There are currently 962 geographic sites in the world that have been classified as World Heritage. World Heritage is a unique concept, privy to and defined by UNESCO-- the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization, one of the specialized agencies and autonomous organizations established within the UN-United Nations system. World Heritage is governed by an international treaty called the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, adopted by UNESCO in 1972 (The `Convention'). The inscription of a World Heritage Site or designation of World Heritage Status is highly coveted and considered in UNESCO parlance to be of "Outstanding Value to Humanity." There are only 4 heritage property sites of English-speaking islands in the Caribbean basin, one of which is located on the island of St. Lucia called The Pitons Management Area (PMA). The PMA comprises 2902 hectares of protected marine and terrestrial property inscribed in 2004. In 2008, the island faced the threat of placement on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger (LWHD) for breaches of the Convention. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the perceptions of World Heritage Status from three identified stakeholders: UNESCO, the St. Lucian national government and the local Soufrière township-home of the PMA. This was an exploratory attempt at gauging perceptions of local voices on World Heritage Status as it relates to the PMA and the island's classification as a small-island developing state (SIDS). Using political ecology as a theoretical framework for analyzing the role of power relationships in this case study, this research revealed that there is an overall lack of communication between the Soufrière community and the national government regarding education and sensitizing about the World Heritage program mandates and incorporating the local citizenry in the protection of their heritage. The majority of the local participants' support for World Heritage Status on the island of St. Lucia was dependent on perceptions of increased income and employment opportunities associated with World Heritage as a global construct and narrative. This research also showed concerns of UNESCO and the St. Lucian national government to be at odds with the 1972 Convention. Results indicated that the varied perceptions of the three stakeholder groups are based on the prioritized interests of each and incommensurate with the aims of protecting the PMA's heritage for posterity.

Garbage disorders the city. Biosphere reserves reorder nature. This dissertation examines both of these concepts by focusing on the role of garbage in small cities enveloped by conservation space on the northwestern coast of Yucatán, México. Drawing from over two years of ethnographic research in Yucatán, I examine the historical and political relationships that produce garbage, conservation spaces, expectations of development, and gendered work. This project also points to the importance of mixed methodologies and multiple voices in political ecological and feminist geographical research by using a combination of methods, including oral histories and interviews, surveys, and policy analysis. My findings elucidate: how urban garbage is conceptualized and managed in protected coastal wetlands, how women produce new socio-environmental subjectivities through garbage projects, and the degree to which informal garbage use redefines urban and conservation space and creates alternative development possibilities.

This dissertation examines how states and international organizations respond to complex ecological problems that are mismatched to their management capacity. The study concentrates on effort by scientific advisors, technicians, and bureaucrats to manage the population dynamics of the desert locust, Schistocerca gegaria in Western and Northern Africa. Desert locusts periodically invade crops and pastures, where they cause massive depredations that undermine agricultural productivity and food security, often in extremely impoverished regions. The immensely complex and bio-geographically stochastic breeding and gregarization dynamics of the desert locust put the insect at odds with the conventional spatiality of the state. This make it difficult for managers to precisely predict and effectively control locust outbreaks and invasions. To better understand the factors shaping institutional responses to this insect, I address three interrelated questions primarily informed by political ecology, political geography, and critical development studies: (1) What historical trajectory yielded the contemporary configuration of locust control? (2) Why do some approaches to locust management become selected over others amongst experts and organizations? (3) What is the relationship between the spatial dynamics of locust outbreaks and invasions, on the one hand, and the spatial logic and imperatives of the state? Analysis of interviews, field observations, and archival records indicates that the ability of the desert locust to evade and exceed the conventional spatiality of the state has made this pest problem an appealing field to innovate and enact new regimes of governance that operate transnationally. This has embedded locust control in the historical arc spanning from formal colonialism to the current configuration of independent states supported by international programs of foreign aid and technical assistance. In this context, concerns for the professional viability of locust expertise within state agencies and international organizations favor the selection of strategies that best fit the modalities of access to development aid and resources. This motivates state-mandated locust managers to favor the adoption of locust control strategies that are best aligned with capacity building goals of these programs, and that incorporate locust management in broader interventions of social and environmental improvement.

Hurricanes pose a challenge for residents and communities of the United States Gulf Coast. The people that live in the region must adapt and respond to these storms, as do the social institutions that provide support during disasters and their aftermath. This is complicated by the longstanding and ongoing relationship between the oil and gas industry and gulf coastal communities, especially as activities associated with oil and gas development alter the local environments and regional landscapes in ways that increase vulnerability. These vulnerabilities layer onto existing social inequalities and make management and protection of regional populations difficult, and complicate recovery efforts. In this dissertation I explore the relationships between people, communities, industry, and social institutions. I trace the recent history of gulf coast storms in the region, emergent and developing strategies for preparation and recovery, and ongoing contention embedded within policy and governance issues. I also consider the complex interaction between social and natural systems, the role of government and support networks in providing assistance, and the locus of responsibility in mitigating vulnerability and providing support, before, during, and after a disaster.

In Chile’s neoliberal economy, large-scale timber plantations controlled by national and multinational forest corporations have expanded significantly on traditional indigenous territories. Chile’s forestry sector began to expand rapidly in 1974, the year following the military coup, owing to the privatization of forest lands and the passing of Decree 701. That law continues to provide large subsidies for afforestation, as well as tax exemptions for plantations established after 1974. As a consequence, conflicts have developed between indigenous communities and forestry companies, with the latter actively supported by government policies. The Mapuche people, the largest indigenous group in Chile, have been demanding the right to control their own resources. Meanwhile, they have been bearing the physical and social costs of the forestry sector’s growth. Since democracy returned to Chile in 1990, governments have done little to strengthen the rights of indigenous peoples. Government policy in this area is ill-defined; it consists mainly of occasional land restitution and monetary compensation when conflicts with the Mapuche threaten to overheat. This, however, is coupled with heavy-handed actions by the police and the legal system against Mapuche individuals and groups. From a political ecology perspective, this thesis examines how indigenous communities resort to various political strategies to accommodate, resist, and/or negotiate as political-economic processes change, and how these responses in turn shape natural resource management and, it follows, the local environment. My findings are that the environmental and social impacts associated with landscape transformation are shaped not only by structural changes brought about by economic and political forces but also, simultaneously, by smaller acts of political, cultural, and symbolic protest. Emerging forms of political agency are having expected and unexpected consequences that are giving rise to new processes of environmental change. Evidence for my argument is provided by a case study that focuses on the political strategies followed by the Mapuche movement. I analyze the obstacles that are preventing the Chilean government from addressing more effectively the social, economic, and cultural needs of indigenous peoples through resource management policies. Government policies toward the Mapuche have not encompassed various approaches that might facilitate conflict resolution, such as effective participation in land use plans, natural resource management, the protection of the cultural rights of indigenous communities, and the Mapuche people’s right to their own approaches to development. Employing Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, while the Mapuche have widely contested the state’s neoliberal policies, they have nevertheless been drawn into governing strategies that are fundamentally neoliberal in character. These strategies have reconfigured their relationship with the state, NGOs, and foreign aid donors. Operating at both formal and informal levels of social and political interaction, this new mentality of government employs coercive and co-optive measures to cultivate Mapuche participation in the neoliberal modernization project, while continuing to neglect long-standing relations of inequality and injustice that underpin conflicts over land and resources.

This thesis documents the genealogy of the development of Jakarta’s urban water supply infrastructure from 1873 (the inception of the first colonial water supply network) to the present. Using an analytical framework of governmentality, supplemented by insights from postcolonial studies and political ecology, the thesis explains the highly unequal patterns of water access in Jakarta as the product of (post)colonial governmentalities, whose relations of power are expressed not only through discursive categories and socio-economic relations, but also through material infrastructures and urban spaces. The thesis presents material from the colonial archives, Jakarta’s municipal archives, and the publications of international development agencies and engineering consultancy firms. This is combined with primary data derived from interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation of the implementation of current pro-poor water supply projects in Jakarta. This data is used to document how water supply is implicated in the discursive and material production of the city and its citizens, and to challenge conventional developmentalist and academic analyses of water supply access. Specifically, a conceptual triad of water, space, and populations – produced through, but also productive of government rationalities – is used to explain two apparent paradoxes: (1) the fragmentation of access in Jakarta despite a century of concerted attempts to develop a centralized system; and (2) the preferences of lower-income households for non-networked water supply, despite its higher cost per unit volume. This analysis hinges on an elucidation of the relationships between urban governance and urban infrastructure, which documents the interrelated process of differentiation of types of water supply, water use practices, populations, and urban spaces from the colonial period to the present. This, in turn, is used to explain the barriers being encountered in current pro-poor water supply development projects in Jakarta. The thesis thus makes a contribution to current academic debates over the ‘colonial present’. The contribution is both theoretical – in the emphasis placed upon the materiality of governmentality – and empirical. Finally, the thesis also makes a contribution to the urban and development studies literatures through its reinterpretation of the urban ‘water crisis’.

This paper explores representations of nature that emerge through the ecological management of Mildred Lake, Syncrude’s Alberta-based oil sands extraction facility. Examining the ways Mildred Lake’s ecology has been re-presented by site eco-management teams, I argue that technologically produced visions help reproduce the regime of power infusing a state-sanctioned scientific practice of eco-management. ‘Using governmentality theory, Chapter 1 contextualizes activities at Mildred Lake: I show how the Alberta government, tethering the growth of the oil sands to technological innovation, submits eco-management questions to a capital-driven state-developmental framework. Chapter 2 examines how state-sanctioned science is discursively performed through eco-management acts. Chapter 3 uses a case study approach to consider three Mildred Lake eco-management projects: Beaver Creek, the Tailings Pond, and reclamation. While Mildred Lake’s eco-management practices cannot withstand critical scrutiny, they reveal the culturally and ecologically significant transformations of nature required to sustain authority amid the destructive effects of bitumen extraction.

This paper explores representations of nature that emerge through the ecological management of Mildred Lake, Syncrude’s Alberta-based oil sands extraction facility. Examining the ways Mildred Lake’s ecology has been re-presented by site eco-management teams, I argue that technologically produced visions help reproduce the regime of power infusing a state-sanctioned scientific practice of eco-management. ‘Using governmentality theory, Chapter 1 contextualizes activities at Mildred Lake: I show how the Alberta government, tethering the growth of the oil sands to technological innovation, submits eco-management questions to a capital-driven state-developmental framework. Chapter 2 examines how state-sanctioned science is discursively performed through eco-management acts. Chapter 3 uses a case study approach to consider three Mildred Lake eco-management projects: Beaver Creek, the Tailings Pond, and reclamation. While Mildred Lake’s eco-management practices cannot withstand critical scrutiny, they reveal the culturally and ecologically significant transformations of nature required to sustain authority amid the destructive effects of bitumen extraction.

Post-socialist states have increasingly adopted rural governance and resource management policies framed around the concepts of decentralization, devolution, and de-concentration in which formerly central state powers are transferred to lower, more local levels of governance. In more recent incarnations, these policies have become inspired by neo-liberal discourses of minimal government, self-rule, and personal responsibility. Increasingly, the social science literature has argued that such forms of neo-liberal governance lead to a variety of unforeseen and diverse consequences. This dissertation attempts to understand the impact of these political transformations on household vulnerability in the context of hazardous events called zud. I do this through an ethnographic study of institution-building and risk management in a pastoral district of eastern Mongolia where I explore contemporary transformations in the management of critical resources such as livestock, labor, and land. As this dissertation shows, differential mobility practices are strongly correlated to zud-based livestock mortality rates. In particular, households that are more capable of practicing otor, a kind of non-customary and irregular migration strategy, are less susceptible to the conditions that threaten herd loss. Households with a greater capacity for conducting otor are able to move greater distances, in shorter time spans, and to regions with less severe conditions, thereby escaping the possibility of facing high loss rates. Differential capacity to mitigate the risk of zud conditions also was found to be deeply affected by previously under-studied institutional transformations surrounding rights and access to livestock, labor, and land. Primarily, this study demonstrates that decentralization and other neo-liberal models of governance not only open space for significant reconfiguration of the institutional landscape in ways that support social inequality, but also subsequently lead to increased differentiation in vulnerability to disaster. Theoretically, this work contributes to critical understandings of political ecology by uncovering circulations of power through constellations of actors (human and otherwise), institutions, and meanings as well as through bio-physical landscapes. In addition, this study contributes to work in vulnerability studies by shedding light on how administrative governance, local institution-building, and property-making shift the apportionment of entitlements to produce hazardous conditions and unequal distributions of risk and vulnerability.

This dissertation analyzes the politics of garbage in Oaxaca, Mexico. In particular, it explores the tactics used by a marginalized colonia near the dump to affect waste management and local development. This colonia provokes garbage crises by blocking the metropolitan areas access to its dump. As a result, garbage builds up in the city and public officials are forced to negotiate with colonia residents. I argue that two prior processes are essential to the success of this strategy. First, the mid-sized city in southern Mexico implemented many new waste management practices during the latter half of the 20th century and the first few years of the 21st in order to produce an image of a clean and modern city for residents and tourists. While the city tried to modernize by increasing the level of sanitation, a concomitant increase in consumerism meant that it was impossible for this clean and modern city to be produced on the ground. Nevertheless, these contradictory processes made cleanliness the marker of urban modernity. Therefore, garbage in the city can undermine the legitimacy of modern urban institutions, as it does in the case of the garbage crises. Second, a process of modern citizen-formation was underway wherein an association with garbage identified one as outsider. In this way, garbage crises are struggles over citizenship and belonging.