Research has shown that criminal justice policy in Western democratic societies has become increasingly punitive (e.g. Wilson and Petersilia 2010), and that the public largely supports these policies, despite the fact that crime rates have been declining (e.g. Roberts 2003). However, few studies have attempted to explain this paradox in the context of neoliberalism, and within a Canadian context. Using the 2011 and 1997 Canadian Election Study, this project employs logistical regression and a comparative analysis to examine the extent to which neoliberal governance has produced prejudicial attitudes towards racialized “Others,” social and economic insecurity, and attitudes that individualize causes of poverty, and the extent to which these factors predict support for punitive treatment of violent young offenders. The results of this study show that the advent of neoliberalism has precipitated racialized “othering” towards Aboriginal people, which has increased punitive attitudes, but that insecurity and individualization, in relations to punitive attitudes, was present previous to 1997. / October 2015

Agriculture remains one of the most contentious issues in the ongoing negotiations of the World Trade Organization, with serious implications for food security and the livelihood of farmers in the developing world. This dissertation examines the formation of agricultural trade policy and the politics and arguments surrounding it within the context of India’s position in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The research has two components. A set of archival documents relating to India’s participation in a WTO institution called the Trade Policy Review (TPR) was analyzed. In addition, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a number of Indian experts and officials involved in agricultural trade policy. This project suggests a number of tentative conclusions with implications for political geography and particularly for the literature on policy transfer, neoliberalism, and Neo-Gramscian models of international relations. First, it finds that the WTO Secretariat plays a key role in promoting neoliberal ideas within the TPR institution and that the forms of argumentation used here can help to explain the resiliency of neoliberalism in the face of policy failure. Second, it shows that the Indian government has not accepted neoliberal policy models wholesale, but has exercised autonomy, selectivity, and adaptation in its liberalization programs. Third, it demonstrates that neoliberal ideas do not always favor the positions of developed countries. Finally, it supports the narrative of increasing developing country bargaining in the WTO and shows that the Indian representatives bolster their arguments by articulating them as being in the interest of the developing world in general.

Ricardo Aldape Guerra was an undocumented Mexican migrant who was wrongfully convicted and given a death sentence for the murder of a white Houston police officer in 1982. In the absence of any physical evidence that implicated Aldape Guerra for the crime, Harris County prosecutors appealed to extreme anti-Mexican immigrant hostility in Houston by repeatedly emphasizing Aldape Guerra’s undocumented immigration status to the jury in order to construct him as a dangerous “illegal alien” deserving of severe punishment. This thesis situates Aldape Guerra’s encounter with the Texas legal system within related histories of social, cultural, economic, political, and legal phenomena in the United States in order to obtain a more complete understanding and to excavate critical lessons about the overall treatment of undocumented Mexican migrants in the U.S. legal system. It argues that the isolation of law from histories of racialization of Mexican migrants renders the U.S. legal system inadequate to protect undocumented Mexican migrants against racial discrimination, even in the court of law. It also argues that the U.S. legal system also cannot account for the material effects of transnational neoliberal capitalism on the cross-border movement of Mexican labor forces. This failure cultivates flawed legal reasoning in immigration jurisprudence that equates “illegality” with danger and criminality. / text

This study analyzes the multiscalar interactions of the emerging carbon market and the social, environmental, and economic implications it may hold for small-scale landholders in the tropical rainforest. Based on a change detection analysis from a case study in Costa Rica, this report argues that 1) the scalar mismatch between national carbon trading markets and small scale agroforestry sequestration efforts is driven by insignificant land holdings; 2) secondly, the scalar mismatch limits the small scale landholders’ access to the carbon market; and 3) that in order to link global and local approaches to climate change we need to understand the local economic contexts within which these global markets are interacting. / text

Background: A great deal of research on charter schools has examined the neoliberal origins of charter schools, the academic performance of charter school students, charter school governance, and the balance between autonomy and accountability. However, there is a lack of research that has investigated the formal processes by which the accountability side of the equation is carried out, particularly in the area of charter renewal. No study has yet analyzed the weight given to factors used by charter authorizers in making high-stakes accountability decisions, and to whether modifying variables related to the population served impact the outcomes of these decisions. Also, while some studies have looked at charter school operations through the lens of institutional theory, no study has yet looked at changes made by charter operators in the face of high-stakes authorizer scrutiny, and whether those changes may impact the outcomes of the decisions. Purpose: To examine the factors explicitly considered by the board of the largest charter authorizer in the U.S., and determine whether the outcomes have been consistent with the established criteria, whether the outcomes show evidence of being affected by the nature of the population served by the charter school, and to look for evidence that changes suggested by institutional theory have an predictive value in understanding the outcomes of high-stakes authorizer decisions. Setting: Charters in Arizona authorized and considered for renewal by the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools (ASBCS, the Board) during the period from June 2010 to November 2012. Participants: 117 Arizona charters granted by the ASBCS which were considered by for renewal during the study period. Research Design: Quantitative study. Data Collection and Analysis: Data were collected from the public records provided to the Board during the period of operation leading up to renewal, and provided to the Board during the renewal consideration. Analysis was conducted using multinomial logistic regression analysis with the IBM SPSS 22 statistical software package. Findings: Academic performance over the years immediately preceding the renewal consideration and the number of compliance actions taken over that same period significantly predicted whether the outcome of the renewal decision would be renewal without conditions, renewal with conditions, or denial. Several factors which had been suggested by the literature as having predictive value, including improvement in academic performance and financial viability, did not prove to have significant predictive value. Certain factors related to the population served by the charter, including socioeconomic status, grades served, and size of the school population, had predictive value in ways that generally supported the literature. Mimetic isomorphic changes as identified in this study did not prove to have significant predictive value regarding the outcome of the renewal decision. Findings regarding consistently low performing schools and the overturning of denial decisions on appeal lead to questions regarding the market efficacy assumptions made by neoliberal charter proponents. Conclusions: This study reinforces the importance of charter authorizers having clear, measureable criteria for high-stakes decisions, and for charter operators to understand those criteria and how they affect the operations of the schools.

This dissertation explores the transformation of American financial organization and governance over the postwar period. Through a case study of Citigroup, it seeks to explain how and why the global financial services supermarket became the dominant form of business organization in American finance and society. My core claim is that generational change in the late 1950s and 1960s swept into power a group of Interwar generation elites bearing with them a concept for the large financial firm and a vision of market order whose roots traced back to the Gilded Age. The timing and pattern of organizational and institutional change was, however, contingent on battles won and lost over particular features of their institutional environment.

This dissertation configures winter disasters in Mongolia as a context for examining the "politics of responsibility" in a post-socialist nation. Winter disasters in Mongolia, called zud, are complex events in which unfavorable environmental, climatic, and weather conditions—such as sparse pasture, deep snow, ice, and extreme cold—combine to produce high winter livestock mortality, thus threatening rural livelihoods. Observed and projected climate change raises concerns that zud will increase in frequency and severity. Moreover, social and economic transitions in Mongolia since the end of Socialism have left herders highly exposed to shocks. A zud in the winter of 2009-2010 was especially alarming, being the biggest disaster since 1944, killing almost one quarter of Mongolia's livestock. This event was a testament not only to the destructive power of combined meteorological and environmental factors, but also to persistent vulnerability in rural Mongolia. Focusing on the politics of responsibility surrounding disasters such as zud, this dissertation examines popular discourses of herders as "lazy" and "irresponsible." These discourses arise from "neoliberal" ideologies in post-socialist Mongolia, and from certain values and institutions tied to Mongolia's socialist past. Some foreigners and urban Mongolians speculate that Socialism made herders dependent on state assistance, and now they just need to learn how to take care of themselves. Such assumptions have real impacts, as they influence development program design and policy. Socialism has indeed influenced the ways that Mongolians perceive risk and allocate responsibility in the face of zud. However, the effect has not been to make herders "lazy" and apathetic in the face of increasing risk, but rather the opposite. Socialism fostered strong values concerning work ethic, discipline, and agency. The research incorporated participant observation with herders at a site in the Gobi Desert and comparative research across five sites in Mongolia to record herders' complex strategies for managing risk. Interviews and archival research were used to examine Mongolians' changing attitudes toward risk.

The Chilean Water Code of 1981 has been presented as a successful case of free-market water reforms. In the northern Atacama Desert, the Atacameño people have developed their indigeneity in the context of the forceful implementation of this radical free market system. This situation invites an examination of the connections between the Chilean state's free-market restructuring of water governance and the process through which indigenous groups claim their identity through water politics. This dissertation addresses the following questions: (Q1) Why and how have the Atacameño people claimed indigeneity within the context of the pro-market water reforms? (Q2) How have Atacameño identity and the water reforms been conceived, articulated, and reproduced in relation to each other? This question is broken down into sub-questions: (Q2a) How do pro-market water reforms and related conflicts inspire indigeneity and water practices among the Atacameños? and (Q2b) How do the articulation of indigeneity and water practices among the Atacameños, in turn, reshape the pro-market water reforms? During fieldwork it became clear that the water market was not as active as I expected and that Atacameños are not selling water rights, but buying them, leading to a third question: (Q3) Why are the Atacameños not selling their water rights to mining companies and urban water supply, despite the extremely high purchasing power of the former, and why have indigenous communities recently become the main buyers of water rights? In answering these questions, this dissertation explores how water management is not just about the management of the management of H20, but is also related to the production of new subjectivities. In the case of the Chilean Water Code of 1981, rather than being a threat to a certain genuine or fixed Atacameño tradition, community, or identity, it is seen as a key catalyst that has allowed a group of people to publically articulate a legitimate indigenous positionality upon particular historical sediments and political economic conditions. Here the Atacameños appear to be articulating their history with contemporary issues, knowledge, and multiple practices in relation to specific current claims about the control of water resources. This fact has questions the water reforms in terms that they were reshaped by the process of identity formation. Indeed, the Atacameños successfully mobilized their identity to partially reject the privatization process, thereby subverting the neoclassical expectations that, within a free market, water should flow toward its highest economic value uses. Finally, this dissertation shows how the Chilean model, rather than being a free market approach to water management that supposes the withdrawal of the state, relies heavily on the state's centralized actions. As such, this dissertation (1) questions the existence of a truly free water market for the allocation of water rights in the Atacameño area (2) highlights the role of the state as the main central and hierarchical source of water allocation for both mining and urban supply companies, and (3) argues that the implementation of the Water Code is another chapter in the history of the state's the internal colonialism of the Atacama Desert.

In the late 1980s and through the mid-1990s, Mexico underwent an enormous neoliberal transformation that affected almost every level of its economic, political, and social systems. Research has shown that rural and poor areas of Mexico have been particularly hard hit by these transformations. At the same point in time, Mexico established an unprecedented number of natural protected areas - national parks, biosphere reserves, wildlife reserves, and the like. Mexico is not alone in this transformation. Other "less industrialized" countries are also implementing these dual policies.While many working in the field of conservation in less industrialized regions assume little connection between their work in natural protected areas and the larger political economy, I argue that the two are interrelated and have compounding outcomes. The goal of this study is to understand the connection between these two seemingly incongruous policies. In addition, this study seeks to understand the process through which natural protected areas were territorialized and the outcomes of this territorialization process on landscapes and livelihoods within the larger context of Mexico's neoliberal reformation.To understand these questions, I look at Mexico as a case study at the national level as well as two more local case studies - the Loreto Bay National Park (LBNP) in Baja California Sur and Cuatro Ciénegas Wildlife Reserve (CCWR) in Coahuila, Mexico. Both areas support the neoliberal agenda, although in different ways. In addition, both are being reterritorialized so that nature is separated from society and treated as a marketable commodity through tourism or privatization. In addition, both have created uneven or patchy regional landscapes in which resources are more heavily extracted outside of reserves (due largely to neoliberal reforms) while inside the reserves small-scale production activities are limited.

This project outlines the existence of neoliberal multiculturalism and identifies the implications and limitations of its practice. Neoliberal multiculturalism involves the institutionalization of group autonomy by the state to download responsibility to jurisdictions that have historically lacked sufficient fiscal capacity and have been hampered by colonialism in the development of the political capacity necessary to fully meet the requirements entailed by the devolution. At the same time, this practice releases the formerly responsible jurisdiction from the political burden of the policy area(s) despite its continued influence and effect. As demonstrated by my analysis of the Indigenous child welfare devolution that has occurred recently in Manitoba, neoliberal multiculturalism therefore involves a certain kind of “privatization”—that is, it involves the appearance of state distance from said policy area. This practice problematizes the traceability of power and decision making while at the same time it co-opts and in many ways neutralizes demands from critics of the state by giving the appearance of state concession to these demands. In response to the dangers of neoliberal multiculturalism, I situate multiculturalism in a robustly political model of democratic multi-nationalism (characterized by both agonism and deliberation) in order to combat multiculturalism’s tendency simply to rationalize “privatization” and to enhance democratic accountability. My approach goes beyond dominant constructions of group autonomy through group rights by emphasizing that autonomy is a relational political practice rather than a resource distributed by a benevolent state. Building on my analysis of Indigenous autonomy and the unique challenges that it presents for traditional democratic practices, I outline a contextually sensitive, case-specific employment of what I term “democratic multi-nationalism”. This approach conceives of Indigenous issues as inherently political in nature, as opposed to culturally defined and constituted, and therefore better meets the challenges of the colonial legacy and context of deep difference in which Indigenous-state relations take place today.