Thesis. 1976. Ph.D. cn--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 446-449. / Ph.D.cn

This study contributes to the literature on the academic profession's intellectual freedom. Drawing significantly on two methodological approaches, comparative case study and grounded theory, this dissertation examines three controversies in which government officials challenged academic scientists' federally sponsored research, which had implications for national environmental policies. To structure this examination, I used a two- part framework. For the first part, I investigated the evolving interpretations of events and actors' interests, which revealed the tactics and pressures employed by government officials when challenging the academic scientists' federally sponsored research. For the second part, I used Freidson's theory of professional dominance to help us understand how and in what ways institutionalized arrangements within society supported the academic profession's autonomy and authority over its work. This analysis identified the means by which the academic scientists in my three cases exerted some degree of control over scientific decisions regarding the research assumptions, methods, and analyses of their findings. The study's key findings are presented in the form of five research claims: First, the government challengers may try - sometimes successfully - to exercise their influence over indirect participants in the federally funded research in an attempt to control the dissemination of the federally sponsored research findings. Second, the government challengers, though not scientists themselves, relied heavily on their own judgment to declare publicly the kinds of activities that can and cannot count as legitimate scientific research, rather than relying on the traditional scientific peer-review process. Third, academic scientists may involve members of the public in the dispute. When that happens, the public may help decide whether government officials or academic scientists are better equipped to address the scientific matters associated with the federal policy. Fourth, academic scientists' political allies can support academic scientists' efforts to defend their research within the policymakers' setting. Fifth, academic scientists may assert academic conventions (e.g., peer review) as the standard (or possibly as the preferred) practice through which to evaluate science, even when government challengers question the validity of those conventions. Placed in context of the extant literature, these claims, taken together, suggest that the government officials tried to take actions that exceed their professional competence, specifically as boundary breakers who attempted to infiltrate the jurisdictional responsibilities of the academic scientists. In addition, despite the government officials' attempts to engage in professional boundary-crossing activities, the academic scientists asserted institutionalized practices and standards of the profession (e.g., peer review and open dialogue) and drew on the assistance of external actors (i.e., members of the public and political allies) as countervailing forces to exert control over their research.

In 1995, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established as an interim Palestinian government on shreds of land within the West Bank and Gaza. One of the new authority’s lesser-known administrative mandates is protection of the environment from pollution. Though the PA was to have a semblance of “self-rule,” the Oslo Accords that established the PA also stipulated that the latter seek Israeli approval when building most large-scale infrastructures—including those designed to manage waste. Meanwhile, emergent ideas about the environment defined it as a limitless expanse. The environment projected out from PA enclaves on thirty percent of the land in all directions—including into the air above and into the subterrain below. The Accords projected environmental responsibility into Israel proper as well as into areas it “shares” with Palestinians in the occupied territories. As a consequence, Palestinian waste infrastructures are objects of concern not only to the Palestinian communities they are designed to serve but also to the Israeli state, to Israeli settlements, to regional neighbors and to foreign donors in far-flung offices who are concerned with “environmental security.” This dissertation investigates a series of multimillion dollar PA projects aimed at protecting what came to be called the “shared” environment through management of Palestinian wastes. In doing so it analyzes the tension between the insistence, on the one hand, that the PA govern “its” population within strictly defined borders as part of a hierarchical system of nested sovereignties in which Israel’s is the superior form, and the imperative, on the other hand, that this territorially-defined, officially interim government perform care for the territory’s longterm ecological future. It tends to be taken for granted that Oslo produced a period of separation by enclosing the West Bank and Gaza and cleaving them off from Israel proper. Millions of West Bank Palestinians are no longer permitted to work in, travel through or even visit Jerusalem or Israel. Israel has prohibited Israeli citizens’ entry into PA areas of the West Bank. This allows PA areas to appear relatively autonomous—insofar as they are viewed as separate from Israel. But in a number of significant ways, Israel continues to control and to direct the daily experiences and future possibilities of West Bank Palestinians. Separation and control are thus equally accurate characterizations of Palestinians’ experiences post-Oslo. This dissertation contends that their particular combination in the post-Oslo period has allowed people living in the West Bank to experience PA governance as what, borrowing a term I heard there, I call a phantom state (shibih dowlah). Palestinians see the limits of PA autonomy vis-a-vis Israel and the PA’s many donors. The PA is specter-like: an appearance without stable material follow-through. People nevertheless treat the PA as a matter-of-fact, tangible part of their lives: as an address for appeal, requests and complaints, as a distinct entity upon which responsibility, blame and, very occasionally, even praise is bestowed. Studies of garbage at the turn of the twenty-first century show that modern waste has the capacity to destabilize and to undermine political systems because of the risks it is perceived to pose and because of the difficulty of keeping it stable and contained. Unlike water, oil and electricity, waste is an infrastructural substrate whose flows should move out from inhabited areas rather than into them. As mobile, abject matter that perpetually threatens the environment, it requires constant monitoring. It is managed at regional scales. In the Palestinian context, waste therefore reveals some of the spatial-geographical complexities that render the treatment of separation and control as an either/or dynamic impossible to sustain. It also reveals the ways in which believing both separation and control to be true for the people experiencing them in combination means living, working and planning within a logic of constant contradiction. Waste is not the only infrastructural substrate that reveals the Mobius strip of separation and connectedness of the post-Oslo period. But waste and its infrastructures are uniquely useful for showing the impossibility and the partialness of a politics of separation more broadly in an emergent era of environmental securitization. This dissertation thus analyzes an incommensurable tension in what Achille Mbembe has called a “late-modern colonial occupation” that operates in the style of older forms of indirect colonial rule. That tension renders governance of people and territory both difficult and incoherent. It produces environmental hazards while seeking to eliminate them. And it performs major political displacements among colonized and colonizers alike.

A renovação da outorga que permite reverter as águas das bacias dos rios Piracicaba, Capivari e Jundiaí (PCJ) para abastecer a Região Metropolitana de São Paulo através do Sistema Cantareira constituiu um importante momento de decisão sobre a gestão dos recursos hídricos. Diante disso e do processo de descentralização na gestão das águas, possibilitando a ação de diversos atores, com a instituição do Sistema Integrado de Gerenciamento de Recursos Hídricos em São Paulo (SIGRH), existe a necessidade de conciliação de interesses, de cooperação entre os atores e de negociação de conflitos. Este trabalho pretendeu analisar como a existência de um histórico de cooperação entre os membros dos Comitês das Bacias PCJ contribuiu para o fortalecimento da sua capacidade de negociação no processo de renovação da outorga do Sistema Cantareira. Para tanto, a pesquisa contou com a aplicação de um questionário fechado junto aos membros dos Comitês PCJ, que permitiu observar a existência de cooperação entre eles e de outros elementos que constituem o conceito de capital social. Percebeu-se que os Comitês PCJ possuem uma estrutura de organização que possibilita um desempenho satisfatório na tomada de decisões, na mobilização de recursos, na facilidade de comunicação e na solução de conflitos. Verificou-se que entre os seus membros existem relações consistentes de cooperação, confiança, solidariedade e reciprocidade, através das quais foram construídos arranjos institucionais nesses Comitês para resolver problemas relacionados à gestão dos recursos hídricos, como foi o caso da renovação da outorga do Sistema Cantareira. Com a nova outorga, a operação do Sistema passou a ser descentralizada e transparente. Todo esse processo contribuiu para que o capital social existente entre os atores envolvidos na gestão das águas se desenvolvesse e fortalecesse os seus laços. Também contribuiu para o amadurecimento técnico e político dos Comitês PCJ, para sua capacidade de negociar o recurso comum e para a institucionalização do SIGRH na busca pela gestão compartilhada das águas. / The renovation of the water permit that makes possible the reversion of water from the Piracicaba, Capivari and Jundiaí (PCJ) river basin to supply the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Region, through Cantareira System, consisted of an important decision making moment on the water management. With regard to that and to the decentralization process on water management, that enables the participation of several actors with the Integrated Water Management (IWM) in Sao Paulo, the conciliation of interests, cooperation among actors and conflict negotiation have become necessary. This research aimed to analyze how the existence of cooperation among the members of the PCJ River basin Committee contributed to strengthen their negotiation capacity during the process of renovation of the Cantareira System water permit. A questionnaire, applied to the members, enabled the observation of cooperation and other elements that constitute the concept of social capital among them. It was possible to observe that the PCJ Committee has an organization structure that enables a satisfactory performance on the decision making process, resource mobilization, communication and conflict resolution. It was also observed that among them there are consistent cooperation, trust, solidarity and reciprocity relations, through which institutional arrangements were built to solve problems related to the water management. With the new water permit, the System operation has become more decentralized and transparent. All the process contributed to develop and strengthen the existent social capital and ties among the actors. It also contributed to the technical and political maturity of PCJ Committee, to its capacity of negotiating the common resource and to the institutionalization of IWM in the search for an integrated water management.

This thesis explores the governmentalities of ecotourism in South Korea in relation to the specific historical-political experience of accelerated modernisation, focussing on three selected analytical themes of nature, time, and space. It develops a theoretical framework that combines Foucauldian governmentality analysis with concepts and insights related to nature, time and space developed in more-than-human and relational geographies and cognate social sciences. Drawing on three cases of tidal flat tourism, countryside walking, and whale tourism, it first examines the assemblages and technologies of ecotourism governance. It argues that ecotourism in South Korea is characterised by a decentralised mode of governance involving an array of political actors. This mode relies less on sovereign power and more on disciplinary and biopolitical techniques. Second, it examines the ways in which political technologies relating to nature, time, and space are engaged in the governmentalities of South Korean ecotourism. The analysis centres on: understandings of nature enacted through the discourse of saengmyeong [life] and therapeutic experiences; a discourse of slowness enacted through a paradoxical temporal organisation of accelerated slowness; and the multiple spatial relations entangled in the geographical-historical connections of South Korean modernisation. Together, these political technologies are deployed to create an ecotourism subject who cares about the self and the environment, which differs from the prevalent South Korean positions of the disciplined worker and the practical user of nature. This thesis argues that ecotourism in South Korea serves as a new biopolitical intervention to conduct the conduct of its human participants in ways that differ from those established through accelerated modernisation. By offering one of the first social science accounts of ecotourism in South Korea, it provides novel concepts and practices for the analysis of ecotourism. These differ from the mainstream approaches that deploy a political economy framework and focus largely on examples drawn from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

No description available.

Climate variability and climate change have become important research topics also in economics. The objective of this thesis is not to forecast the future but to learn from the past by studying how two important climate change-related topics have affected Indonesian households. Delayed monsoon onset, El Niño, will become more frequent with climate change whereas palm oil production is a contributor to climate change. The first essay examines how variability in monsoon onset affects rural households' welfare in terms of household expenditure and farm profits. Using the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) data I find that households in the middle tercile of the expenditure distribution face the biggest albeit temporary losses from delayed monsoon onset. Half of the expenditure decline is due to increase in household size. Conditional on onset, rainfall intensity has only minor effects. The second essay uses the IFLS data to study how schooling and child labour are affected by delayed monsoon onset. The probability of continuing from primary to secondary school is reduced when a delayed onset coincides with the transition year. In other respects, monsoon onset does not affect education of rural children. However, riskier distribution of rain postpones school entry for young children. Moreover, delayed onset increases child labour. Using district-level data on palm oil production and area planted and national household survey (SUSENAS) the third essay studies the impact of oil palm expansion on household expenditure and health. Instrumental variable estimates exploit the historical production and district forest area as an exogenous source of variation. I find that smallholder production has a weak negative impact on household expenditure but this effect is not present among rural households. More, total production increases incidence of asthma in Kalimantan. The findings suggest that palm oil is not a panacea to increase rural welfare.

This thesis presents a critical reflection on what is meant by a 'Green Revolution' within the current, narrow 'productivity-technology fix' paradigm. It shows the current focus on productivity is creating a limited view of technology as the principal means to address food insecurity in Africa, as opposed to a more comprehensive view that takes into account economic, social and political factors. The research combines a socio-technical systems approach with an actor-oriented analysis to examine two input-support programmes in Kenya. It focuses on input-support programmes due to the current interest in subsidies as the mechanism to address food insecurity and deliver agricultural technologies to smallholder farmers. It examines the political, social and institutional factors that influence the creation, design and implementation of these programmes. A multi-level approach (global, national and local) is used to map out the key narratives and actor networks operating in and across the different levels to highlight the dynamic interactions as they come together through these programmes. The thesis demonstrates how intermediary factors (institutions, policy and social networks) significantly affect programme outcomes. The two case studies show that policy and practice often diverge through changing actors, networks and funding flows. Each programme implementation is mediated through socially differentiated beneficiaries, creating interactions that unfold in numerous ways due to distinct social, political and economic factors, as well as to unique institutional and delivery mechanisms. The evidence suggests that technology-based programmes that fail to take account of these critical factors will encounter difficulties in uptake. Therefore, policymakers must consider context-specific approaches that appreciate the diversity of local conditions and the importance of socio-economic, institutional and political factors. The underlying message is that the impact of agricultural technologies on the practices and perceptions of smallholder farmers cannot be understood in isolation; end users constantly adapt technologies through complex social interpretations, local institutions and political processes.

While it is clear that urban food systems need to be made resilient so that broader sustainability goals can be maintained over time, it has been a matter of debate as to how resilience should be conceptualised when applied to social-ecological systems. Through a case study of peri-urban Wuhan, this research develops and applies a resilience based conceptual framework for periurban food systems analysis in order to explore the potential for an enhanced understanding of resilience that can contribute to promoting sustainability in urban food systems. The evidence of this thesis suggests that the current approach to governance of Wuhan's periurban vegetable system is building an increasingly exclusionary pattern of resilience. It is a form of resilience building which is likely to undermine broader normative sustainability goals around social justice and environmental integrity and have mixed future implications for food system resilience as a whole, particularly in relation to livelihood outcomes for peri-urban farmers and food safety outcomes for urban consumers in general. The key lessons from this research are that the concept of resilience can be used to support either a narrowing down or an opening up of normative framings of system outcomes and can contribute to obscuring or revealing the multiple processes of change unfolding across the levels of system context, structures and actors. These dualities in the way that resilience thinking can contribute to normative and analytical framings need to be explicitly acknowledged if serious unintended consequences of resilience building interventions are to be avoided. Six important principles for conceptualising resilience in urban food systems are suggested: to 1) disaggregate system outcomes, 2) differentiate function and structure, 3) analyse positive and negative resilience, 4) identify external and structural shocks and stresses, 5) analyse resilience in relation to multiple and multi-scale processes of change and 6) recognise the impacts of those processes on marginalised system actors. Finally, a heuristic framework is presented for guiding the design of resilience analyses of human dominated social-ecological systems.

Thesis. 1979. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 116-126. / M.C.P.