is that a price on carbon is relatively ineffective in limiting electricity demand of affluent households in the East. This is significant as increasing residential electricity usage could jeopardise the sustainability reform of the electricity sector. Another key finding from the empirical study is that the carbon market scenario ranked highest by study participants would lead to a widening gap between the inner and the Eastern regions. In such a scenario, where the energy generators shoulder most of the cost burden, the advanced economies of the coastal provinces would grow at a faster pace than the mining dominated inner regions. Scenario simulation also demonstrates that supplementary equity enhancing interventions could mitigate regional socio-economic and environmental disparities by supporting the establishment of innovative industries in China’s centre. In general, the thesis contributes to the discussion on the significance of China’s current political, institutional and cultural setting for its market-led sustainability transition. By illustrating the constraints to achieve the sustainability targets anchored in the 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020), implications are drawn from the research that are relevant for the current political process. Furthermore, the thesis highlights the importance of identifying dependencies and interactions between and within different levels of analysis to aid the understanding of a multifarious problem. To this end, it develops a bespoke methodological framework that supports the appraisal of complex situations involving divergent preferences for the solution outcome.

Thanks to rapid urbanization and climate change, most regions, particularly cities, are facing the risk of natural disasters and extreme weather events. Flooding, the most common type of natural disaster, has accounted for nearly 47% of all weather-related natural disasters since 1995, has killed 157,000 people, and has affected more than 2.3 billion people. Despite physical damage, floods also interrupt economic activities and result in huge and unacceptable economic costs that people cannot see directly. Thus, comprehensive analysis of the economic impact by flood disaster on the industrial and economic system has become an urgent and essential part of urban recovery and sustainable development. However, there is a lack of studies which focus on assessing the indirect economic impacts resulting from floods and thereafter providing a common quantitative approach within their assessment. This PhD thesis presents a full methodology for a flood footprint accounting framework, so-called ‘Flood Footprint Model’ that can be applied to indirect economic impact assessment for both single and multiple flood disasters. The concept of ‘flood footprint’ is employed here to measure exclusively the total economic impact to the affected region and the wider economic systems that have been directly or indirectly caused by a flood event. Within the framework of input-output analysis, the ‘Flood Footprint Model’ is built upon previous contributions, with improvements regarding the optimization of available production imbalances and the requirements for recovering damaged capital. Certain factors are considered more rationally and accurately through mathematical and logical approaches, and the main novelties of the proposed methodology are: 1) a recovery scheme for industrial and household capital loss, set by endogenous factors and by considering industrial linkages; 2) a proposal for estimating degraded productive capacity constraints regarding labour and capital; 3) an optimized rationing scheme including basic demand and reconstruction requirements; 4) various extensive sensitivity analyses (as this research proposes a more clear post-flooding recovery process based on this model scenario rather than the ‘black-box’ recovery in other studies). Three practical cases are applied in order to demonstrate this method. In particular, two hypothetical example cases are used to verify the mathematical equations of the model within single and multiple flood events. Chapter 4 describes the total and indirect flood footprint assessment of a hypothetical single-flood case, in which a hypothetical flood occurs in an economy with 3 sectors; while Chapter 6 shows a flood footprint estimation of a hypothetical two-flood event that occurred in a region with 5 sectors. In addition, the ‘Flood Footprint Model’ is successfully applied to a real single-flood case ‘2012 Beijing 721 urban flooding’ which affected 1.9 million people and caused a 11.64 billion Chinese Yuan (CNY) direct economic loss (Chapter 5). The total flood footprint is calculated as 21.19 billion CNY with a recovery period of 42 weeks (almost 1.18% of the total GDP in the Beijing area in the year 2012). In particular, the direct flood footprint was 11.64 billion CNY while the indirect footprint was 9.55 billion CNY; the tertiary industry accounted for 52%, the secondary industry accounted for 40% and the other 8% occurred in the primary industry. Regarding the 42 sectors, Construction, Water Conservation and Transportation were responsible for the largest flood footprint, and accounted for over 12%, 10% and 9% of the total area flood footprint, respectively. Such results seem to correspond closely with the industrial output composition of Beijing in 2012. Aside from the modelling process being shown in three cases, a series of sensitivity analyses of the ‘Flood Footprint Model’ are applied to a single- and two-flood events, as actual economic data for examining the post-flood economic recovery is unavailable. Several conclusions are reached: 1) regarding the results of the indirect flood footprint of a specific flood - the higher direct flood footprint does not mean that the higher indirect flood footprint is determined by inter-linkages among industries; similarly, in a multi-flood, larger direct damage cost from each disaster will result in a larger direct flood footprint of the multi-flood, but does not mean a higher indirect flood footprint; 2) flood footprints of a given single and multiple floods are sensitive to the model-related parameters, such as labour and capital recovery paths, import and basic demand; 3) in a single disaster, delayed recovery scenarios resulting from incomplete governance show results that illustrate that delayed recovery will produce an accumulated effect that can increase the flood footprint and extend the recovery period of the whole economy; 4) in a two-flood case, the total flood footprint of a multi-flood within a given region is larger than the sum of individual flood footprints and this is the same for the indirect flood footprint, as the flood footprint is highly constrained by factors like occurrence time, and physical damage caused by the ensuing flood; 5) this model enables us to find the regional or industrial threshold for damaged capital caused by multi-flooding by calculating the maximum acceptable damage level for the first and second flood in the affected region. Overall, the methodology improved by this thesis is more externally oriented and therefore is a better fit with reality: the final aim of the flood footprint assessment is not confined to an estimation of the economic cost of an urban flooding event at industrial and regional levels per week, month or year, but also provides more options and scenarios for post-disaster recovery management by considering the distribution of any remaining production and the allocation of financial assistance within the economic system after flooding.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognize the importance of institutions in the promotion of economic growth and gender equality. Several scholars (Boserup, 1970; Baltiwala, 2007; Kabeer 2012) also agree on the need to engage with social institutions at various levels to achieve women’s economic empowerment. Ironically, institutions in the Lagos context tend to undermine women’s economic empowerment through their opaque and devious governance processes, and contribute to the widespread social mistrust which reduces the appetite for collective action. Further, contrary to some literature that presents the Lagos market associations as cohesive and protective (Little, 1972; Mba, 1982; Ikioda, 2011), this study suggests a despotic and extortionist market governance within which the majority of women traders have no voice. The study examines how Lagos women traders (in Oke Arin market) negotiate the complexities of their relationships with institutions at kin, market, and state levels. The study explores the central paradox that while cultural norms and social reality in Lagos demand that women be economically independent and engaged in family provisioning (Sudarkasa, 1973; Mann, 1991; Denzer, 1994), various institutions constrain women’s ability to meet their expected gender roles. Based on a sample of 80 Lagos (Yoruba) women traders, the study leveraged a combination of survey, in-depth interviews, observation and secondary data. Concepts of power and empowerment are used to examine the gendered strategies for survival and accumulation. Among the key findings are that kin relationships are critical to women’s entry into, and success in, trading and that the patterns of maternal influence and inheritance suggest an increasing trend towards matrifocality. Additionally, in response to spatial politics and the dominating market and government institutions, women traders devise resistance strategies, sometimes pushing the boundaries of legality. But in the absence of collective action, they remain unable to achieve transformative change.

This thesis is situated in the context of a gap-year education programme operated in Bolivia and Peru by a US-based organisation. Inspired by Paolo Freire’s social-emancipatory educational ethos, the organisation transposes his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) from literacy programmes for Brazilian peasants to a very different context: into attempts to transform privileged 18 to 21-year-olds from the “developed” world into critical global citizens, ready to challenge social injustices after three months in “developing” countries. This Freirean sentiment is unusual in the gap year industry, as well as in the academic literature on transformative learning which has emphasised personal transformation, overlooking social change and power relations. My thesis addresses this oversight, engaging with the concept of power as an ‘invisible’, symbolic network of social boundaries that defines ‘fields of possibility’ (Hayward, 1998), shaping what happens during the programme. Much research into transformative educational experiences focuses on the learning outcomes of self-identified transformed learners, based on self-reported data collected retrospectively. By contrast, this thesis is based on a critical ethnographic case study focusing on pedagogic process. Analysing data from participant observation, discussions, interviews, and students’ learning journals, I hone in on the micro-level functions of power, space, and place in shaping not only what is taught and learned during the BB programme, but also how, where and why this happens. Suspended in the tension between Bourdieu’s theory of social and cultural reproduction (1990) and Curry-Stevens’ post-Freirean ‘Pedagogy for the Privileged’ (2007), I principally use Bernstein’s notion of ‘pedagogic device’ (2000) to analyse how programme Instructors counter-intentionally facilitated socially reproductive, rather than transformative, learning. I argue that the programme reproduces social inequalities by enabling privileged people to accumulate a specific form of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1977) – cross-cultural transformation capital (CCTC). This is gathered by gaining supposedly “authentic” knowledge through “real” experiences with “the Other” in culturally “pure” spaces, accessible only to “travellers” and uncontaminated by “tourists”. I show how this creates patterns of pedagogic segregation whereby specific types of pedagogic space produce specific types of knowledge. However, paradoxically, I also describe sporadic, unpredictable pockets of transformative learning in which students engage critically with their privileged positioning in asymmetric power structures. I thus contend that (socially) transformative pedagogic space is constituted in complex, contradictory ways, but also by pedagogy that must connect personal and social change. I conclude that greater attention to power and space is critical to transformative pedagogic theory and practice which can be framed and conceptualised in spatial terms, as the crossing and reconfiguring of boundaries.

This thesis offers an ethnographic account of the lives of a handful of Rwandan twelve to fifteen-year-olds over their first two years as students at a Catholic-led, public secondary boarding school on the outskirts of Kigali. The wider context is Rwanda as both a post-conflict state, in which schooling is thought of as a tool for shaping collective memories and constructing a shared civic identity in the name of ‘reconciliation’; and as a developmental state, in which schooling intends to make young people useful human capital for accomplishing national development goals. The focus of the thesis is on how the young Rwandans in the study (re)interpret and appropriate the discourses they encounter in the school and beyond as they perform their identities and imagine their futures. Told in the students’ own words, with particular attention to the creative production of alternative (non-elite) discourses at grass-roots, the thesis tells a story of anxiety and uncertainty as students struggle to navigate the many ambiguities in their lives and to truly believe the government’s promise of a bright future.