In recent years corruption has come to be considered as a pervasive phenomenon, and a major obstacle in the process of economic development. However, there exist few studies that discuss the factors that cause corruption and why some countries are more corrupt than others. This research contributes to that rather scanty literature and focuses on the causes of corruption. More importantly, the study empirically investigates various causes of corruption, in particular the role of economic development, democracy and economic freedom in explaining the observed variations in corruption across countries, and the nexus between democracy and economic freedom in combating corruption. The study first tests the reliability of the recent quantitative innovations in the study of corruption in terms of the Corruption Perception Index, constructed by Transparency International. Using theoretical and empirical analysis, various hypotheses regarding corruption and its determinants are examined using panel data for 100 countries during the period 1995 to 2004. The empirical findings show that the subjective indexing process of corruption perception eventually converges to a common consensus. In evaluating the relationship between economic development and corruption, the results suggest that income per capita, education, unemployment, income inequality, economic freedom and democracy are among the factors which determine and help explain the cross-country differences in corruption. Furthermore, the assessment of the relationship between democracy and corruption shows that an ‘electoral democracy’, represented by ‘political rights’, is not in itself sufficient to reduce corruption. Instead, for low levels of corruption to exist, the presence of an advanced fully-formed mature democracy is required. A characteristic of a mature democracy is the existence of an environment where the probability of being caught, if acting corruptly, is very high. In addition, the examination of the interaction between economic freedom and democracy suggests that economic freedom reduces corruption in any political environment, and the effect is substantially larger with a high level of democracy. The interesting and important findings of the analysis indicate that there exists a non-linear relationship between corruption and the level of income as well as democracy. The findings suggest that developed countries have succeeded in controlling corruption through higher levels of economic development along with the economic and political freedoms that their peoples enjoy.

International migration and development have been traditionally treated as separate policy portfolios; however, today the two are increasingly viewed as interlinked. While the development status of a country could determine migration flows, migration can, in turn, contribute positively to national development, including economic, social and cultural progress. Consequently, if migration is not well managed, it can pose development challenges to a country’s development and progress. Therefore, partnership through greater networking between countries of origin and destination is needed to fully utilise the development potential of migration. For Tuvalu, migration has remained a vital ingredient for economic development and more importantly, the welfare of its people. The implementation of New Zealand’s Pacific Access Category (PAC) scheme in 2002 offered for the first time a formal migration opportunity for permanent or long-term migration of Tuvaluans. The PAC scheme allows 75 Tuvaluans per year to apply for permanent residence to work and live in New Zealand, provided they meet the scheme’s conditions. The goal of this research is to investigate, more than five years after PAC’s implementation, the ways in which long-term migration of Tuvaluans, through the PAC scheme, has benefited Tuvalu. To give a broader perspective on the issues explored in this study, the views of Tuvaluan leaders, as significant players in traditional Tuvaluan society, are included, in addition to the perspective of migrants’ families in Tuvalu and the migrants themselves in New Zealand. Combining transnationalist and developmental approaches as a theoretical framework, this thesis explores how Tuvalu’s mobile and immobile populations, through articulation of transnationalism, enhance family welfare, and grassroots and national development. The eight weeks’ fieldwork in Tuvalu and Auckland demonstrated that the physical separation of Tuvaluans from one another through migration does not limit the richness of the interactions and connections between them. In fact, the existence of active networking between island community groups and other Tuvaluan associations in Auckland and in Tuvalu strengthens the Tuvaluan culture both abroad and at home, thus ensuring strong family and community coherence. Maintaining transnational networks and practices is identified as of great significance to grassroots and community-based development in Tuvalu. However, the benefits of long-term migration can only be sustained as long as island loyalty, or loto fenua, and family kinship stays intact across borders, and networking amongst families, communities and church remains active.

International migration and development have been traditionally treated as separate policy portfolios; however, today the two are increasingly viewed as interlinked. While the development status of a country could determine migration flows, migration can, in turn, contribute positively to national development, including economic, social and cultural progress. Consequently, if migration is not well managed, it can pose development challenges to a country’s development and progress. Therefore, partnership through greater networking between countries of origin and destination is needed to fully utilise the development potential of migration. For Tuvalu, migration has remained a vital ingredient for economic development and more importantly, the welfare of its people. The implementation of New Zealand’s Pacific Access Category (PAC) scheme in 2002 offered for the first time a formal migration opportunity for permanent or long-term migration of Tuvaluans. The PAC scheme allows 75 Tuvaluans per year to apply for permanent residence to work and live in New Zealand, provided they meet the scheme’s conditions. The goal of this research is to investigate, more than five years after PAC’s implementation, the ways in which long-term migration of Tuvaluans, through the PAC scheme, has benefited Tuvalu. To give a broader perspective on the issues explored in this study, the views of Tuvaluan leaders, as significant players in traditional Tuvaluan society, are included, in addition to the perspective of migrants’ families in Tuvalu and the migrants themselves in New Zealand. Combining transnationalist and developmental approaches as a theoretical framework, this thesis explores how Tuvalu’s mobile and immobile populations, through articulation of transnationalism, enhance family welfare, and grassroots and national development. The eight weeks’ fieldwork in Tuvalu and Auckland demonstrated that the physical separation of Tuvaluans from one another through migration does not limit the richness of the interactions and connections between them. In fact, the existence of active networking between island community groups and other Tuvaluan associations in Auckland and in Tuvalu strengthens the Tuvaluan culture both abroad and at home, thus ensuring strong family and community coherence. Maintaining transnational networks and practices is identified as of great significance to grassroots and community-based development in Tuvalu. However, the benefits of long-term migration can only be sustained as long as island loyalty, or loto fenua, and family kinship stays intact across borders, and networking amongst families, communities and church remains active.

This thesis explores claims that organic agriculture may be an empowering development strategy by investigating the impacts of conversion to organic farming systems on the lives of small-scale farmers in Cambodia. The thesis interrogates the diverse uses and abuses of the term =empowerment‘ in development rhetoric and argues for an empowerment model that is derived from farmers‘ self-defined concepts of development. This model was used to conduct a qualitative case study involving semistructured interviews and focus groups with members of organics initiatives in seven diverse Cambodian communities. Results indicate that many farmers in all communities felt that their most important objective was not only to achieve food security, but to be able to grow sufficient rice to feed their family. Farmers joined the organics initiatives primarily to improve their health and reduce the cost of farming inputs. As a result of joining the initiatives, all farmers (including both certified and non-certified organic farmers) felt they had improved their health and food security. Most farmers also increased incomes, created stronger family and community ties and felt they had more control over their livelihoods. These benefits were not, however, distributed equally amongst individuals or communities. Very poor and isolated farmers could not generally access benefits. The three main factors that determined the impact of the organics initiatives on farmer empowerment were identified as: the individual‘s level of resources, the strength of the farmer group, and the policies and values of the supporting organisation. The implications for future initiatives are, firstly, the tremendous potential for farmers and wider rural communities to benefit from organic agriculture as a development strategy. However, this study also shows that if organics is to be viable for low-resource people, it may be necessary to promote both resources and techniques in organics initiatives. Also, a focus on building strong relationships both within the farmers group and linkages with local and wider stakeholders may enhance long-term sustainability of organics initiatives.

This thesis explores claims that organic agriculture may be an empowering development strategy by investigating the impacts of conversion to organic farming systems on the lives of small-scale farmers in Cambodia. The thesis interrogates the diverse uses and abuses of the term =empowerment‘ in development rhetoric and argues for an empowerment model that is derived from farmers‘ self-defined concepts of development. This model was used to conduct a qualitative case study involving semistructured interviews and focus groups with members of organics initiatives in seven diverse Cambodian communities. Results indicate that many farmers in all communities felt that their most important objective was not only to achieve food security, but to be able to grow sufficient rice to feed their family. Farmers joined the organics initiatives primarily to improve their health and reduce the cost of farming inputs. As a result of joining the initiatives, all farmers (including both certified and non-certified organic farmers) felt they had improved their health and food security. Most farmers also increased incomes, created stronger family and community ties and felt they had more control over their livelihoods. These benefits were not, however, distributed equally amongst individuals or communities. Very poor and isolated farmers could not generally access benefits. The three main factors that determined the impact of the organics initiatives on farmer empowerment were identified as: the individual‘s level of resources, the strength of the farmer group, and the policies and values of the supporting organisation. The implications for future initiatives are, firstly, the tremendous potential for farmers and wider rural communities to benefit from organic agriculture as a development strategy. However, this study also shows that if organics is to be viable for low-resource people, it may be necessary to promote both resources and techniques in organics initiatives. Also, a focus on building strong relationships both within the farmers group and linkages with local and wider stakeholders may enhance long-term sustainability of organics initiatives.

The mainstream accounts on local growth politics, which generally conceptualize the current context around the globalization of investments and the prominent role of local entrepreneuralism, argue for the tendency towards local coalitions. In opposition, the main argument of the thesis is that an increasingly fragmented and conflictual local growth politics is the defining feature of the contemporary localities. Defining the current context around the increased involvement of the business actors in directing the path of local economic growth and of the local state institutions in entrepreneurial activities, it was shown in Manisa case that intra-local conflicts are likely to deepen under conditions of increased inter-urban competition. By critically employing the concept of local dependence, it was shown that different local dependence factors result in the differentiation of the local actors&rsquo / priorities and preferences with regard to the utilization of local resources. Thus, it is concluded that a common local interest is not possible and that conflicts and contentions (between different-fractions of capital and between local labor and capital) stemming from the existence of different local dependence factors mark the process of local growth politics. As a special dependence factor in terms of local politics, the generation of land-rent was identified to be a potential basis for local collaborations whereas it was also found out that such coalitions are likely to be temporary and open to political contention. On the other hand, the supra-local relations of actors, which are essential for the pursuasion of local interests, are observed to have a determinant effect on local conflicts.

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This exploratory study assessed attitudes and perceptions of smallholder farmers towards agricultural technologies in Kakamega County, Kenya. Through a mixed-methods sequential design, the study evaluated the key variables predicting farmer adoption of agricultural innovations. While social sciences provide a clear human-driven pattern explaining the process of choices and behaviors regarding technology use, there is still little clarity on the influences of adoption decisions among smallholder farmers in rural Kenya. Using the diffusion of innovations theory, the study explored the attitudes and perceptions of smallholder farmers toward technology adoption in seven sub-counties of Kakamega County (Lurambi, Ikolomani, Shinyalu, Mumias East (Shianda), Malava Butere, and Khwisero). The study design utilized a quantitative survey of 245 smallholder heads of households, followed by focus group discussions to further probe attitudes, values and practices that could influence technology adoption. The survey questionnaire tested two hypotheses: (H1) socio-demographic characteristics are related to agricultural technology adoption; and, (H2) farmer access to extension services was related to agricultural technology adoption. A binary logistic regression model was used to quantitatively estimate socio-demographic variables presumed to influence the adoption of agricultural innovations. Subsequently, four informal focus group discussions of 28 discussants was conducted across representative sub-counties (Lurambi, Shianda, Malava and Ikolomani), to elicit an in-depth understanding of farmers’ perspectives on technology adoption. The focus group participants included farmers recruited from among survey participants. The qualitative research instrument sought to answer three questions, (RQ1) what are farmer attitudes and perceptions towards agricultural technologies; (RQ2) what socio-cultural values influence farmers’ choice of agricultural technologies; and, (RQ3) what sources do farmers use for obtaining information on agricultural technology? Quantitative results included a principal component analysis (PCA) in which 14 attitudes questions were reduced to five conceptual clusters. These clusters included: challenges in accessing modern agricultural technologies (explained 19.09% of the total variance); effectiveness of agricultural technologies (11.88%); enjoyment of agricultural technologies (10.02%); social influence in use of technology (9.47%); and experience with agricultural technologies (8.13%). A logistic regression model indicated that independently age (.07), education (.10), and off-farm income (.08) were significantly associated with adoption of technology at the 90% confidence level when controlling for all other variables in the model. However, agricultural extension (.42) was not a significant predictor of agricultural technology adoption in this model. Qualitative results provided rich insights which enhanced findings from the survey data. Key insights in the thematic analysis included: farmers’ ambivalence about agricultural technologies; lack of trust in agricultural agents; low levels of agricultural technology knowledge; extension services as the main source of information dissemination to farmers; predominance of gender in determining agricultural technology adoption; and gender inequity in agricultural decision-making. In conclusion, the study results suggested that a mixed-methods approach was valuable in probing the nuances of farmers’ perceptions of agricultural extension and technology adoption among smallholder farmers. The results supported the following recommendations: the agricultural extension efforts could be more effectively structured in order to support the dissemination of agricultural information; the issue of gender should be adequately addressed by engaging male and female in collaborative agricultural efforts to help break the barrier of gender inequity; and future research would benefit from disaggregating public and private extension services as a more robust method for determining their individual effects in the promotion of agricultural innovations among smallholder farmers.

The return of Māori land to a productive role in the New Economy entails the innovation and diffusion of technologies relevant to the sustainable development of this land. Sustainable development requires substantive changes to current land and resource use to mitigate environmental degradation and contribute to ecological and sociological resilience. Such innovation is emerging in 'New Economic Space' where concerns for cultural resilience have arisen as political-economic strategies of the New Economy converge within a global economic space. New Economic Space comprises policy, technology and institutional innovations that attempt to influence economic activity, thus directly engaging with local 'place-based' expressions of geohistorically unique knowledge and identity. This thesis approaches contemporary Māori development from three perspectives. First, by viewing the changing links between ecosystems and communities as examples of innovation diffusion, the evolution of relevant policies, technologies and institutions can be examined for their impact upon Māori resilience. Second, such innovation diffusion can be described as a form of regional development, acknowledging the integral role of traditional territories in Māori identity and culture as well as the distinct legislative and governance contexts by which this land is developed. Third, by incorporating the geohistorical uniqueness of Māori ideas, values and beliefs, standard concepts of political-economy can be reformulated to show an explicit cultural economy – Māori Traditional Economic Space – in which Māori horticulturalists participate in parallel with the New Economy. Two methods are used in the analysis of the participation by Māori horticulturalists in New Economic Space. Fuzzy set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) allows the rigorous investigation of small-N studies of limited diversity for their partial membership in nominated sets. This thesis uses fs/QCA to organise theoretical and substantive knowledge of each case study to score its membership in agri-food networks, Māori institutions and post-production strategies, allowing the identification of causal configurations that lead to greater resilience for Māori growers and their communities. The second method is Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that incorporates elements of nature and society, showing the extensive and dynamic entwinement that exists between the two. ANT describes the enrolment of diverse 'actants' by a range of eco-social institutions and the subsequent translation of the resulting assemblages into resilience strategies. The results of this research first show a 'System of Provision' (SOP) in which Māori development strategies converge with non-Māori attempts to expand research and marketing programmes. These programmes seek to implement added-value strategies in supplying novel horticultural products within New Economic Space; parallel 'cultural logics' ensure food is supplied to traditional Māori institutions according to the cultural logics of Māori. In addition to this finding, results also show that the participation of Māori growers in New Economic Space can paradoxically lead to an expansion of the Traditional Economic Space of Māori. This expansion is not simply contingent upon configurations of policy, technology, and institutional innovations that originate in New Economic Space but is directed by Māori cultural logics, located in Māori territories but seeking innovations from an amorphous universal 'core'. The interface between the global New Economy and the localities of a Māori cultural economy is defined by the 'interrogation' of these innovations, and innovators, through eco-cultural institutions in their diffusion to and from Māori land, Māori resources and Māori people. Within the boundaries of this interrogation border resides a malleable assemblage of actants, enrolled by Māori as components of resilience strategies, which can lead to the endurance of Māori culture.

Wik, Wik-Way and Kugu people (Wik people) in Aurukun Shire on Cape York Peninsula (CYP) are among the most socio-economically disadvantaged groups in Australia. While Wik people are presently reliant on government work for welfare programs for income, elders have a vision of economic independence and self-reliance. The large area of native Darwin stringybark (Eucalyptus tetrodonta) forest on traditional Wik land is a potential engine for economic development, which could provide meaningful employment, and contribute to other Wik socio-economic objectives, including facilitating population decentralisation and consolidation of cultural obligations to manage country through provision of on country employment, reducing welfare dependency and expenditure on timber purchases from outside CYP, and increasing income and skill levels in the community. A large proportion of the higher-quality timber resource on traditional Wik land is situated on bauxite mining leases and the current practice is to clear, windrow and burn this timber prior to commencement of mining. A Wik native forest timber industry could make use of this wasted high-quality timber resource. The objectives of this thesis were to: determine the property rights of Wik people to the timber resource on their traditional land; assess whether forestry operations in Darwin stringybark forests in the study area are likely to be financially viable; and generate a suite of optimal timber utilisation strategies for Wik people, subject to cultural, ecological and economic constraints. This required economic research in the areas of indigenous property rights, private and social costs and benefits of forestry, timber markets, and evaluation and application of economic analysis techniques for appraisal of forestry development opportunities. A social cost-benefit analysis of the privately optimal timber utilisation policies has also been performed to support the decision-making of government policy-makers. This research project was a demanding and complex undertaking, not least because the research was being performed in a unique and diverse indigenous cultural environment where there is a need to respect cultural and research ethics protocols, where formal participatory research methods are inappropriate and where gatekeepers are particularly zealous about ‘protecting’ Wik people from ‘outsiders’. In addition, the property rights of Wik people to timber resources had never previously been analysed methodically, timber inventory and timber market information was lacking for CYP, and there are difficulties in transferring parameter estimates from the industrial hardwood timber industry of Australia to culturally appropriate indigenous operations on CYP. A critical research step was to develop a rapport with Wik people and gain an insight into their forestry objectives, through a number of visits to Aurukun Shire and informal discussions with elders on country. The property rights of Wik people to timber resources have been assessed by reviewing Federal and State Government legislation, court rulings, regional development policies and the Queensland Code of Practice for Native Forest Timber Production on State-owned lands. A timber inventory was conducted over 580,000 ha of Darwin stringybark forest, individual-tree volume and taper models were developed, and a geographical information system was used in estimation of harvestable timber volume and its spatial distribution. To facilitate information transfer to Wik people, expertise was gained in the use of forest visualisation software to pictorially display timber inventory data. A review of literature and discussions with experts identified technically feasible timber processing opportunities for CYP timbers. An informal telephone and in-person survey of 46 businesses, local councils and government agencies in north and south Queensland and the Northern Territory provided market information about CYP timbers. Concepts of a culturally appropriate working week and culturally appropriate rate of production were developed to assist the estimation of cost structures for a Wik timber industry, based on cost estimates for non-indigenous Australian hardwood forestry enterprises that had been obtained from discussion with forestry experts and ‘grey literature’. Generation and evaluation of a suite of privately optimal timber utilisation strategies for Wik people has been supported by the development of a mixed-integer goal programming (GP) model using the GAMS software package. The social analysis of the privately optimal strategies has been performed by adjusting private net present values (NPV) estimated by the GP model with shadow prices and transfer payments. In particular, a carbon model has been developed to estimate the value of carbon emitted by the Wik timber industry. The GP model analysis suggests that a Wik timber industry can generate a positive financial NPV if seed funding of at least $0.5 M is available. In general, privately optimal forestry strategies for Wik people generated by the GP model utilise relatively low-technology equipment, including portable sawmills and air-drying sheds, and produce undressed timber products such as structural timber. This contrasts strongly with Wik visions of an industry selling mostly unprocessed logs or woodchips and non-indigenous representatives of Wik people favouring the manufacture of high-value strip-flooring and furniture. The social analysis of privately optimal timber utilisation strategies reveals that social NPVs are much higher than financial NPVs, even when accounting for the costs of ecosystem services foregone by logging native forest. The establishment of a culturally appropriate Wik timber industry can be expected to generate net social benefits for Australia.