Since 1978 China has transformed itself from a planned economy to a market economy, which has been accompanied by the shift from state-centric government to the co-existence of hierarchical and multi-nuclei forms of governance. This research argues that there is a gap in the analysis of rural sustainability governance in China in which insufficient attention is given to: (1) how different governance forms, objectives, and goals affect policy implementation to achieve sustainable development; and (2) how the local state re-organises its functions to achieve socio-economic and ecological sustainability during the reform period. To evaluate the effectiveness of the local state to govern for the sustainable development of the bamboo shoot industry, this research integrates insights from ecological modernisation, political ecology, and eco-Marxism. These perspectives allow a more fruitful understanding of the factors that enable and constrain steering approaches, policy design, and implementation in the bamboo shoot industry. This dissertation explores resource allocation and management in the bamboo shoot industry in Lin’an, China. It critically examines how governance operates at the county level, which is a key level of governance for the delivery and practice of sustainable development programmes and policies. Data was collected through fieldwork in two towns, one in the upland and the other in the lowland, which enabled an exploration of networks linked to supply chains and geographical differences including both physical and social settings. Under market reform, the Central State decentralises economic rights and autonomy to the local state in Lin’an County, which has increased the synergy, interdependency, and partnership between the local state and non-state actors in the bamboo shoot production industry. This emerges as a multi-nuclei form of governance structure to manage bamboo shoot resources, maintain the local state’s administrative authority and intervention, and to increase the indirect rule of the local state through new knowledge and technology production.

This thesis describes a new approach tor investigating cairns, stone enclosures, stone alignments and other small archaeological features found in the deserts around the Egyptian Nile valley. Investigation of these features has previously been restricted by their ephemeral nature, damage from modern development and the limited artefactual, epigraphic or archaeological evidence associated with them. This research focuses on a case study of eight cairns and adjacent courts at the Middle Kingdom carnelian mine of Stelae Ridge in the Gebel el-Asr quarries in southern Egypt. While accepting previous interpretations of the cairn-courts as ritual structures created for the worship of local divinities, this research sought a fuller interpretation of the site in its landscape context and a more nuanced understanding of the structures, their chronological development and the decisions which governed their location and layout. This was achieved through systematic visibility analysis of the eight cairn-courts with geographic information system (GIS) software, which provided new data concerning the patterns of visibility associated with the structures. Interpretation of these patterns in the context of the archaeological and textual evidence from the cairn-courts, practical experience of visibility at the site and evidence from the wider cultural context provided a new and more detailed understanding of the site. Stelae Ridge was chosen because cairns upon it made highly visible landmarks, particularly for people travelling south towards the other sites in the Gebel el-Asr gneiss quarrying region. Initially practical, the Stelae Ridge cairns also developed a ritual function, creating tension between the highly visible cairns and the secluded ritual courts, and suggesting that the cairn-building process became ritualised. By the end of the cairn-building period, in the reign of Amenemhat III, new cairns were constructed in less visible positions, suggesting that the ritual aspects of the cairn-courts had largely subsumed their earlier practical function as landmarks. This type of GIS research has never been undertaken on Egyptian archaeological sites and previous interpretations of visibility in Egyptian contexts have been limited. The detailed interpretation of the Stelae Ridge cairn-courts achieved here, shows that the technology and approach applied to this research can make a meaningful contribution to the investigation of other similar non-formal structures, and at Egyptian sites in general. It also reveals that GIS visibility analysis can answer relevant archaeological questions, when employed as a tool for data generation and properly contextualised with other evidence from the site.

Humanitarian aid faces a crisis of legitimacy in many conflicts as a result of a close relationship with Western power, which can result in both its failure and rejection. The rise of institutional humanitarian aid has been a part of the rise of Western power. Humanitarian aid has been used as a tool to advance hegemonic power and as rhetoric to justify intervention. However, power is changing. Western norms and institutions are being contested in an emerging global multi-polarity and diffusion of power, often misconceived as shrinking humanitarian space. Institutional humanitarian aid has been so intertwined with Western power that as the West declines humanitarian organisations are either retreating with the tide or being left exposed. The relationship between humanitarian aid and Western power means humanitarian space is actually a Western space. In the places where aid can be deployed – within the realms of the West's influence - its effectiveness is in question due to its incorporation into longer-term processes of liberal democratic state-building that overlooks the basics of emergency response. This is demonstrated in the findings of this qualitative doctoral thesis. Case-study research took place in South Sudan and Syria. In South Sudan, a breakdown of emergency-response capacity as a result of the incorporation of aid into a state-building agenda is demonstrated. In Syria, the relationship between humanitarian aid and Western power is a key justification for the Syrian government to limit emergency-response access. However, changing global power is challenging the conceptualisation and practice of humanitarian aid. If liberal democracy underpins current approaches to humanitarian aid, in emerging states like Brazil and South Africa – where interviews were conducted – the politics of aid are linked more to counter-hegemony, both from the state and diffused forms of power. Changes in global power may not present solutions to the challenges of humanitarian effectiveness and access, but the ongoing affiliation between humanitarian aid and Western power hampers its ability to negotiate a dynamic landscape. This research demonstrates that institutional humanitarianism must disentangle itself from Western power to remain effective and to access the most vulnerable.

This thesis is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter provides an analysis of intergenerational mobility across countries, across cohorts and over the income distribution. It compares the patterns of intergenerational income mobility between fathers and sons in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. Among other findings, the analysis highlights that mobility is lowest for families at the extremes of the income distribution. Among university graduates, mobility is still lowest at the top. This calls for further research on the drivers of intergenerational mobility. The second chapter investigates why intergenerational earnings mobility is lowest at the top and at the bottom, by exploring the role of social networks. The implications of a simple model are tested on data from the United Kingdom. The inverse U-shaped mobility patterns are explained in two steps. First, a range of findings is consistent with the hypothesis that family friends affect the offspring’s educational and occupational choices. Second, the friend’s job is correlated to the parent’s job, in different ways at different income levels. Specifically, the richest and the poorest parents tend to have friends that are more similar to them than median parents. The third chapter examines the effects of job polarization on individuals and households by assessing the roles of occupational mobility, changes in occupational wage premia, mating patterns across occupations and female labour supply. The paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to examine the UK over 1991-2008. The findings suggest that most of the factors listed above have important roles. The period is characterised by pronounced movements in occupational premia and important roles for occupational mobility and assortative matching.

This thesis studies three channels through which elections and, ultimately, public policy may be interrelated: new media, electoral systems and vote motivation. The media has the fundamental role of providing political information to voters. New media such as the Internet brought about an enormous shift in the availability of political information during elections. Exploiting the timing and geographic variation in the introduction of Internet in Brazil, in the first chapter, I show that municipalities with higher Internet penetration voted more often in candidates who faced legal restrictions for advertising in traditional media. Electoral systems, in turn, have specific features that, in theory, may allow voters to select better politicians by providing more information about candidates and other voters' preferences. In the second chapter, using the discontinuous allocation of single- and dual-ballot electoral rules across mayoral elections in Brazil, I compare the quality of politicians fielded and elected in these systems. In general, dual-ballot candidates from major parties are more politically experienced. This experience may be translated into unobserved political skills that are required to deal with the more competitive electoral process, that, by itself, punishes female candidates, to the extent to which women's participation in politics has been historically low. No differences in performance are observed, except in the attraction of discretionary resources by dual-ballot mayors eligible for reelection, but only in election years. Finally, in the third chapter, I use a quasi-naturally generated group of voters with differential political information and voting motivations to show that politicians extract more rents in municipalities where they know a number of voters is not directly interested in public goods and do not have readily access to local sources of information.

This study is an attempt to consider the role of translation competence of medical experts who are self-translating medical research abstracts from English into Kurdish. To do so, it investigates a corpus of research abstracts terminologically, syntactically and textually in order to identify and establish the translation competence of the medical experts. The study adopts the descriptive approach to translation for the purpose of its investigation within the frame of which it employs Toury’s methodology in order to analyse 65 originally written abstracts and 65 translated Kurdish abstracts. The aim of the study is to identify the translation competence of medical experts who perform English-Kurdish specialised medical translation. It also aims to identify any potential recurrent translational behaviour that occurs in Kurdish specialised medical translation. Moreover, the study aims to provide an insight into the status of Kurdish specialised language through examining the translated abstracts. The results of the data analysis reveal that medical experts have successfully demonstrated the translation of their research abstracts as far as terminology and conceptual knowledge are concerned. However, their translations show recurrent cases of linguistic and textual markedness which can be attributed to a lack of linguistic and textual competence. The results also revealed that Kurdish specialised medical language is not under-developed as the study hypothesised but it has a rich stock of specialised terminology as well as naturalised terms that the medical experts have largely used in their self-translated abstracts. Based on the outcomes of the study, it is concluded that medical experts require linguistic and textual competence as much as subject competence. In addition, consistent and appropriate proofreading can have a profound impact on specialised medical translation in reducing the incidence of syntactic and textual calques as well as common typographical errors before publication.

For many, the English criminal justice system is considered to be among the best in the world. An important feature of the system’s success is thought to be the jury trial whereby in the most serious of cases, use of ordinary citizens to determine guilt is thought to make for fairer verdict outcomes. Yet despite being a more democratic process, questionable verdicts and low conviction rates for crimes such as rape have led many to question how impartial lay jurors are likely to be and to what extent preconceived biases may in fact be influencing verdict decisions. The overarching aim of the current thesis was thereby to examine the relationship between personal characteristics and juror decisions. Specifically, the role of psychopathic personality traits, rape attitudes, and juror demographics upon individual decision formation were examined. Another aim was to develop and validate a self-report measure of individual juror decision making, directly integrating theoretical features of the dominant model of jury decision making into an empirically testable scale. Tested separately between two independent samples within Experiment one, an opportunity sample of 324 university students comprised within 27 separate jury panels observed a videotaped mock rape trial before making individual and collective decisions. Within Experiment two, a systematic randomly selected sample of 100 community participants comprised within nine separate jury panels observed a live rape trial re-enactment before making individual and collective decisions. All participants completed demographic, attitudinal, and psychological self-report measures before the onset of the trial including; the Psychopathic Personality Trait Scale (PPTS), Acceptance of Modern Myths about Sexual Aggression (AMMSA), and the Juror Decision Scale (JDS). Results displayed evidence of a discernible relationship between juror’s psycho-social make-up and the verdict decisions made during trial. Latent profile analyses revealed psychopathic personality traits were significantly associated with verdict preferences in the community sample and regression analyses displayed elevated rape attitude scores were consistent predictors of Not Guilty verdict decisions across both samples, pre and post-deliberation. Confirmatory factorial techniques displayed a bifactor model with three meaningful factors while controlling for the general factor was the best representation of the JDS data, with the three subscales evidencing differential predictive validity with external variables. Finally, path analyses revealed the structure of the relationship between all variables and verdict decisions, providing further evidence for the role of juror characteristics. These findings strongly support the assertion that within rape trials, juror decisions are directly related with the attitudes and psychological constructs jurors bring to trial. Evidence that a juror’s psycho-social make-up affects their interpretation of the evidence and ultimately predisposes them towards particular verdict decisions, gives rise to the possibility of needing to screen biased individuals out the jury trial process in the future. Whether change occurs or not to such historical English jury procedures, what can no longer be simply dismissed, is the role of individual juror bias upon trial outcomes within rape.

The thesis, comprising three chapters in empirical international finance and growth, with a focus on SubSaharan Africa, examines the growth impact of foreign direct investment in the first chapter, the existence of a transfer problem and the effects of financial liberalisation on real exchange rate in the second chapter, and whether monetary fundamentals explain nominal exchange rate movements in SSA in ways consistent with the monetary model of exchange rate in the third chapter. The contribution of the thesis to knowledge is mainly empirical - it consists of using a broad range of existing econometric models to comprehensively test some important but hitherto untested hypotheses and specific theories in international economics within the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, and to obtain findings that improve our understanding of the behaviour of relevant economic variables in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Police legitimacy is fundamental to the relationship between the state, citizens and their police, and this is nowhere more challenging than in public order policing contexts. Procedural Justice (PJ) and the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) have gained dominance in UK policing as the means of establishing greater perceptions of police legitimacy and public compliance and cooperation with the police and the law. Much of the theorising and empirical research in this field has been conducted with regard to police reform, complaint handling, crime reduction and sporting event policing. However, there are limitations to both PJ and the ESIM approaches within public order contexts. PJ and the ESIM assume that violence and disorder stem from a failure of policing to create perceptions of police legitimacy. However, this is problematic for the policing of protest and public order for three interrelated reasons. Firstly, there are occasions when violence occurs despite the police use of PJ and ESIM approaches. Secondly, ignoring or underplaying this detail serves to demoralise the police and undermines their trust in using PJ and the ESIM. Thirdly, an insistence on police use of PJ and ESIM as the exclusively legitimate means of dealing with violence and disorder, ignores different approaches to police legitimacy that are not found within the PJ or ESIM literature. The findings presented in the thesis suggest that PJ and the ESIM do not necessarily work in protest contexts, because protesters’ self-policing, a key claim of the ESIM, does not necessarily equate to compliance with the law and authority. Personal values and moral legitimacy are important aspects of protest contexts that feature less prominently than required within the PJ and ESIM research. The thesis argues that police legitimacy, defined empirically, needs to be understood with regard to the policing context. It is in this respect that the thesis claims an original contribution by identifying and explaining contextually based influences associated with the construction and shaping of protester perceptions of police legitimacy and their attitudes to compliance and cooperation. The thesis uses a mixed method approach to examine the claim of PJ and the ESIM that fair and respectful treatment garners increased perceptions of police legitimacy and creates compliance and cooperation with the law and the police. The empirical research comprises an exploratory quantitative survey (n=40), qualitative interviews (n=79) and non-participant observations at thirteen protest events in London between 2010 and 2015. The findings establish that while the general claims of PJ hold and that social identity forms part of perceived police legitimacy, protesters’ perceptions need to be understood contextually. A contextually driven model of police legitimacy (CDM) developed from empirical data is presented, it suggests that additional influences other than fair and respectful policing play a determining role in constructing and shaping protester perceptions of police legitimacy and their attitudes to compliance and cooperation. The theoretical implications are considered and professional practice recommendations for the policing of protest are presented.

Objectives To develop an alcohol intervention model that predicts life years (LYs), quality adjusted life years (QALYs), and healthcare costs classified by the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) screening tool and other various risk factors related to alcohol consumption. Furthermore, the developed model was transferred to the Thai setting. Methods Eight Scottish Health Surveys from 1995-2012 were linked to Scottish morbidity records and death records for the period 1981 to the end of 2013. Parametric survival analysis was used to estimate the hazard risks of first alcohol-related and non-alcohol related hospitalisations and deaths. For men and women, multivariate data analyses were applied separately for each gender in modelling the utility score, risks of subsequent hospitalisation and annual healthcare costs within the follow-up period. Risk profiles were used for the covariates of the models as follows: age, socio-economic status, health condition, alcohol drinking (i.e. AUDIT and binge drinking), smoking, body mass index, and physical activity. According to the under-reporting bias of alcohol consumption among the survey population, this study adjusted the reported alcohol consumption using alcohol sales data. Multiple imputation approach was applied to deal with missing data. A health-state transition model with annual cycle length was developed to predict LYs, QALYs, lifetime costs, and cost-effectiveness. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis was also performed to deal with parameter uncertainty. Moreover, a methodological transferability protocol of the Thai study was detailed. Results The sample size of the cohort was 46,230. The developed model showed the association between drinking and alcohol-related and non-alcohol related hospitalisations and deaths which were calculated as LYs and QALYs. Other risk factors were also taken into account that would likely affect the outcomes of interest. The modelling showed that an increasing AUDIT score and the number of cigarettes per day were associated with an increased risk of first alcohol-attributable hospitalisation. Predicted outcomes for a male aged 30 year with high-risk drinking levels (AUDIT >7) were worse than males with low risk drinking (AUDIT ≤7), with approximately 5 LY gained and 7 QALY gained. The same results for females were obtained for high-risk drinking (AUDIT >4) compared to low-risk drinking (AUDIT ≤4), with approximately 10 LY gained and 12 QALY gained. Furthermore, an economic evaluation was performed to compare the no-intervention situation with a hypothetical health promotion intervention - which aimed to stop drinking (measured by the AUDIT) and smoking (measured by the number of cigarettes per day) behaviours. To compare the costs and benefits of the hypothetical intervention and no intervention over the lifetime period, a within-trial analysis combined with the developed model was able to capture both short- and longer-term consequences (i.e. LYs, QALYs, and healthcare costs) of the intervention. Finally, the model was able to compare cost-effectiveness ratio between risk behaviours without the new intervention and the modified risk behaviours when the new intervention is implemented. Conclusions The study highlights the potential and importance of developing health economic models utilising data from routine national health surveys linked to national hospitalisation and death records. The developed framework can be used for further economic evaluation of alcohol interventions and other health behaviour change interventions. The framework can further be transferred to other country settings.