Ochotonids (pikas) are an ancient group of mammals originating in the Oligocene of Asia and flourishing in the Miocene of the Old World. During the Pliocene they reduced both their diversity and abundance, Only the Pleistocene genus Ochotona survived to the present. Their current geographic diversity is concentrated in Asia, where 28 species exist today. Outside of Asia, ochotonids are represented by one living species in Europe and two living species in North America. There were likely three main immigrations to North America since the Miocene: (1) at the beginning of the Miocene represented by the appearance of Oreolagus; (2) at the Miocene- Pliocene boundary represented by the appearance of Ochotona spanglei; and (3) during the Early Pleistocene with the appearance of Ochotona whartoni, and small pikas close to the "Ochotona pusilla group". Extant, endemic North American species appear in the Pleistocene.

This thesis is conducted on the premise that the existing legal, policy and governance frameworks are insufficient to protect biodiversity from the alarming loss it is facing now. It argues that these frameworks are crafted to conform to the dominant paradigm of anthropocentrism; a paradigm which believes that humans are the pinnacle of creation and everything on Earth, including the Earth itself destined to satisfy only the interests of humanity without having their own purpose. By showing how anthropocentric worldview conceived, developed and spread, and how this worldview managed to influence societal collective consciousness to govern the relationship established between humans and the nonhuman nature, the thesis argues that loss of biodiversity not a problem in itself. Rather it is a symptom of the underlying problem rooted in human thinking, guided by anthropocentric worldview. Anthropocentrism has become a powerful paradigm that succeeded in permeating into dominant religions, knowledge base and legal systems of countries of the world, including Ethiopia. The thesis contends that law, as mirror of dominant paradigms and perceptions, reflects the values of these paradigms, at international as well as national levels putting protection of biodiversity within the interpretations of these paradigms. It argues that the human treatment of the natural environment is on a scale of violence which puts the survival of humans and that of the environment at a precarious condition. Based on evidence from the review of evolutionary science and the Holy Scriptures, the thesis argues that humans are deeply connected to and dependent on the Earth systems and are responsible to maintain these systems which are functioning in a holistic manner to support all life on Earth. Promoting the proposition of Thomas Berry that the Earth is a community of subjects not a collection of objects, it contends that biodiversity has intrinsic value in addition to instrumental value, deserving ethical extension. Drawing on these concepts, the thesis suggests, by adopting a reformist approach, a shift from the reductionist notion of anthropocentrism to ecocentrism via the new philosophy called Earth jurisprudence. Earth jurisprudence is believed to correct and heal the conflicting relationship that humans established with the nonhuman nature, with the view to reconciling the present legal, policy and governance systems which have been dominated by anthropocentric perspectives. Through the vehicle of Earth jurisprudence, it is hoped that humans assume a stewardship responsibility for the mutual benefits of humans and nonhuman nature. The thesis finally deals with a case study conducted in Sheka zone in the Southwest Ethiopia. The case study is done with the purpose of exploring the TEG systems of indigenous/local communities which are believed to conform to the tenets of the Earth jurisprudence, the philosophy of law which is chosen by this work to guide the protection of biodiversity. The case study came out with findings that the Sheka TEG systems are good examples of customary practices that provide better protection for biodiversity. Exemplary lessons can be drawn from the Sheka TEG systems to amend the dominant legal, policy and governance regimes.

Ethiopia has experimented with land law reforms linked to agriculture-led national development strategies that Emperor Haile Sellassie I, Derg, and EPRDF introduced since Emperor Menelik II enacted modern Ethiopia’s first reform intended for development in 1908. Nonetheless, the country’s smallholder productivity averaged 1.0 ton/hectare and its poverty ranked 174th in the UNDP Human Development Index in 2011. This thesis examines whether and how land law reform can be used to help raise smallholder productivity and tackle poverty in Ethiopia notwithstanding the challenges of legal pluralism. By drawing upon evidence from law and development research and experience and analysing it in the Ethiopian context, the thesis argues that reform can help raise smallholder productivity, but only by recognising legal pluralism and changing the land tenure system’s formal state or non-formal customary land policies, laws, and institutions which constrain the provision and implementation of productivity-raising smallholder land rights that enhance tenure security, facilitate the transfer of rights over land, and authorise the collateralisation of land rights; and tackle poverty by thereby increasing food supplies, raising incomes, and improving health, education, and other necessities for the country’s predominantly rural population. Specifically, the thesis explores the possibility of using reform to adopt a hybrid state-private-customary land policy that combines the advantages of state land ownership policy that the government enforces, private ownership that critics favour, and non-formal arrangements that society uses. It then highlights how within the framework of this hybrid policy reform may help issue land laws boosting the provision of land rights that enhance tenure security by specifying definition of state, private, and communal landholdings, certification of lifelong usufructuary landholding, stricter eviction and confiscation procedures, and clearer expropriation and compensation mechanisms; that facilitate transfer by easing lease, donation, and succession restrictions; and that authorise collateralisation conditionally. Finally, it demonstrates how reform may help establish land institutions that improve implementation by incorporating non-formal arrangements, establishing a federal executive institution, clarifying the mandates of regional institutions, and assigning the judiciary greater dispute resolution role.

The thesis examines the nature and mechanisms of land alienation in the context of Ethiopia's history of land relations and the role of national and global actors. In consideration of these themes, the study has adopted a contextual analysis of law and policy. Data from fieldwork has informed the core themes. It has also involved a combination of doctrinal legal research and documentary policy research augmented by quantitative data. The research considers issues of land alienation in the situation where the main relevant perspectives argue for the abolition of the people's ownership of land approach embodied in the country's 1995 Constitution and its replacement by private ownership of land (privatization perspective) or for its modification to allow alienation of land use rights (revisionist perspective) or for its change into village ownership of land with a possibility of market transfer of land use rights (associative ownership perspective). In addition to their promotion of one or another form of land alienation, the above three perspectives focus on consideration of ways to break the bureaucratic power of the State over land. This study contends that a focus on these issues has prevented the perspectives from fully identifying and thus explaining features of the ongoing land alienation in Ethiopia including the position of international institutions. This thesis therefore claims that there is an underlying shift towards marketable property in land in favor of actors who are assumed to be 'better land improvers. This is happening in a dual context of significant land poverty and economic growth.' Land alienation is being manifested in rural land expropriation laws, administrative and judicial endorsement of kontract, absence of recognition of communal lands and transfer by the State of the communal rural lands to large-scale farmers through the deployment of discourses such as 'empty land' and the 'tragedy of the commons.' This gravitation clashes with the people's ownership of land approach that provides for agricultural land for peasants and pastoralists, security of their landholdings and a ban on land alienation. The tilt has resulted in another tension between federal and regional governments where the Centre claims that efficiency demands that it handle land transfers to developers whereas the regions assert their constitutional power over land. Similarly, global institutions are involved in a contradiction because they prescribe land rights to the poor as a strategy to reduce poverty in Ethiopia and at the same time they encourage large-scale land grants in accordance with `principles of responsible agricultural investment.' The thesis proposes an affirmation of the constitutional principles concerning land with a proper form of constitutionality.

The thesis is about a contextual and prospective analysis of the Ethiopian variant of plea bargaining focusing on the major components of legal culture, legal structure and principles of criminal law and procedure. To this end, it makes use of a thorough analysis of policy and reform documents, laws, as well as comparative literature, interviews and questionnaires. The thesis argues that the Ethiopian variant of plea bargaining is less desirable and feasible. It hardly fits into the Ethiopian legal system for it is constrained by inherent due process concerns in an exacerbated fashion as well as structural/institutional and cultural limitations. Here three subarguments emerge: First, plea bargaining which inherently relates less to evidence and circumvents fundamental principles of criminal law and procedure, aimed at ensuring the integrity of the process, is likely to yield , inter alia, inaccurate outcomes- the innocence problem. With a less developed legal structure (weak defence in particular) and weak legal culture/rule of law, the problem would be exceptionally formidable in Ethiopia. Second, huge structural and functional limitations of legal institutions- the police, the prosecution, the judiciary, and the defence/legal aid, mean plea bargaining would not fare well. Third, plea bargaining tends to be incompatible with the prevailing legal culture. In America and Western Europe, it is often characterized by problems of fairness and outcome inaccuracy. On the face of weak legal culture/rule of law, it remains to be more so in Ethiopia. While plea bargaining may solve problems of delay and enhance efficiency in many jurisdictions, it is not a universal prescription, though. With jurisdictions like Ethiopia whose legal institutions and legal culture are less developed; whose trial appears to be simple, inexpensive, less utilized and correlates very loosely as an underlying cause of delay, plea bargaining is less likely to offer the desired efficiency gains even at all costs. Conversely, it would be more of a liability than an asset at least in three senses: it is likely to yield inaccurate outcomes- wrongful convictions in an aggravated fashion; put defendant`s rights at greater risk, and leave a room for abuses and corruptions.

In documented incidents alone, between January 2006 and December 2009, 900 people were killed in 534 incidents of group conflict in Turkana. On the basis of this apparent lawlessness, the central research question queries whether the apparent inability of the state law and its institutions to manage group conflicts in Turkana districts denotes a crisis of application or a crisis of substance. Is the problem merely the extension of structures of state law such as courts, prosecutors, security agents, prisons and advocates to Turkana or does the crisis speak to a more fundamental challenge. The research argues the latter, that the relationship between state law and group conflicts in Turkana demands an interrogation of the conceptual and institutional dimensions of modern state law. The thesis interrogates how state law is incorporated; an apparatus of power through which certain regulative rationalities come to reframe the terrain upon which people in Turkana live and define their lives. In order to move state law in a radically improving direction, the research argues for a reorientation of rationalities and legality. The reorientation is advanced through two corresponding techniques that allude to the structural and perspectival elements of state law. Fashioned from amongst the unfinished representations of modernity and the initial task of conceiving a (post)colonial tension between regulation and emancipation, the first task involves building on those progressive aspects of state law that enhance its political legitimacy. The second requires the adoption of a transgressive mode of thinking described as 'knowledge-as-emancipation'. On the basis of these two prescriptions, state law can develop a more purposeful and emancipatory purpose within the conflict context of Turkana in particular, and Kenya in general.

This thesis undertakes an analysis of the law pertaining to the regulation of telecommunications in Nigeria generally and more specifically with regards to the extension of access to telecommunications services to unserved and underserved persons and areas in Nigeria. The study is situated in the context of privatisation and liberalisation reform of the Nigerian telecommunications sector. It addresses the question of how to extend access to telecommunications services in Nigeria to unserved and underserved persons and areas. This question is researched by focusing on the sector regulator the Nigerian Communications Commission and analysing the mechanisms, ranging from licensing to interconnection to universal service provision and the National Rural Telecommunication Programme, that have been deployed in the past to achieve this objective to ascertain how these may be improved to ensure that as many persons and areas as possible have access to telecommunications services. The issue of securing the accountability of the regulator responsible for the deployment of these access extension mechanisms is also addressed. The research identifies the main international influences on the development of the Nigerian regulatory framework and shows the country’s ability to borrow from a number of sources while adapting and refining the borrowed rules to solve Nigerian problems. The thesis makes a contribution to knowledge in at least three material ways. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first work on the legal framework for the regulation of telecommunications in Nigeria after the enactment of the Communications Act 2003. Secondly, it is also the first work that I am aware of which analyses issues of access to telecommunications services using a variety of regulatory mechanism as opposed to focusing on universal access and universal service alone. Finally it presents a positive illustration of a successful outcome of globalisation of rules, specifically the transposition or transplantation of specific legal rules in the economic context of a developing African country.

As a new emerging industrializing nation, industrial pollution is a challenge in Ethiopia. To address the problem, the government has introduced different laws, policies, strategies and established environmental organizations at federal and regional levels. However, the government has not performed well in this regard due to various barriers militating against sustainable industrial pollution control and management. Partly this is due to organizational weaknesses, lack of effective implementation of standards as well as the absence of expertise and capacity building. The aim of this research is to investigate the practice of industrial pollution control and management in Ethiopia with particular emphasis on two selected industries. For the practical investigation a methodology that combines semi-structured interview from key informants in industrial pollution, together with documentary and observational data has been employed. The findings of the research show that the magnitude of industrial pollution is rapidly increasing in the country. This is particularly the case in the textile and leather industries. It is also more severe in urban centers where most of the industries are located. The problem is most operating industries in Ethiopia do not have waste treatment plants. They simply discharge their untreated effluent to the nearby rivers or drainage facilities in violation of the established standards. Even for those industries with treatment plants (including the two case study industries) the treatment plants are not functioning properly due to cost implications; and they discharge their effluent to the nearby rivers with nominal treatment. Thus, they are sources of damage to the environment and the nearby communities. The main barrier to industrial pollution control has been the application of weak form of sustainable development policy and lack of institutional regulations—including laws and organizational implementing mechanisms. This is manifested through lack of political will on the part of the government to enforce the existing industrial pollution control laws; lack of capacity (resource and personnel) and coordination among the environmental organizations. On the part of the affected community there is lack of awareness and organization to protect their constitutionally enshrined right—the right to clean and healthy environment. Similarly there is also lack of corporate social responsibility on the side of the two industries subject of the study.

The emergence of mobile money and other new forms of payment has changed the sovereign foundations of money. Starting as a DFID funded project in Kenya, mobile money has now spread to many countries including Malaŵi. This thesis looks at the regulatory issues that mobile money poses, and the risks that this alternative form of payment poses to the financial system. The thesis argues that the traditional regulatory architecture of supervising the financial services is ill-suited to supervise mobile money. There are essentially two models of mobile money: telco-led and bank-led. The first is an innovation by telecommunication operators and utilises the small messaging service. There is no requirement to own a bank account. The bank-led model is linked to a bank account. The regulatory approaches to these two models are different. Unlike the telco-led, the bank-led model is under prudential regulation. This has manifested itself in the way the services have developed. The telco-led model had thrived while the bank-led model has fizzled indicating that for mobile money, less regulation may be an enabler. Mobile money is now considered a key developmental tool to achieve financial inclusion among the poor, rural based, unbanked, and underbanked. As opposed to traditional additive forms of financial inclusion, mobile money, especially the telco-led, is transformative. It employs a different approach where the consumer does not have to have a bank account or even travel to a bank to access financial services. In Malaŵi, the financial regulatory framework largely embodies the command and control model. Mobile money, however has largely been regulated using light-touch, with regulation following innovation. This thesis proposes an approach based on the concept of really responsive regulation. This approach, is best suited to embrace mobile money as it passes through the different phases of its evolution.

Food safety problems set an enormous challenge to China’s sustainable economic development. The Milk Scandal of 2008 brought public attention to the poor regulation and ineffective administration of the food industry. This highlighted the fact that food safety is relevant to the public health and the brand ‘Made in China’ in international trading. It also shows how food safety law and better environmental protection has arisen out of a crisis. The milk scandal brought an influx of foreign products into China and opened up the Chinese market to international influence and food standards that would not have been possible before the crisis began. Sustaining China’s environmental future is a work-in-progress with uncertain outcomes but there is an admission that without solving the food safety problem, China cannot achieve its sustainable economic development. This thesis examines China’s current food safety legislation in the aftermath of the milk scandal of 2008. The thesis raises the question of how China deals with its food safety crisis and regulates its food industry to cope with its sustainable economic development. It also considers how best for the Chinese and the rest of the world may be able to learn from the Chinese experience. In the aftermath of the Chinese food crisis, China found itself subject to imports from abroad. This had a two-fold effect. It brought international regulatory practices into Chinese life; the second effect was to awaken China to the demands of international trade and the need to conform to best practice. It also showed how China had to meet expectations that were informed by international experience, which China sadly lacked. A deeper analysis is that China was exposed to the dilemma of profit driven organisations failing to appreciate the role of regulation and the safety of ordinary people. The scandal exposed many institutional and organisational shortcomings while the lessons were clear for anyone who looked. Placing profits over the preservation of social order and stability resulted in short-term gains with few long term benefits. This research provides a comprehensive analysis and offers a perspective of the Chinese food safety problem from the legal, social and economic context of the problem. The causes of the food safety problem in China are complex. The food safety problem is not only caused by the defect of the food safety legislation itself. Other factors, such as environmental challenges and the irresponsible business activities, all contribute to the ineffectiveness of the food safety regulatory system. The thesis starts with the Milk Scandal of 2008 to examine the current food safety regulatory system in China. It addresses the main systemic problem, which leads to the weak implementation and ineffective administrations, and it also finds out that apart from the systemic defects, the environmental problem and the failure of the private sector all have an impact on the food safety regulatory system. Furthermore, the thesis also explores the new innovations in the 2014 Environmental Protection Law, which may potentially contribute to the food safety law in the future. The private sector has also been examined. The fact is found that Chinese companies are operated in an irresponsible way, which causes the consecutive food scandals in China. The role of corporate social responsibility is also considered to guide the business activities in practice. The interests of the stakeholders, such as consumers, need to be addressed in the decision-making. The final conclusion is China still has a long way to go to achieve its sustainable economic development. The legislation system needs to be completed and unified. The effectiveness of the administration needs to be improved and independent judiciary needs to be built up. Besides the systemic problem, the improvement of the environment and the responsible business operation also contribute to re-shaping an effective food safety regulatory system. The innovation in the Environmental Law of 2014 can also be introduced to the food safety system. The citizen-driven approach can be used as an important supplement to China’s traditional state-centred approach, to overcome the systemic weakness in the implementation of the food safety law. Many disasters in the world are discussed in terms of the experiences countries may gain from bad events. Bhopal and Chernobyl are two examples. The Chinese Milk Scandal stands in a line of disasters such as BSE in Britain that have re-oriented the regulatory map. Stakeholders and citizens have much to gain from learning the lessons of the milk scandal.