The study focuses on community participation among the poor of Bogota, Colombia. It explores the changing relationships between poor communities, local politicians and the city government before and after the institutional reforms and changing approach to development that occurred during the 1990s. The case studies were conducted in six irregular settlements, all developed in contravention of the city's planning regulations. Data were collected using a sample household survey and in-depth interviews with community leaders, local inhabitants and the representatives of outside organisations. In the 1990s, clientelistic practices became less effective to push the regularisation process. City programmes toward irregular settlements became more holistic and benefited from better coordination between the different public entities. As a result, the inhabitants became more discriminating in identifying the most effective strategies for obtaining the services and infrastructure that they required. Competent government intervention was ultimately the most important factor in furthering the regularisation process. However, regularisation could not be achieved without community participation. Community involvement was important both before and after a settlement was recognised. The community had to find the money to put down a deposit before the service agencies would install services. This required not only a minimum level of economic resources but also firm community leadership. The study also shows that apparently contradictory decisions made by the different communities were highly rational. Whether the inhabitants were willing to pay for services depended on the benefit they expected in return. Their criteria changed through the consolidation process because their most urgent needs changed. Today, after the pricing system of public services changed, access to services depends mostly on users' purchasing power and not on the collective negotiation led by the JAC leaders. In the 1990s, under the new constitution with its laws protecting citizen's rights, 'participation' of citizens in the political arena as well as their right to obtain basic services was clearly recognised. Under this legal framework, community participation gives the poor a voice with which they can present claims as well as criticise the negligence of public administration. However, the protests of the inhabitants against increased public service charges show that the community-based organisations sometimes still have reason, and the ability, to mobilise the local people as a final resort.

In May 1953 the first natural history television programme was broadcast from Bristol by naturalist Peter Scott and radio producer Desmond Hawkins. By 1997 the BBC's Natural History Unit has established a global reputation for wildlife films, providing a keystone of the BBC's public service broadcasting charter, playing an important strategic role in television scheduling and occupying a prominent position in a competitive world film market. The BBC's blue-chip natural history programmes regularly bring images of wildlife from all over the globe to British audiences of over 10 million. This thesis traces the changing aesthetics, ethics and economics of natural history film-making at the BBC over this period. It uses archive material, interviews and participant observation to look at how shifting relationships between broadcasting values, scientific and film-making practices are negotiated by individuals within the Unit. Engaging with vocabularies from geography, media studies and science studies, the research contextualises these popular representations of nature within a history of post-war British attitudes to nature and explores the importance of technology, animals and conceptions of the public sphere as additional actors influencing the relationships between nature and culture. This history charts the construction of the actor networks of the Natural History Unit by film-makers and broadcasters as they seek to incorporate and exclude certain practices, technologies and discourses of nature. These networks provide the resources, values and constraints which members of the Unit negotiate to seek representation within the Unit, and present challenges as the Unit seeks to preserve its institutional identity as these networks shift. The thesis tells a series of stories of natural history film-making that reflect one institution's contributions and responses to the contemporary formations of nature, science, the media and modernity.