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Pentecostal Christianity has gained many followers in the developing world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite a corpus of anthropological scholarship on the impact of following Pentecostalism on identities and social change, less has been written from the perspective of the believer, and little from within the field of development studies. In this thesis, which is based on 14months of research in Kampala, Uganda, I explore how followers of this religion appropriate a discourse of prosperity and blessings, and how they utilise certain religious practices and relationships that are forged from the Pentecostal community in their efforts to mediate their futures and ‘move on up’ from a state of poverty. In particular, I discuss whether these practices and relationships can be seen as engendering transformative agency for these individuals. In doing so, I explore three themes that were prevalent in my data analysis: an everyday non-ecstatic speech act which is called ‘positive confessions’, ways of understanding poverty and dealing with situations of injustice, and patronage relationships between more wealthy and poorer members of the Pentecostal community. I suggest that despite readily apparent displays of agency, in effect these religious practices and relationships do little to enable positive transformations in the lives of these believers, and instead, might actually uphold existing issues of disenfranchisement, through an emphasis on the individual as a force for change, a reorientation in ideas of time, and a prohibition of doubt and questioning. In addition, a more limited exploration of a group of non-Pentecostals sheds light on the potential for Pentecostal Christianity to be influential on the wider religious milieu than may have originally be thought, and hints at the need for a re-fashioning of our research methods when understanding the lives of those who are ‘Pentecostal’, in Uganda at least.

This study applies a multidimensional definition of wellbeing, which includes material, social and subjective dimensions, to household level social research in rural Rwanda. Its contribution lies in applying the approach to three different fields: the study of cultural difference; natural resource management; and agrarian change, and in combining a wellbeing assessment with dominant theories or concepts in each. Rwanda has received acclaim for meeting development targets despite high levels of poverty and population density. However, due to centralised, target driven policy, those impacts are contested and this thesis presents rare empirical insights from the perspective of rural inhabitants themselves. The assessment of rural wellbeing forming the basis of three empirical papers reveals that many people struggle to meet basic needs for food, shelter and fuel. In contrast to development indicators, data reveal wellbeing to be falling among many rural households and inequality to be increasing, despite investment-driven health, education and security improvements. Far-reaching policies promoting rural and agricultural modernisation, alongside reconciliation between ethnic groups, appeared only to emphasize difference between groups, with outcomes of poverty reproduced for those with little relative power. The Twa, an indigenous people, suffer acute difficulties, exacerbated by reduced forest access. However application of a framework combining wellbeing and ecosystem services reveals that a landscape approach to natural resource management could realise synergies between local resource needs and conservation of biodiversity in Rwanda’s rich tropical forests. The pervasive and authoritarian nature by which development targets are pursued, for example enforcing rural villagisation, has resulted in a perceived loss of freedom, which inhibited local systems of knowledge, labour, trade and social interaction. While such consequences are commonly overlooked, more holistic approaches such as this enable interpretation of complex interrelated systems and promote awareness of local perspectives, with critical implications for the design and assessment of development policy.

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No description available.

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This study provides important empirical and analytical insights that represent a step forward towards a deeper and better understanding of the effects of land reform and land policies on the distribution of access to land-based resources. It explores the extent to which the process of land reform during the early 1990s, and the subsequent implementation of complementary land policies and programmes brought deep modifications to the way in which agrarian communities obtain benefits from resources. The empirical evidence on which this research is based consists of both qualitative and quantitative data elicited by a combination of research methods applied to a case study design. The case study chosen is San Francisco Oxtotilpan, an agrarian community in Mexico‟s central highlands that is home to the smallest indigenous group in the region: the Matlatzinca. The theoretical and analytical framework designed takes into account the main scholarship on access to natural resources. This extended analytical framework of access to land-based resources provides a characterization of access mechanisms that disentangle the complex set of cultural, socio-economic and political processes underlying access to land-based resources. It enables an assessment of the effects of the implementation of land reform-related policies and programmes over the different ways in which members of the agrarian community benefit from land-based resources. The study concludes that the implementation of land policies in Mexico since the early 1990s has brought deep modifications in the local governance of land-based resources. It illustrates that the differential distribution of benefits from land-based resources depends on households‟ ability to use a set of access mechanisms to gain, control or maintain the flux of benefits from land-based resources. Results show that when it comes to land-based resource governance, the implementation of land policies and programmes has produced conflicts between the agrarian community and external politico-legal institutions –especially from the State. Furthermore, it modified the internal structure of the agrarian community, and consequently, the complex set of mechanisms that shape the distribution of access to land-based resources available.