In 2013, the Dominican state ruled to uphold a 2010 constitutional amendment that stripped thousands of Dominicans of Haitian origin of their citizenship and forced them to leave the country during summer 2015. About 2,200 of these people became displaced in Anse-à-Pitres, where most took up residence in temporary camps. I use the term forced migrants or displaced persons interchangeably to refer to these people. Many endure challenges in meeting their daily survival needs in Haiti, a country with extreme poverty, considerable political instability, and still in the process of rebuilding itself from the devastating earthquake of 2010. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic field- work in Anse-à-Pitres, I examine how these displaced people, in the face of statelessness and amid their precarious social and economic conditions, create survival strategies by drawing upon everyday labor mobility and informal economic activities within and across their communities. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the involvement of these displaced people in community life through socio-economic practices attests to a sense of belonging and produces a form of substantive citizenship in their absence of legal citizenship. This kind of substantive citizenship is also shaped by the ability of the displaced people to re-define life goals, participate in local meetings with the local state and organizations on the ground, and challenge systems of power that seek to impose their choices upon them. In this dissertation, I argue against construing the displaced people as hopeless by focusing on the forms of power and agency that they exercise in and over their lives, which make them agents of their self-development.

Within a loose framework of two ongoing and interrelated processes (globalisation and changing roles of the nation-state) family and relations between family, economy and state are studied in Greece and Sweden. Greece is in focus. Modernization, development and family in social science literature are discussed. Using the idea of the social landscape and the existence of four different types of organizations (private enterprises, nation-states, families and voluntary organizations) several advantages are achieved: care work is made visible and nation-states are seen in a wider context. Informal economy and clientelism in general and in Greece in particular are described. The role of family in maintaining such patterns is discussed and attention is paid to the mutual strengthening of family, informal economy and clientelism in a social landscape where formal, universalistic and public procedures to get access to valued resources exist side by side and interwoven with informal, particularistic and veiled ones. Traditional patriarchal ideologies are breaking up and an increasing number of women work outside the family but women's role in caring for family members in Greece is crucial. Great progress in terms of equal rights has been made. State involvement in caring activities and other reproductive work is however small. Modernization and rationalization in economy and state in the wake of EU and EMU membership challenge such phenomena as informal economy, clientelism and women's subordination. Finally development in Greece and Sweden within the EU is discussed and division of responsibilities and work with care is problematized.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the workings of multi-scalar networks that connect informal economy organizations that are active locally, nationally and internationally. The study adopts a „right to the city‟ framework wherein the relation between the local and the global is discussed. The main questions that were addressed in the research were (I) how do local, national and global networks among street vendorsand marketers and their organizations shape the resistances of street vendors andmarketers and (II) how do local, national and international networks amongorganizations that work for street vendors and marketers contribute to street vendors‟ and marketers‟ claims to the rights to the city. Qualitative interviews were conducted with street and market vendors operating from urban areas in the Zambian Copperbelt as well as with organizations dealing with market and street vendors in the samegeographical area. Results showed that networks operating on different geographical scales served the street and market vendors as well as their organizations different purposes. Findings are related to the relative importance of the global for the local as well as contemporary theories of democracy and citizenship.

The relationship between economic performance and support for the incumbent government varies across voters and electoral contexts. While some of this variation can be explained by factors that make it easier or harder to hold politicians accountable, an additional explanation is that the electoral importance of economic issues varies systematically across groups and contexts. Because issues that are personally important tend to be more easily accessible when voting, we prose that exposure to economic shocks generates higher incentives to place more weight on economic conditions when voting. We test this hypothesis using archived and original survey data from Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. The analysis demonstrates that economic vulnerability enhances the economy's salience. Specifically, poverty generates incentives to cast an egotropic vote while wealth, insecure employment, informal employment, and exclusion from governments welfare programs enhances sociotropic voting because these groups have greater stakes in the national economy. By implication, elections in developing countries with large numbers of vulnerable voters should be more strongly contested over economics despite the weak institutional environment that potentially undermines the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable. Aggregate elections returns and the CSES survey support this proposition and demonstrate that economic voting is substantially more common in Latin American than in Western Europe or North America. Thus variations in economic voting provide opportunities to not only learn about the conditions under which elections can serve as mechanisms of accountability but also a laboratory to model the process of preference formation and the demands voters place on their representatives. / Dissertation

This study investigates the relationship between gender, social capital and resilience in four of British Columbia’s rural, island communities. Each community’s unique circumstances provide a distinctive context in which to study the interaction between these concepts. This study utilizes quantitative data from several sources, including Statistics Canada, BC Stats, and a mail out survey conducted by the Resilient Communities Project (RCP). This study also utilizes qualitative data from several sources, including two sets of RCP interviews, interviews carried out in the Haida First Nation community of Old Massett, and participant observation. The results of these case studies confirm the necessity of taking context into consideration in any study of the operation of social capital. Within this specific context, social networks operate very differently than in an urban setting. The small size of these rural communities means that the entire community functions as one social network, within which residents have ties of differing strengths. The strength of their ties determines their access to resources within the network, as access to these resources is only given to those who are accountable and trustworthy. Through visible and repeated social interaction, residents built strong ties to one another. These ties allow for processes of generalized reciprocity to take place, wherein residents give to others with no immediate expectation of receiving back, knowing that should they need help, it will be available. This process relies entirely on the trust built up through repeated interactions and the sanctions imposed on those who break it, and contributes greatly to community resilience. Women play a particular role within these communities. Unlike studies that find that women are disadvantaged by their social networks, the results of this study find that women have parlayed their higher levels of involvement in the social life of the community and the informal economy into beneficial social networks based on trust and reciprocity. In addition, their higher levels of education put them at the forefront of the new service economy with lower levels of unemployment and equal likelihood of self-employment, all of which contributes not only to individual resilience, but community resilience as well.

This dissertation examines the livelihood strategies of African dock workers in Durban, South Africa, between the Anglo-Boer War and the 1959 strikes. These labourers did not conform to common conceptions of radical dock workers or conservative African migrant workers. While Marxist scholars have been correct to stress the working class consciousness of Durban’s dock workers, this consciousness was also more ambiguous. These workers and their leaders displayed a peculiar mix of concern for workers’ issues and defences of the rights and interests of African traders. Many of Durban’s dock workers were not only wage labourers. In fact, only a minority had wages as their only source of income. The Reserve economy played a role in sustaining the consumption levels of their households and, more importantly, more than half of the former dock workers interviewed for this research engaged in some form of commercial enterprise, often based on the pilferage and sale of cargoes. Some also teamed up with township women who sold pilfered goods while the men were at work. This combination of commercial strategies and wage labour has often been overlooked in the literature. By looking at these livelihood strategies, this dissertation considers how rural and urban economies interacted in households’ strategies and reinterprets the reproduction of labour and the household in order to move beyond dichotomies of proletarian versus rural consciousness. The dock workers’ households were neither proletarian households that were forced to reside in the countryside because of apartheid, nor traditional rural homesteads with a missing migrant member. The households were reproduced in three geographically separate spheres of production and consumption, none of which could reproduce the household on its own. These spheres were dependent on each other, but also separate, as physical distance gave the different household members some autonomy. Such multi-nodal households not only bridged the rural and the urban, but equally straddled the formal/informal divide. For many, their employment on the docks made their commercial enterprises possible, which allowed them to retire early from urban wage labour. Consequently, the interests of wage labourers could not be divorced from those of African small-scale entrepreneurs. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-26 17:14:17.474

This study investigates the relationship between gender, social capital and resilience in four of British Columbia’s rural, island communities. Each community’s unique circumstances provide a distinctive context in which to study the interaction between these concepts. This study utilizes quantitative data from several sources, including Statistics Canada, BC Stats, and a mail out survey conducted by the Resilient Communities Project (RCP). This study also utilizes qualitative data from several sources, including two sets of RCP interviews, interviews carried out in the Haida First Nation community of Old Massett, and participant observation. The results of these case studies confirm the necessity of taking context into consideration in any study of the operation of social capital. Within this specific context, social networks operate very differently than in an urban setting. The small size of these rural communities means that the entire community functions as one social network, within which residents have ties of differing strengths. The strength of their ties determines their access to resources within the network, as access to these resources is only given to those who are accountable and trustworthy. Through visible and repeated social interaction, residents built strong ties to one another. These ties allow for processes of generalized reciprocity to take place, wherein residents give to others with no immediate expectation of receiving back, knowing that should they need help, it will be available. This process relies entirely on the trust built up through repeated interactions and the sanctions imposed on those who break it, and contributes greatly to community resilience. Women play a particular role within these communities. Unlike studies that find that women are disadvantaged by their social networks, the results of this study find that women have parlayed their higher levels of involvement in the social life of the community and the informal economy into beneficial social networks based on trust and reciprocity. In addition, their higher levels of education put them at the forefront of the new service economy with lower levels of unemployment and equal likelihood of self-employment, all of which contributes not only to individual resilience, but community resilience as well.

This study sought to analyse the role of foreign aid in poverty alleviation and economic development of Ghana from 1957 to 2008. Literature related to the study on foreign aid and economic development was reviewed to get an insight into the views of other writers on the topic under study. The study adopted both primary and secondary sources of data to examine the concept of foreign aid, poverty reduction and economic development in Ghana. The study collected data using qualitative interviews consisting of open- and close-ended questions from the field. Content analysis involving the use of existing materials by researchers and the analyses of data originally collected by others was also relied on as a complement to the primary sources in the study. The study found that donor aid is not well coordinated in Ghana because of the proliferation of donor agencies in the country. Though aid is provided to the Ghanaian economy to address poverty and economic development challenges, the study found that foreign aid did not achieve the set objectives because of poor management of donor resources. This study, therefore, recommends that the informal economy should be promoted with funding from microfinance as an alternative to donor-driven development to effectively harness the natural resources in the country for development. / Development Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (Development Studies)

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / A migração laboral de bolivianos para São Paulo é um processo intrinsecamente relacionado aos planos de ajuste estrutural ocorridos na Bolívia e no Brasil na segunda metade dos anos 1980 e no início da década de 1990, respectivamente. Para a Bolívia, o Decreto 21.060 implicou a privatização de mineradoras e conseqüentes demissões em massa, além de uma abertura econômica que favoreceu migrações internas para as regiões cocaleiras e para as periferias das grandes cidades. Posteriormente, esses migrantes e seus familiares se destinaram a países limítrofes como Argentina e Brasil. Destaca-se nesse contexto a localidade de El Alto, origem de grande parte dos imigrantes que se destinaram a São Paulo. Do lado brasileiro, houve também uma abertura econômica que foi prejudicial a amplos setores da indústria, como a cadeia têxtil-vestuário. Para reduzir os custos de produção e aumentar sua competitividade em relação às mercadorias asiáticas, a indústria de vestuário se reestruturou defensivamente e subcontratou grande parte de sua produção material às oficinas informais que empregam imigrantes bolivianos geralmente jovens, indocumentados e com baixa qualificação profissional. Nessa pesquisa, relacionamos esse fluxo populacional às transformações estruturais ocorridas nos dois países, destacando as mudanças nas relações de trabalho decorrentes do processo de reestruturação produtiva. Também abordamos as redes de solidariedade desses imigrantes e os meios pelos quais estes vêm revertendo uma inserção na sociedade de destino em que predominam condições precárias de trabalho e habitação, além de uma instabilidade permanente decorrente da irregularidade documental que atinge grande parte desses trabalhadores. / The Bolivian immigration to São Paulo is related to the structural adjustment plans which took place in both countries. In Bolivia, the State mines were privatized, meaning the loss of approximately thirty thousand jobs. The open trade policy was also harmful to familiar agriculture and both policies were followed by the migration to coca zones, the outskirts of the biggest cities and other countries, like Argentina and Brazil. In this context, the population of the city of El Alto located in the outskirts of La Paz - grew steeply and became the origin of most of the immigrants that travelled to São Paulo. On the Brazilian side, the trade-opening was harmful to many industrial sectors and led to their productive restructuring. That was the case of the garment sector which, to reduce its costs, outsourced the production to the sweatshops where the Bolivians work. These immigrants are mostly poor, undocumented and have low education level. In this research, we also relate this population flow to the structural transformations in these two countries, like the changes in the labor relations that occurred due to the productive restructuring processes. We also address the solidarity networks of these immigrants and the means by which they are improving their conditions on the destination society, where precarious work and habitation conditions prevail as well as a permanent instability as result of the irregular documentation for a expressive part of these workers.

This thesis examines how the agency of informal vendors in Kampala, Uganda, is shaped by the state. It argues that efforts by the President and the NRM to monopolize political power have dramatically restricted the agency of informal street and market vendors, forcing them to adapt to changing political circumstances in ways that have limited their ability to participate in urban development and economic life. This argument is presented through two examples of how expanding political control has led to a contraction of vendors’ agency. The first of these describes how the early decentralization and democratization reforms introduced by the NRM allowed street vendors to take advantage of competition between newly elected and empowered politicians to remain on the city’s streets, and how the central government’s subsequent recentralization and de-democratization of political power in Kampala has led to the repression of street vending while closing the channels of influence that vendors previously enjoyed. The second explores how efforts by the central government to undermine the opposition-led local government allowed market vendors to successfully oppose an unpopular market privatization initiative, and how both the President and the new city government have since been able to take advantage of disputes within markets for their own purposes while vendors have been largely unable to realize their market management and development ambitions. Both examples detail the causes, forms and implications of the ruling party’s monopolization of political power and explore how vendors have responded to their changing political circumstances, highlighting how these efforts face significant obstacles due to the increasingly restrictive environment in which vendors are forced to act. This thesis shows that the agency of informal vendors—while always manifest in certain ways—is constantly and increasingly constrained as the President and the ruling party tighten their grip on power. As their political exclusion precipitates a broader exclusion from urban development and economic life, informal vendors are forced to contend with a situation of increasing marginalization and vulnerability that they are largely unable to improve.