Irrigation plays an extremely important role in agriculture but climate change is predicted to modify climate patterns with potentially devastating consequences for irrigation. Potential impacts and adaptations are known, but not how implementation strategies may be implemented at the individual irrigation scheme level. Using a case study approach and qualitative research methods this thesis describes the Bwanje Valley Irrigation Scheme (BVIS), Malawi in order to explain how water is managed. Subsequently, historical adaptations are described in order to draw conclusions concerning the vulnerability of the BVIS under normal and extreme hydrological conditions. The BVIS is vulnerable in all conditions because it utilizes a common pool resource. As water supply decreases, irrigation water management becomes less and less equitable which makes the system extremely sensitive to changes in water supply. Capacity to adapt to climate change is limited to funding provided by external agencies which currently limit adaptations to reactive changes

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This paper considers the contribution of urban agriculture to the local food system and the role of the city council in this system. Using an interdisciplinary mixed method approach, the study explores local stakeholders’ perspectives of these aspects in the city of Bristol, UK. The findings were viewed through the lenses of two conceptual frameworks, resilience and social justice. The results reveal that urban agriculture increases resilience through building community, maintaining a diverse food supply network, and strengthening adaptability by retaining the knowledge and skills to produce food. Urban agriculture also supports social justice, by providing access to healthy food, promoting equality and inclusion, and encouraging healthier living through education. Furthermore, the results indicate that the city council can increase resilience and support social justice in the local food system through four key interventions; their procurement policy, urban planning, assisting urban agriculture initiatives, and developing a holistic urban food policy. In conclusion, urban agriculture is regarded as more than a form of food production because local stakeholders use it to support a broad range of social objectives. Developing an urban food policy is the shared responsibility of the city council as well as private and voluntary sector actors. Resilience and social justice are advocated as normative goals of the food system, and can be used as frameworks to guide the complex process of urban food system reform.

Social-ecological systems of traditional pastoralists are adapted to deal with shocks and stresses such as droughts and livestock disease that characterize their environment. However, inappropriate policies have undermined the resilience of pastoralist social-ecological systems at a time when stresses from new challenges, such as growth in the human population and global climate change are increasing. Many pastoralist groups such as the Gabra of north-central Kenya now regularly require emergency relief. There is an urgent need to take deliberate steps to rebuild the resilience of pastoralist social-ecological systems. One lever that external actors such as NGOs and government agencies have that could help them to do so relates to structures and processes of participation and decision-making. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to examine ways in which the approaches to public participation used by agencies involved in water resources management can affect the collective capacity of pastoralist institutions and communities to influence social-ecological resilience. The research revolved around a single case study: the Kenyan NGO Pastoralist Integrated Support Programme (PISP) together with the Gabra communities where PISP works. The research found that the capacity to influence resilience resides in the network of vertical and horizontal institutional linkages as much as it does in any particular organization or institution. This implies the need for a radical paradigm shift in the way that NGOs and other formal sector actors think of participation and of their role. An examination of the Gabra approach to decision-making and PISP's approach to participation point to an alternative way of thinking about participation. This alternative rationale for participation would call on formal sector actors to promote participation and inclusivity of decision-making at multiple levels of social organization through an array of interconnected processes and institutions, to foster deliberation processes that are nested across levels, and to help create and strengthen vertical institutional linkages for their beneficiary communities. These proposed strategies relate to a key contribution of this research, which is to suggest building a resilience-based theory of participation and to provide a glimpse of what such a theory might entail.

This thesis investigates marginalisation in small-scale fishing communities in Chilika Lagoon engaged in customary capture fisheries. However, the Lagoon has undergone tremendous changes in recent decades, impacting the social, cultural, economic, political and environmental life, and resulting in fishers’ disconnection and marginalisation. The study explores what marginalisation looks like from the fishers’ point of view, and attempts to explain the processes and drivers responsible for change in Chilika social-ecological system, and the implications of this change, with four areas for analysis: 1) historical and political background to the processes of change in Chilika Lagoon fisheries; 2) the challenges from external drivers to fishery commons and the need to understand commons as a process; 3) impacts of social-ecological change from a livelihood perspective, including how the fishers dealt with livelihood crisis through various strategies; 4) institutional processes and their implications for fishers’ marginalization. Using evidence collected through household- and village-level surveys, combined with various qualitative and participatory research methods over 28 months, the study shows that there are two major driving forces or drivers of marginalisation: (1) the role of aquaculture development in the loss of resource access rights and the decline of local institutions, and (2) the ecological displacement and livelihood loss brought about by the opening of a new “sea mouth” connecting the Lagoon and the Bay of Bengal. There exist a paradox of the official account and fishers’ own view of marginalisation. Chilika is a clear case in which government policies have encouraged de facto privatisation. The dynamic nature and fluctuations associated with commons development make it imperative to understand commons as a process that includes commonisation and decommonisation. Out-migration has emerged as a key livelihood strategy resulting in occupational displacement for one-third of the adult fishers, and such livelihood strategies have led to their disconnection and marginalisation. The fishers’ point of view presents a more complex, multidimensional concept of marginalisation, not simply as a state of being but as a process over time, impacting social and economic conditions, political standing, and environmental health.

The shift from management and governance of ecosystems to relational complex adaptive social-ecological systems (SES) emphasizes a dynamic and integrated humans-in-nature perspective. Such a shift also needs to investigate how diversity and differences in cultures and morals relate to the existence of SES. The papers of this thesis relate these dimensions to SES resilience theory. Paper I analyzes cultural and landscape ecological aspects of trees and tree planting in Androy, Madagascar. Culturally, planting trees serves as a symbol of renewal, purification, agreement and boundary-making. Ecologically, planting trees contributes to the generation of ecosystem services in an otherwise fragmented landscape. Paper II tests the role of forest patches for generating pollination services to local beans that constitute an important protein staple in Androy. The results indicate a significant effect of insect pollination on bean yields and a strong spatial pattern of locating bean plots closer to forests than expected by chance, improving rural food security. Paper III addresses the adaptive capacity of the indigenous forest management in Androy with regard to religious and climatic drivers of change. Paper IV is concerned with cultural analysis of the robustness of provisioning ecosystem services in Androy and the interdependence of morality, cultural practices and generated ecosystem services. Paper V explores how social-ecological memory (SEM) can be seen both as a source of inertia and path dependence and a source of adaptive capacity for renewal and reorganization in the emerging theory about social-ecological systems. Paper VI analyses the film Avatar and discusses ethical–epistemic obligations of researchers as cross-scale knowledge brokers in emerging forms of global environmental politics. The thesis has interdependencies between the social and the ecological and shown that cultural and moral analyses bring important insights and challenges to resilience thinking. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 5: Submitted. Paper 6: In press.</p>

Ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation, shadow pricing, sustainability measures, and squeezing Nature into the commodity boxes of goods, services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic, financial and banking discourses. There are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social, psychological, political and ethical facets. The relationship with Nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching. However, this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation. A shallow movement, allied to a business as usual politics and economy, has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values. If, instead, ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society. The implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st Century. (author's abstract)

Social-ecological systems of traditional pastoralists are adapted to deal with shocks and stresses such as droughts and livestock disease that characterize their environment. However, inappropriate policies have undermined the resilience of pastoralist social-ecological systems at a time when stresses from new challenges, such as growth in the human population and global climate change are increasing. Many pastoralist groups such as the Gabra of north-central Kenya now regularly require emergency relief. There is an urgent need to take deliberate steps to rebuild the resilience of pastoralist social-ecological systems. One lever that external actors such as NGOs and government agencies have that could help them to do so relates to structures and processes of participation and decision-making. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to examine ways in which the approaches to public participation used by agencies involved in water resources management can affect the collective capacity of pastoralist institutions and communities to influence social-ecological resilience. The research revolved around a single case study: the Kenyan NGO Pastoralist Integrated Support Programme (PISP) together with the Gabra communities where PISP works. The research found that the capacity to influence resilience resides in the network of vertical and horizontal institutional linkages as much as it does in any particular organization or institution. This implies the need for a radical paradigm shift in the way that NGOs and other formal sector actors think of participation and of their role. An examination of the Gabra approach to decision-making and PISP's approach to participation point to an alternative way of thinking about participation. This alternative rationale for participation would call on formal sector actors to promote participation and inclusivity of decision-making at multiple levels of social organization through an array of interconnected processes and institutions, to foster deliberation processes that are nested across levels, and to help create and strengthen vertical institutional linkages for their beneficiary communities. These proposed strategies relate to a key contribution of this research, which is to suggest building a resilience-based theory of participation and to provide a glimpse of what such a theory might entail.

This thesis investigates marginalisation in small-scale fishing communities in Chilika Lagoon engaged in customary capture fisheries. However, the Lagoon has undergone tremendous changes in recent decades, impacting the social, cultural, economic, political and environmental life, and resulting in fishers’ disconnection and marginalisation. The study explores what marginalisation looks like from the fishers’ point of view, and attempts to explain the processes and drivers responsible for change in Chilika social-ecological system, and the implications of this change, with four areas for analysis: 1) historical and political background to the processes of change in Chilika Lagoon fisheries; 2) the challenges from external drivers to fishery commons and the need to understand commons as a process; 3) impacts of social-ecological change from a livelihood perspective, including how the fishers dealt with livelihood crisis through various strategies; 4) institutional processes and their implications for fishers’ marginalization. Using evidence collected through household- and village-level surveys, combined with various qualitative and participatory research methods over 28 months, the study shows that there are two major driving forces or drivers of marginalisation: (1) the role of aquaculture development in the loss of resource access rights and the decline of local institutions, and (2) the ecological displacement and livelihood loss brought about by the opening of a new “sea mouth” connecting the Lagoon and the Bay of Bengal. There exist a paradox of the official account and fishers’ own view of marginalisation. Chilika is a clear case in which government policies have encouraged de facto privatisation. The dynamic nature and fluctuations associated with commons development make it imperative to understand commons as a process that includes commonisation and decommonisation. Out-migration has emerged as a key livelihood strategy resulting in occupational displacement for one-third of the adult fishers, and such livelihood strategies have led to their disconnection and marginalisation. The fishers’ point of view presents a more complex, multidimensional concept of marginalisation, not simply as a state of being but as a process over time, impacting social and economic conditions, political standing, and environmental health.

The focus of this research relates to physical activity (PA) among populations at risk for inactivity. Two studies were completed. Study 1 was an exploratory study examining the relationship between health literacy (HL) and PA as they relate to the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) constructs. Study 2 was an action research-based project in partnership with the staff and students of an alternative school. In Study 1 participants (N=65) completed measurements including the REALM to assess HL, and accelerometers to establish PA levels. The results of this study showed that even after controlling for covariates HL and PA are significantly linked (r = 0.37, p < 0.01), however, the TPB constructs were not found to mediate this relationship. However, Perceived Behavioural Control (r = 0.29, p < 0.05) and Intention to Exercise (r = 0.29, p < 0.05) were significantly linked to HL. Of particular interest, Difficulty Reading was cited as a significant barrier to PA for those with lower levels of HL (r = 0.37, p < 0.01). Finally, HL was found to be a significant moderator of the Education-PA relationship. Study 2 contained two components. First, focus groups with community partner organization (CPO) members to establish issues of relevance to them related to PA, to gather suggestions for incorporating PA into CPO programs, to gain an understanding of the barriers experienced by the community members, and to receive input regarding their current feelings and knowledge surrounding PA. Second, a process evaluation was conducted with administration to gauge how the CPO had progressed over the first academic year, using the TRACE process evaluation tool. The findings from the focus groups were organized by socio ecological level into PA facilitators and inhibitors, and were used to plan a new PA program for the school year. A repeated measures survey and process evaluation tool were used to assess these program objectives for the initial year. Perceived HL scores increased from baseline (M = 20.71,SD = 4.29) to follow-up (M = 22.58, SD = 5.15 ); t(-2.44), p < 0.05, as did perceived understanding of the importance of PA from September (M = 4.46 , SD = 1.60) to June (M = 5.54 , SD = 1.67); t(-3.06), p < 0.01. There was an increase in total minutes of MVPA among students as well, although this trend merely approached significance, from September (M = 526.60, SD = 557.63) to June (M=817.0, SD = 674.69), t(-1.97), p = 0.06. The evaluation tool revealed that the community was “Half Way There”, and identified areas where improvements could be made. These findings are relevant to creating equitable and comprehensive promotion and education of physical activity in the future and to understanding the mechanisms involved in PA disparities. These findings also support the need for health promoters and researchers to work with communities known to be at risk for low HL, and using action research methods to create locally relevant program development and research. / Graduate