This study seeks to investigate how Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been implemented on a local level in Burkina Faso, by focusing on 1) how the local context has been considered in the top-down implementation, and 2) what role formal and informal institutions play in the Local Water Committees (CLEs). Burkina Faso is facing issues of water scarcity, and in times of climate change management of water resources has become a topic of great concern. In 1992, the general principles of IWRM were presented at the Dublin conference. Since then, IWRM has been implemented in many countries across the world, and in West Africa, Burkina Faso has been a pioneering country when it comes to the implementation. Previous research on institutional reforms in development has shown that blueprint solutions tend to fail on adaptation to the local context. Furthermore, both formal and informal institutions need to be acknowledged in institutional analyses. In order to answer the research focus in this thesis, a field study has been conducted in Burkina Faso. It is a comparative case study of two Local Water Committees within one Water Agency, where semi-structured informant interviews and an ethnographic approach have been used as methods. It is shown that the implementation, to some extent, has failed to consider the local context. However, the findings indicate that the local context in itself is an ambiguous concept that is highly complex due to history, culture and recent political changes in Burkina Faso. Informal institutions are shown to have some impact on the possibilities to work, however, future research is needed to establish this further.

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The Rights of Nature is an emerging concept within sustainable development, it states that the current environmental laws are not enough to protect nature from human harm. The movement emphasize the need to acknowledge other living entities in our law systems, regardless of their use or benefit for humans. It requires a paradigm shift in the way that modern societies relate to nature, moving from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric age. The first and only nation that has enacted the Rights of Nature in its constitution is Ecuador in 2008. On a global scale this is an historic event challenging the human norm of acting superior to nature. Due to the magnitude of this event, this inductive study investigates the causal mechanisms of the process leading up to this change. The paper proposes a chain of historic events all interlinked to the indigenous values of the Andes, Sumak Kawsay. Throughout the research, the findings created a hypothesis arguing that the Rights of Nature in the Ecuadorian constitution was a collective effort of indigenous movements and political agendas by influential scholars.

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In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti 2010 a second disaster hit the small Caribbean country. This time in the shape of a cholera epidemic, imported by Nepalese UN soldiers. The disease outbreak culminated in a previously unpresented lawsuit against the United Nations in which their principle of absolute immunity was questioned. This study highlights the complex causal paths that preceded the legal dispute, by investigating three hypotheses on why the controversy with the UN got out of hand and could not be resolved through other means. The findings imply that the framing of the Haitian state as fragile and corrupt led to a shift in the perception of responsibilities. As the government was rendered incapable, international organizations were expected to provide health and well-being to the Haitian people. This however proved to be an expectation they could not live up to. The case of Haiti illustrates a good example of the difficulties in the delivery of large-scale humanitarian aid and how this can undermine existing institutions if implemented unwisely.

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This thesis is a comparative case study of the Suffragette movement and the Gulabi Gang, two women’s movements using violence as a political strategy to fight patriarchal structures. Studying vigilante women’s movements is important as the current literature on the relationship between women and violence is deficient, focusing on women as victims of violence but neglecting the idea of women as contributors to violence. This study therefore aims to challenge the idea of female pacifism and to acknowledge women as rational, and sometimes violent, actors. This will be done by comparing the Suffragette movement and the Gulabi Gang, two most-different cases of vigilante women’s movements, with the purpose to find the motivations behind their strategic choice of violence. The study is of an explorative kind, aiming to contribute to the existing theories of vigilantism with why some women’s groups have felt compelled to step outside of traditional stereotypes and norms attributed to women to achieve their goals. The result shows that the existing theories explaining the motivations to vigilante actions coincide with the Suffragettes and the Gulabi Gang. They are however also proven to not adequately explain why some women’s movements use violence. This study therefore contributes, to the existing theories, with the conclusion that women’s movements use violence, generally seen as a masculine strategy, to shock and surprise the people and the decision-makers. The use of violence, in other words, creates a disturbance in the societal structures as a result of women generally being unexpected to use such strategies. It furthermore creates opportunities for the groups to increase the attention devoted to them in ways that would not have been possible if the groups would use more feminine strategies.

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