Thesis (M. Arch.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2007. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Christopher Livingston. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-142).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / "1998"--Cover. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 395-414).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Melbourne School of Land and Environment, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 361-386)

This thesis looks into the relationship between natural resources and non-resource economic activity in resource-rich countries. This relationship has been investigated through the literature of the “resource curse” which was first noted by Sachs and Warner (1995) who show a significant negative relation between natural resource dependence and income growth. Despite the developing literature in that area, empirical tests suffered from endogeneity. In this thesis, I try to add more resilient identification strategies in order to assess the effect of resource abundance on the macro economy using exogenous variations in 136 countries from 1962-2012. The first essay of this thesis examines the correlation between natural resource rents and economic diversification. The main question I ask in this essay is can resource-rich countries diversify their economies? To address this issue, the essay empirically tests diversification in exports, in employment and in value added and finds a significant negative impact. In the second empirical essay of this thesis, I focus on giant oil and gas discoveries as the main external variation and test the role of institutional quality in diversification when a country becomes resource abundant. Results show that all countries with varied institutional quality go through export concentration after giant oil discoveries. The third empirical essay looks more thoroughly into the manufacturing sector. I estimate the causal effect of two commodity shocks suggested by the Dutch Disease hypothesis on the tradable manufacturing industries: giant oil discoveries as a resource discovery shock, and oil price boom and bust as a commodity price shock. The results suggest a negative impact on the tradable industries growth in manufacturing value added and wages. These results add more credible empirical evidence to the Dutch Disease literature.

The environment and energy have been fundamental to the growth of the economy. This looks like a straightforward claim. But it is not. In order to understand how these are related, how growth came to be associated with the economy, and how this growth came to be seen as the unshakeable fundament of any environmental politics, this thesis focuses on a brief period of largely postwar history, and almost exclusively on a single country - America. At this time, and in this place, the technical removal of material constraints, the provision of energy, the construction of environmental limits and then their dismantling, forms the complex history of the growth of the environment and the environment of growth. This history created both the possibility of the contemporary political economy of the environment as well as its limits. This thesis traces the way that the economy, energy and the environment were co-constructed, transformed and interwoven in the US from the postwar years through to the mid 1970s, through the assembling, application and reassembling of the economic techniques and technologies that defined growth, scarcity and efficiency. To this end, it orients itself around the impacts of the 1952 President's Materials Policy Commission - known as the Paley Commission, and the think tank that was set up in its wake: Resources For the Future (RFF). The Paley Commission report and the RFF would, through their technical innovations play a key role in the construction of the economy as a separate, measurable and observable sphere of monetary flows, driven by an associated logic of exponential growth; energy as an interchangeable system of sources powering this economy; and the environment, initially as encompassing the economy and defined by finite limits, then reconstructed as external to the economy and where pollution is considered as an example of market failure to be rectified by the internalisation of externalities.

This thesis has three separate parts. In the first part I report the first ex post study of the economic impact of sea level rise. I apply two econometric approaches to estimate the past effects of sea level rise on the economy of the USA, viz. Barro type growth regressions adjusted for spatial patterns and a matching estimator. The unit of analysis is 3063 counties of the USA. I fit growth regressions for 13 time periods and I estimate numerous varieties for both growth regressions and matching estimator. Although there is some evidence that sea level rise has a positive effect on economic growth, in most specifications the estimated effects are insignificant. Therefore, I cannot confirm the implicit assumption of previous ex-ante studies, in particular that sea level rise has in general negative effect on economies. In the second part I fit Ricardian regressions of agricultural land values for 2830 counties of the USA on past sea level rise, taking account of spatial autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity. I find a significant, hill-shaped relationship. Hence, the outcomes are mixed. Mild sea level rise increases, while more pronounced sea level rise causes land values to fall. The results are robust to a set of variations. In the third part I explore an unprecedented dataset of almost 6,000 observations to identify main predictors of climate knowledge, climate risk perception and willingness to pay (WTP) for climate change mitigation. Among nearly 70 potential explanatory variables I detect the most important ones using a multisplit lasso estimator. Importantly, I test significance of individuals' preferences about time, risk and equity. The study is innovative as these behavioural characteristics were recorded by including experimental methods into a live sample survey. This unique way of data collection combines advantages of surveys and experiments. The most important predictors of environmental attitudes are numeracy, cognitive ability, inequity aversion and political and ideological world-view.

This research examines the formation of Water User Associations that administer communal drinking water supply systems in highland Ecuador and explores the ways in which they have become one of the many spaces through which indigenous and peasant comunidades negotiate and define citizenship rights. While policy debates and academic research have recognised that safe access to drinking water is an essential aspect of life in terms of wellbeing, health and productivity, less attention has been given to the cultural and political implications that accessing hydrological resources holds for marginalised groups in society. In other words, what are the uses and meanings that water acquires through time for local people? How and why different claims over water management become a source of power struggles and political contestation? Based on fieldwork and archival research the thesis explores the case of an indigenous and peasant comunidad of Otavalo, where during the past 30 years the establishment of drinking water supply systems has brought significant changes to the local population in terms of self-governance practices and forms of organisation. It argues that Water User Associations, originally introduced by the state to manage water, have become a space through which local communities negotiate local identities and articulate development aspirations. In this way, water has become an important political tool for a traditionally marginalised segment of the population who are, through their everyday practices of water management, demanding recognition of their rights via à vis the state. The thesis also shows, that despite the importance of these institutional arrangements access to water is also determined by power asymmetries and inequalities within the comunidad. By analysing user associations for drinking water systems, this thesis also contributes to an area of study that has been ignored by most of the existing water literature as it has tended to favour irrigation water management because it is considered more ‘traditional' and part of the ‘hydrological culture' of the Andes. This is important because there is an estimated 10,000 communal water management systems of which 6,600 to 7,000 are administering drinking water in the rural and peri-urban areas of Ecuador.

A crucial contemporary public health issue is the construction and contestation of the relevance of the natural world to human health. Taking a critical approach, this thesis examines how the natural environment as a health determinant is positioned in relation to the 'social' within social epidemiological studies of health, illness and disease. Using conceptual and empirical forms of enquiry, this study shows how current constructions of natural environmental health drivers contour public health practice in the UK and that by challenging the limits of existing structures, innovative responses emerge, which can generate new frameworks for health policy and practice. Having identified a lacuna in research on the 'natural' environment in medical sociology, this inductive qualitative research project brings into conversation the findings from extensive desk and field research. Specially, a study of the elaboration of environmental health discourses within the UK public health policy arena and disciplinary wide discourse analyses of key academic journals are read together to describe the discursive practices shaping environmental public health work in the UK. Linking theory to practice, data from in-depth interviews with sixty health professionals working on health and the environment in the UK and internationally are used to investigate how public health practitioners produce the environment within their work remits. The research breaks ground for further social scientific studies of health and the environment and in particular substantiates the call for an extended notion of the 'environment' using ecological principles. Methodologically, the interdisciplinary reach of this research draws attention to the tensions that arise when working across the medical, natural and social sciences. Practical and philosophical questions about the challenge of expanding the sociological imagination in the contemporary moment are also considered. Empirically, to medical sociology the 'EcoBioPsychoSocial' framework is offered as a tool for studying health at the nexus between the 'social' and the 'natural environment.' Finally, the ways informal public health institutions are serving as 'invisible' forces impeding the uptake of prevention oriented environmental health policies are findings offered to the health policy arena.

The recent rapid proliferation of Private Protected Areas (PPAs) around the world has been attributed to the continuing process of neoliberalization and the commodification of nature. Although the numbers of PPAs have been growing in recent years, little research has been conducted on their everyday functions and particularly their interactions with local populations. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis focuses on a specific PPA, the Redonda Private Reserve in the Atlantic Forest region of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and three local, surrounding communities, Jabá, Esperança and Bamba. Through this focus, the thesis examines a number of issues, including the incentives and motives which lead landowners to establish and administer private reserves and how these influence the pattern of relationship formation between the reserve and the local communities. The research also considers the main implications of such private reserves for local people and their livelihoods. Finally, the thesis considers whether and how local people's perception of the environment and the way they use their surrounding natural resources have changed since the establishment of the private reserve. A central contention of the thesis is that although often interpreted as ‘new' or ‘modern' and labelled as ‘contemporary' solutions to common environmental problems, PPAs, particularly when considered in the context of their interaction with the affected local rural populations, cannot be analyzed in isolation from the wider socio-economic processes and local context where they are found. Thus, areas where PPAs emerge cannot be simply divorced from the past processes of territorialisation and land appropriation; rather, they must be understood as their continuation often reproducing pre-existing social and economic inequalities. For example, the proclaimed ‘modern' way of relating to local men and women, such as through employment, can help to disguise the continuation of traditional social hierarchies, perpetuating unequal power and wealth distribution. The thesis also shows how local people are purposefully constructed by PPAs and their representatives to gain the sympathy of outside donors and thus secure the essential funding they depend on for their existence, facilitate control over the protected natural resources and eliminate or reduce local resentment. The implications of such social interactions are profound for both the involved rural communities and the natural environment that PPAs have been set up to protect.

Civil society organisations (CSOs) in the UK are currently engaged in attempts to make food systems more sustainable, i.e. greener, fairer and healthier. These efforts have been maintained over several decades, for instance the Soil Association was launched in response to concerns about modern agriculture and food in 1946. But more sustainable food systems remain marginal. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to improve understanding of the important roles that CSOs can and do play within processes of large-scale social change (or ‘transitions'). It does this by developing a typology of the distinguishable roles played by CSOs in transition, and relating this to empirical findings from three UK case studies. Through a mixture of field observations, documentary analysis and in-depth interviewing, it makes a number of relevant findings. First, it provides detailed empirical characterisation of the activities, relationships with other actors, and stated intentions of specific CSOs. Second, it finds that CSOs chart unique transformative pathways, both individually and collectively, which emerge from their interactions and strategic repositioning over time. Third, rather than being guided by a single shared vision of transition, CSOs are found to be engaged in a plurality of intended transformations that contend with, cross-cut and partially encompass each other. These findings contribute to scholarly knowledge about how civil society innovation operates at different structural levels, targets different elements within socio-technical systems, and engages different kinds of actors and practices. They also reinforce and extend existing understandings of how civil society actors exercise power in the context of transitions, and reveal how systemic perspectives – such as underlie transitions theory – can obfuscate both the intentions and activities of the actors involved, thereby raising questions about the attribution of agency in studies of transition.