This thesis examines the bureaucratic controls designed to restrict the entry of migrants perceived to be ‘mentally ill’ into New Zealand and Australia in the period between the 1830s and 1920s. It is the first study to analyse the evolution of these practices in this region and timeframe. It addresses a gap in the current literature because it explores the tensions that emerged when officials tried to implement government policy. This study sheds new light on the actions, motivations and ideologies of the British and Australasian officials who were responsible for managing and policing immigration. While there were attempts to coordinate the work of border officials, this proved very difficult to achieve in practice: some immigration controllers were, for instance, receptive to the theories that were coming out of international debates about border control, others retained a parochial perspective. The thesis argues that every attempt to systematise border management failed. The regulation of the broad spectrum of ‘mental illness’ was a messy affair: officials struggled with ill-defined terminology and a lack of practical instructions so tensions and misunderstandings existed across local, national and metropolitan levels. Based on extensive research in British, New Zealand and Australian archives, this study reveals the barriers that were created to prevent those deemed ‘mentally ill’ from migrating to regions imagined as ‘Greater Britain’. It shows how judgements about an individual’s state of mind were made in a number of locales: in Britain; on the voyage itself; and at the Australasian borders. This thesis, by exploring the disordered nature of immigration control, will add a new perspective to the existing scholarship on transnational immigration legislation and Australasian asylum studies. The in-depth examination of border control systems also contributes to our understanding of the links between migration and illness in the British world during this period.

Mutual Support is an in depth exploration of the role and impact of peer support by people with learning difficulties. Built on one of the seven aims of Centres for Independent Living, the project has constructed a model of peer support based on accounts of direct experiences from people with learning difficulties. The overall aim of the research was to construct and critique the Mutual Support model of peer support and people with learning difficulties. This thesis reflects the process of that construction. The overall aim was met through a research situation in which knowledge was constructed in the interaction between the researcher and participants. This provided an opportunity for people with learning difficulties to reflect upon their relationships with one another, and the emancipatory potential of that support. The focus of the research was two pre-existing settings involving people with learning difficulties supporting one another: a Theatre Company using Forum Drama to facilitate changes in attitudes and policy, and a course facilitated by people with learning difficulties who mentored small groups. Methods used within the research were based on an Inclusive Research process which prioritises meaningful research interaction that is accessible and guided by participants. The research process intertwined meetings with advisory groups, and contact with other local groups of people with learning difficulties, with formal data collection within the two main settings. One to one experienced-based narrative interviews with people from the two main settings provided multiple opportunities for participants to speak about their experiences of peer support. These interviews formed the data used in formal analysis, which was a continual process, with subsequent interviews being based on views previously expressed. A further comprehensive descriptive content analysis of data, using the tools of Nvivo8 and mind-mapping, took place prior to the outputs of the whole project being evaluated during group sessions with those who had taken part. The emerging model is one of collective support which challenges assumptions about the role and impact of people with learning difficulties supporting one another and their capacity to engage in insightful interpersonal interaction. Mutual Support has the potential to break down barriers to inclusion. Mutual Support also demonstrates the value that people with learning difficulties place on giving and receiving support from one another. The outputs of Mutual Support include contribution to current debate in the areas of service user involvement, inclusive research, and the academic field of Disability Studies.

This research is located in the aftermath of Argentina’s economic collapse in December 2001. In broad terms, it questions how subaltern or marginalised populations contest disadvantage in an environment of economic meltdown. Following the economic crash, unprecedented levels of unemployment, poverty and social marginalisation generated a variety of organic ‘survival’ responses. These initiatives took various forms and adopted differing approaches, including confrontational activity of piquetero organisations, whilst more institutional or structured actions of co-operative projects formed from workplace recovery. A further response was cartoneo, the practice of gathering and selling recyclable waste. Working as a cartonero, or waste gatherer was generally adopted as a last resort strategy by desperately poor, marginalised individuals from predominantly informal and semi-formal settlements in peripheral areas of the Greater Buenos Aires Province (GBA) and other urban areas nationally. Possibly taking their lead from the broader trends in co-operative organisation, numbers of waste gatherers, or cartoneros, banded together to form co-operatives. The subject of this thesis is one such project, the Tren Blanco co-operative, established in Villa Independencia, an impoverished shanty town in José León Suárez, San Martín department, GBA. The topic was selected on the basis of the opportunity it afforded to present a subaltern study and bottom–up account of the event from the perspective of the protagonists. Appropriate to this aim, the focal aspect of the study was obtained by a qualitative oral approach of informal and semi-structured interviews combined with ethnographic observation conducted between July and August 2007. Secondary resource materials, including academic literature and other media sources, were used to provide a contextualisation of the event within both the broader context of Argentina’s socio-economic history and the more specific context of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century history. Literature on the subject of social responses to Argentina’s economic crisis is limited. Research into the specific phenomenon of cartonero co-operatives is even sparser. As such, this study contributes to the body of Argentine socio-economic history in both the broad and more specific sense. This work is valuable in that it provides an alternative reading to traditionally top-down recording common to some historiographical traditions and accounts. However, the core value of this research is that it provides an original contribution to knowledge by considering the meaning and human relevance of work and co-operative organisation in a marginal community in the chronological and geographical context of early twenty-first-century Argentina.

This research aims to investigate current volunteer use in public libraries in England. Volunteer use is not a new phenomenon, and has been an integral part of public library provision for many years. However recent Government policies, together with greater financial austerity, have resulted in a change in public service delivery. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of volunteers involved within the public library service, and the growth of community run libraries, resulting in much public and professional concern. An interpretivist research approach was used to investigate stakeholder opinions regarding volunteer use, and involved a two phase process. Initially a Delphi survey explored attitudes of 15 English public library service managers, followed by in-depth investigation of two case study library authorities, located in the North-East of England. Surveys, interviews and focus groups, helped to build a rich picture of volunteer use amongst the groups of stakeholders. Findings clearly indicated that volunteer use has moved from additionality to replacement of staff, and is increasingly being used by local authorities as a solution to budget reductions required as a result of economic austerity. A hybrid approach to library service provision has developed, using a combination of paid staff and volunteers, which indicates a fundamental culture shift within public libraries. Research results identified concerns relating to the long term viability of a hybrid approach, and how this impacted on the wider community in terms of service provision. Key concerns were raised concerning advocacy, sensitivity, the fragility of relationships, and the provision of an accountable and high quality service. Formal and informal control mechanisms need to be employed by library service managers to ensure that they reap the benefits of volunteer use, thereby avoiding social exclusion, clarifying stakeholder boundaries, and delivering a high quality accountable service. Training library managers in new volunteer management skills, and adopting a volunteer relationship management approach may help to ensure that this new arrangement is mutually beneficial for all concerned.

As with other forms of green crime, timber trafficking is frequently overlooked by traditional criminology. This research is an exploratory investigation into the problem of timber trafficking in Vietnam, which aims to obtain a detailed understanding of the typology of, victimisation from, and key factors driving this crime. To achieve this aim, 41 semi-structured interviews with seven different cohorts (environmental police, investigative police, forest protection officers, commune authorities, forest-based inhabitants, timber traders, and green NGO staff) were conducted. Over one hundred pages of official documents (criminal case records, operational reports, and conference papers), and more than two hundred relevant newspapers were collected and analysed to enhance and triangulate the primary data. This research reveals a multifaceted typology of timber trafficking in Vietnam, comprising five different components: harvesting, transporting, trading, supporting, and processing. Each of these components is further constituted by distinctive, parallel forms of illicit operation. There are, for example, three parallel forms of illegal timber harvesting, termed small-scale, medium-scale and large-scale (SSITH, MSITH and LSITH). While having certain overlaps, in general SSITH, MSITH and LSITH are fundamentally distinctive not only in terms of the volumes of illicit timber they produce and the methods of illegally felling trees they employ, as typically identified in the previous studies, but more importantly in terms of the harvesters‘ attributes, their motivations, and the sophistication and security implications of the criminal operations. It is thus argued that the typology of illegal timber harvesting in this research challenges the typical classification in the existing literature, and offers an alternative way of understanding more comprehensively the dynamic of illegal logging. Regarding the victimisation from timber trafficking, due to the employment of a broad conceptual framework of human security, it is revealed that timber trafficking has substantial harmful impacts on all seven elements of human security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political. These impacts are closely interconnected, but vary between different groups of victims. These findings culminate in the proposal that there are three main typical characteristics of green victimisation: suffering hierarchy, victim-offender overlap, and multidimensionality. Additionally, the employment of a human security paradigm in this research leads to another proposal that it is highly achievable and productive to integrate perspectives from the field of security studies into the discipline of green criminology, for the purpose of systematically examining green victimisation. Finally, this research offers five solutions to control timber trafficking in the context of Vietnam, by refining the current policy framework of forest governance and improving the efficiency of law enforcement.

The post-conflict nature of the Kosovo society and economy led to an urgent need to address educational policy, specifically to raise the quality of the reconstituted formal schooling system. To address this priority major foreign aid and government subsidies were targeted at both the demand (students) and supply (school) side. One of the major contributors, the World Bank, aimed to improve the supply side by allocating development grants to schools in order to improve student performance. In this thesis the following four research questions are addressed: how appropriate are current evaluation strategies of education policy initiatives in developing countries, what has been the impact of school development grants on student dropout, attendance and student attainment, what are determinants of pupil dropout, attendance and attainment and what are the implications of the answers to the above questions for the reform of education policies in developing economies and the evaluation of policy initiatives. This is the first study that critically reviews previous attempts at evaluating educational initiatives in Kosovo and then employs econometric methods to measure the impact of school development grants on educational outcomes. A quasi experimental approach is utilised and comparisons made between schools with treatment and schools without treatment. A similar study for Cambodia serves as a reference for our research, though we have extensively refined the approach taken in that study. The empirical evidence presented in this thesis suggests at best only a marginal positive impact of these policy initiatives on educational outcomes. More specifically there is some evidence of reduced dropout but no effect is found on student attendance and attainment. These findings are consistent with the results of recent reviews of the literature on this type of policy initiative. This study seeks to act as an example of best practice which can be followed in future evaluations of policy initiatives in countries like Kosovo. It draws important conclusions about the need at the policy design stage to formulate appropriate evaluation strategy and to address related issues about data quality, collection and analysis.