Yau Muk Leung Anthony. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61). / Abstracts in English and Chinese, questionare in Chinese.

In 2014 the Ebola virus entered Sierra Leone, soon to become the epicentre of a global health crisis. A state of emergency was declared, propped up by a large-scale and far-reaching humanitarian intervention; characterised by stringent bureaucratic and biomedical protocols, restrictions on social and economic life, and novel monetary flows. Based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, immediately before and during the state of emergency, the thesis presents an intimate account of the lives and social worlds of young men living in an urban neighbourhood. The thesis outlines the centrality of the domestic sphere – home, neighbourhood, and family – in young men’s projects of coming of age, as well as in surviving and brokering ‘crisis’ and foreign intervention. Rather than ‘crisis’ halting the processes of social reproduction, such processes became central means through which a conflict between ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ expectations – brought to the fore by external intervention – was reconciled and negotiated. The thesis demonstrates how a political economy of crisis maps onto core social tensions between independence and dependence that young men ambiguously negotiate around the home, and how resultant social practices and understandings connect to Freetown’s deeper and more recent histories of intervention, crisis, and entanglement with the Atlantic World.

This thesis contributes a rich empirical analysis of urban water governance in Delhi, with particular attention to informality, groundwater and reforms. My research aims to develop understanding of the relationships between reforms, under both private sector management and a new progressive government, and existing informal water arrangements, particularly groundwater use, which households rely on in the absence of adequate public sector supply. I draw on interviews with 150 residents, as well as water suppliers, project officials, government staff, politicians and party workers over 18 months of multi-sited research in South Delhi’s unauthorised colonies and urban villages. I use the idea of ‘informal infrastructures’ or ‘infrastructural informality’ connects my empirical research across different sites and scales. Bringing ideas from the literature on informality and infrastructures together under this framing offers modifications to the ways that ‘informality’ and ‘infrastructures’ are often understood and used. I use informality in this way ‘as a method’ to focus on the contingently enacted, materially and socially constituted character of various infrastructure processes. I analyse the informal governance and politics of water supply at three difference sites and scales. Within Delhi’s government network at an all-city level I note the formally and informally differentiated nature of the network and the challenges of knowledge and control of it. Outside of the piped network, I examine the decentralised infrastructures of tubewells and water tankers, primarily in the South Delhi areas of Sangam Vihar and Deoli. These decentralised supply modes are socially embedded in systems of party politics, caste and land-ownership with a range of opportunities for discretion, patronage and misallocation. They illustrate the connection and contrasts between informality in different resources, such as land and water, and infrastructures. I then examine an additional layer of urban water governance, in a Public Private Partnership (PPP) for urban water reform, in a zone around the Malviya Nagar area, also in South Delhi. I argue that the complexity of India’s urban social hydrology, even in wealthy areas, has been underestimated by this initiative, and that despite an evolution of the PPP model concerns over the project’s equity and viability remain. The high level of informality across different infrastructural systems in my research sites suggests the coexistence of a submerged ‘technopolitics’ operating through bureaucratic and technical modes of governance, with both overt and covert uses of intercession, personalisation and force. The study makes contributions to knowledge in the following areas: informal urban water supply in India, particularly in unauthorised colonies and urban villages, in a region of high groundwater use, its relationship to water supply reforms from both government and a multinational public-private partnership.

This thesis asks why major urban reforms in India between 2005 and 2015 were more successfully implemented in some cities than in others. It undertakes a study of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), launched in 2005 by the Indian government, which aimed to implement governance reforms and urban infrastructure renewal across 65 Indian cities, but finished with only modest success. The implementation outcome of the mission also varied across cities. This thesis focuses on the differential implementation outcomes of the reforms in two Indian cities, Ahmedabad and Kanpur, and identifies historically constituted political capacity - located in municipal organization at the city level - as the key determinant of divergent trajectories in the JNNURM implementation. The study adapts John Kingdon‟s framework of „policy windows‟ to explore the formation of municipal capacities and municipal organisations in the two cities. The research identifies two historical „windows‟ that were crucial in the shaping of municipal organizations in Ahmedabad and Kanpur: the first episode was the colonial formation of municipal organisations; the second episode was the period of neoliberalisation. Following Kingdon, in each window, the problem, the policy and the politics have been identified and spelled out. The process of “coupling” between the problem and the policy has then been analysed by looking at the nature of politics and the principal political actors. The analysis demonstrates that while in Ahmedabad, the coupling was achieved during the two historical episodes, the problem and the policy remained unattached in the case of Kanpur. This variation led to two different architectures of municipal organisations in the two cities, resulting in different levels of municipal capacities at the time of the inauguration of the JNNURM. The thesis concludes that the specific histories of urban governance systems matter, and a policy insensitive to this, is likely to fail.

In an era of ‘community empowerment’ and the devolution of welfare responsibilities to local groups, it is important to understand what community comes to mean in everyday life. Through two growing projects in Glasgow, this thesis discusses such meanings in local processes of exclusion and urban land development, and uses the sites to explore too the politics of collective growing. To do so, I consider the meanings, tensions and contradictions that emerge between the practices of being communal and the naming of such as community. I draw on a multi-sited ethnography and in depth interviews to elucidate the emergence of that which comes to be called community as a situated, empirical phenomenon. As an overburdened concept, I suggest community is not necessarily the most helpful analytical term to describe the collective activity in both case studies. Instead, I argue for seeing community primarily as a frame that guides and makes sense of communal practices. Whilst some hope has been located in community gardens and similar urban interventions as potential sources of renewal and collective resistance to the harsher vagaries of neoliberal capitalism, this thesis argues that communal growing does not present a systematic alternative, although it does appropriate urban land in occasionally subversive ways. Communal growing does however offer insights into the complexities of creating places for autonomy and survival in austere conditions. I reflect on the selective reproduction of class and social exclusions in growing spaces, and the tentative production of a time and space outwith the logics of the capitalist city, and yet within its bounds. Ultimately this thesis argues that community is not an anodyne or empty concept, but rather a dynamic and symbolically important idea shaping local urban life.

This Ph.D. examines how commuters in Mumbai, India, negotiate their sense of being and wellbeing through their engagements with food in the city. It focuses on the widespread practice of eating homemade lunches in the workplace, important for commuters to replenish mind and body with foods that embody their specific family backgrounds, in a society where religious, caste, class, and community markers comprise complex dietary regimes. Eating such charged substances in the office canteen was essential in reproducing selfhood and social distinction within Mumbai’s cosmopolitan environment. These engagements were “visceral” since they were experienced in and expressed through the intimate scale of the gut, mediating and consolidating boundaries between self and Other on lines of (incommensurable) food habits. Such tensions, most visible between vegetarians and meat eaters, were aggravated in the wake of the “beef ban” in March 2015, which illegalized the slaughter of cattle in the state of Maharashtra, wherein cosmopolitan pleasure gave way to visceral disgust and estrangement. In connection, this thesis examines the vast work-lunch economy of Mumbai through three prominent businesses: the Dabbawalas, a 125-year-old home food delivery network; tiffin services, informal catering businesses operated by housewives, who commercially hybridize homemade food; and tech food start-ups, run by a generation of young entrepreneurs striving for novel takes on homemade food. Whereas anthropological literature on India has analysed either the emergence of a new urban public sphere since India’s economic liberalization, or the ripples it has made in the domestic sphere, this thesis examines how these businesses address commuter specific bio-moral anxieties of maintaining communal identity, purity, and wellbeing within the stressful environment of contemporary Mumbai, by means of mediating domestic intimacy with the urban public, at an affordable price. These interventions are conceptualized as “technologies of purity”, specific forms of visceral politics of food.

Two central ideas characterise the dominant discourse surrounding sovereign debt and sovereign debt crises: the portrayal of the crisis as the only problem and the singling out of the debtor state as the main culprit. This thesis challenges both of these ideas and, in doing so, contributes to the nascent normative literature on finance and justice, as well as to the more established debates on global justice and structural injustice. First, the most serious problem is not the crisis itself, but a highly asymmetrical and unjust Sovereign Debt and Credit Regime (SD&CR), which rests on and further entrenches positions of advantage and disadvantage along lines of class and citizenship. Occupiers of positions of disadvantage are vulnerable to structural domination and exploitation when debt is accrued. Three heuristic categories are introduced here to better understand how the injustices characterising the SD&CR are reproduced, namely the ‘structural processes proper’, the ‘structural-relational’, and the ‘structural-systemic’ dimensions. Second, an integrated responsibility model is defended, which challenges the unilateral attribution of responsibility to the debtor state and allows for more expansive and differentiated responsibility attribution. According to this model, creditors can be held responsible on three grounds: moral responsibility, benefit, and role responsibility. Disadvantaged debtor governments, in turn, are responsible to resist their domination and exploitation. This responsibility may give rise to (a) the duty to refuse to renounce their own agency by endorsing outcome responsibility, and (b) to the duty to engage in acts of state civil disobedience. Finally, citizens cease to have debt servicing obligations if the state budget is systematically used in the interest of only a fraction of the state’s citizenry and whenever the acquisition of further debt threatens the state’s ability to act in the public interest.

Theories of justice are usually divided in aim and sphere of operation between redistributive justice (allocation of goods and resources) and recognition justice (ensuring respect and esteem between members of societies regardless of race, ethnicity, sexuality etc.). Divorcing the two is said to create conceptual clarity, but policy chaos in the treatment of complex injustices. Contrary to the received view, my thesis argues recognition and redistribution can only provide an adequate conceptual framework for questions of justice if they operate together and show this in relation to socially excluded and discriminated against groups, with a particular focus on the case of the Roma minority. The first chapter criticises existing theoretical approaches to the connection between recognition and redistribution, most notably Fraser's ‘different logics’ argument. The following chapters establish that neither recognition nor redistribution are theoretically sufficient for capturing the meaning of injustice in certain cases: Chapter 2 argues recognition faces a ‘symmetry problem’ between just and unjust struggles, requiring appeals to redistribution as a demarcation criterion. Chapter 3 argues redistributive attempts to define disability fail to capture the recognition-based concerns of the social model of disability and extrapolates the argument from the 'special' case of disability to the (unfortunately) common case of ethnic discrimination, focusing on the Roma minority. Chapters 4 and 5 define and defend a view of discrimination as a specific pattern of interaction between recognition and redistribution, similar to Sunstein's anti-caste principle but allowing for relevant markers to be socially (rather than physiologically) defined. Chapter 6 argues social exclusion is also, contrary to most current approaches, a matter of recognition and not only redistribution, showing how the two dimensions interact in the case of the Roma minority. I conclude by pointing out that discrimination and social exclusion, while often regarded as separate social issues, are structurally similar with regards to the underlying dynamic between the redistributive and recognition dimensions.

This thesis consists of three papers that are related to transportation economics, housing economics, and the economics of discrimination. The first paper examines how much people are willing to pay (WTP), on average, to avoid road traffic near their residence using the housing market. The notion is that traffic confers substantial negative externalities such as congestion delays, air and noise pollution, and traffic accidents. Estimating these hedonic functions are, however, extremely challenging with omitted variable bias and sorting of households. Hence, to circumvent these challenges, I rely on the sharp variation in traffic conditions induced by the London Congestion Charge to recover the capitalization of road traffic on housing values. The second paper examines whether installing speed cameras reduces traffic accidents and saves lives. Speeding is one of the major reasons why accidents occur, and the velocity of the vehicles affects the gravity of collisions. This paper sheds insights on how the government could intervene and nudge drivers from risky behaviours that could have serious consequences. The third paper investigates whether facial attractiveness affects sentencing outcomes in courtrooms. I rely on a novel facial recognition system that locates various features from inmate mugshots to compute facial symmetry as a measure of attractiveness. This study is motivated by the burgeoning literature indicating that judges allow extraneous factors, such as race and gender of defendants, emotions and media attention, to influuence their decisions, and the widespread discrimination of appearance in multiple contexts.

This thesis explores a heterogeneous migrant labour force, particularly Kurdish workers from the south-east of Turkey, working in a private steel mill outside Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The wider context is one of war, population displacement, political disintegration, and economic fluctuation. The dissertation builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of 16 months between November 2014 and February 2016 in the south-west of Erbil, ten miles away from the town of Gwer, the ISIS–Iraqi Kurdistan war front. It demonstrates how political and economic fragmentation created a zone for the appropriation and super-exploitation of cheap material and human resources and facilitated an expansion of unregulated capitalism. In this process, capitalist production became freed from the cost and constraint of a moral economy of labour, as political disintegration and Kurdish nationalism created consent and coercion for the corporate control of local resources. Industrial production constituted a field of experimentation in labour relations for both management and labourers, in a manner exemplary of contemporary capitalism. The dissertation opens with a discussion of relational and holistic approaches to the expansion of capitalism and inequality; it then moves to examine the Hiwa neighbourhood as a frontier landscape between the relative stability and security of Iraqi Kurdistan and the insecurity and uncertainty of the war zones of Iraq, Syria and Eastern Turkey. Chapters 1 and 2 describe how production and destruction, formal and informal economies, and deregulation and criminalization are interconnected and integral to the recycling of war scrap on which the expansion of the steel mill depends. Chapters 3 and 4 turn from the environment to labour, and examine the heterogeneous work force composed of migrant men from India, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and the rest of Iraq. Their labour has been made cheap through distinct formal and informal work practices within the wider dynamics of war, displacement, and informalization in the region. Complementary to this structural analysis, Chapters 5 and 6 turn to individual life stories of migrant labourers, focusing on how they experience incertitude, from gruelling everyday uncertainties concerning unstable work to life-threatening disease. In so doing, the thesis aims to document the moral and material consequences of contemporary capitalism in Iraqi Kurdistan for migrant labour at a more intimate level.