This doctoral thesis features two kinds of skill-training programmes implemented in Tamil Nadu (India) drawing on 18 months of fieldwork. The first explores how Nokia recruits and trains semi-skilled youth to work as Operators, in the Nokia SEZ, in Sriperumbudur. I contrast this with the case of Project SEAM: a state-funded skill-training programme, implemented by a private firm through a public-private partnership (PPP). SEAM trains rural, below-poverty-line youth, to work as sewing machine operators in India’s burgeoning garment clusters. I argue that contemporary India’s development trajectory is characterised by the confluence between an increasingly pluralised network state and rapidly proliferating network enterprises, which work together to establish new workplaces and design and implement skill-training programmes for India’s rural poor. Skill-training is used as a lens to examine the complex, symbiotic relationship between these two actors, who drive these new initiatives. Skill development programmes are predicated on the idea that aspiration is a positive, transformative force – a view that is echoed by social scientists like Appadurai (2004; 2013). I demonstrate how the network state and network enterprise, shape and mould youth aspirations, across the skill-training cycle: transforming (within mere weeks) unemployed, unskilled rural youth – into semi skilled workers, ready to work in the manufacturing sector. Youth aspirations are consciously heightened as a marketing strategy, to maximize enrollments into skill-training programmes. Aspiration is also actively taught as a valuable soft-skill, that young people must possess, to become a part of India’s new workplaces. Through an exploration of how young people encounter such initiatives, I question the idea that aspirations are positively transformational. I highlight the tension in youth experience - between aspirations elevated by the training program, and factory work’s harder realities - to illustrate the dark side of aspiration: characterized by disillusionment, disappointment and personal failure.

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In the last decade, the reach of New Public Management (NPM) has stretched well beyond its Western origins as modernising African governments and their global health partners have sought to import new approaches. Public health systems in Africa are entirely different to those of the West however, and this sort of application introduces a number of contextually-specific questions that are not considered by the majority of the NPM literature. The few studies that do investigate NPM in Africa are evaluative in content, seeking to understand whether reforms work and to identify barriers to success. Invariably, whether they find in favour of public management reform or not, the same issues are highlighted: lack of capacity, weak institutions, and improper implementation. This thesis will build a theory of NPM reform that is particular to the African context. I develop this theoretical extension through an intensive ethnographic case study of one of the most important on-going public health reform efforts in Africa—the transformation of the entire Ethiopian hospital system to an NPM-style administrative regime. I develop a constructionist theory of African NPM through thick description of the hospitals under reform. I detail the various ways in which the reforms are indigenised as they meet up with local understandings, institutions, and market contexts, and the inevitable unintended consequences as managers seek to ‘make do’ in environments radically different to those of NPM’s origins. I then conduct a detailed consumer analysis to describe the strategies employed by patients seeking care. Patients from different class positions use very different strategies to get health services and I demonstrate that the reform has very different consequences for Ethiopians across classes. Many patients are not recognisable as the ‘customers’ described in the reform documents, and so the hospitals do not organise their reform efforts to serve them.

The purpose of this thesis is to ethnographically explore the social life of health reform policy. This thesis focuses on the Ponce Center, a safety net HIV clinic in Atlanta. The thesis engages with a fragmented healthcare world, and the inhabitants of these worlds who are charged with rectifying the fragmentation and make care possible. They are, in technical language, service providers, whether they are policy-makers, patients, or political activists. In order to make the healthcare and policy worlds functional, the AIDS community in Atlanta perceive their first task as attempting to connect aspects of the fragmented healthcare assemblage that are otherwise disparate. The core theme of this thesis is articulations, translations, and piecing together aspects of everyday life particularly with regard to various ways of contending with fragmentation. This thesis explores the relationship between the affective, ideological, physical and structural dynamics of inequality, poverty, vulnerability, identity, and a sense of community and belonging. This thesis is about the policy processes. It does not focus on policy-making, but policy interpretation, implementation, and enactment in Atlanta, Georgia. The thesis tracks the appropriation and contestation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a site of interaction between the experience of HIV as a pre-existing condition, inequitable access to treatment through health insurance, and larger social policy and poverty discourses. Finally, it considers the processes by which major policy reforms draw in disparate actors, who are embedded in complex networks of power and resource relations - assemblages - and inevitably play a role in reshaping society.

Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), defined by international law as constituting the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (the latter includes East Jerusalem), are among the highest recipients of international humanitarian aid per capita in the world. In Prolonged Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories, I examine the impact of primarily Western aid on Palestinian society in the present phase of de-development in the OPT (2010-2013). I examine four domains in particular: medical relief, psychosocial humanitarianism, gender-based interventions, and security-sector support. My research reveals the interlinked nature of these domains as well as the blurring of development and humanitarian assistance in the OPT. A central purpose of this research is to provide an ethnographic account of contemporary Palestinian subjectivity under prolonged humanitarian governance, thereby contributing to scholarship on conflict and violence, modern Middle Eastern studies, the anthropology of policy and humanitarianism, and critical development studies. / Anthropology

In this project, I look at the work of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and the role that brokers at the organization play in constructing, promoting, and institutionalizing a body of LGBT human rights. While a great deal is being written about the diffusion of LGBT politics and human rights discourses from the Global North, there are few ethnographic analyses of who is doing the exporting, how, and toward what ends. Based on a year of fieldwork in IGLHRC’s New York and Cape Town offices, I look at the history of IGLHRC, the interactions among brokers and how these shape their daily work, how brokers understand their mandate and the hybridity that it so often requires, and how partnership with groups in the Global South, the production, verification, and circulation of information, and the possibilities and constraints of the formal human rights arena all shape the work that brokers do. Ultimately, I conclude that human rights advocacy must be understood holistically if it is to be understood at all. Such advocacy always necessarily involves a degree of theoretical elaboration, promotion, and codification by human rights defenders and NGOs, and focusing exclusively on one or another of these aspects paints a skewed portrait of what it means to work within a human rights framework. Drawing from the anthropology of sexuality, queer theory, literature on brokerage, and interdisciplinary studies of transnational advocacy networks, this project aims to deepen understandings of how LGBT NGOs and the brokers that animate them regularly engage in the construction, promotion, and institutionalization of particular understandings of sexuality and the claims that can be made by sexual subjects globally.

The global water crisis has often been presented as a crisis of governance and attributed to various factors, including the slowness of institutional adjustments to rapid structural challenges such as demographic growth, resource degradation and economic difficulties (UNU-INWEH, 2012). Despite the rapid growth of cities around the world and a fast increase in the use of desalination for freshwater supply (WHO, 2011), the dynamics of institutional change in desalinated urban water governance have never been researched. This thesis investigates the drivers, barriers and counter-forces to a major institutional change - privatisation - in the desalinated water governance of the coastal cities of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Through the cases of public private partnerships (PPPs) in Abu Dhabi and Doha and the failed attempt to implement similar PPPs in Kuwait City, this research investigates the diverse forces that have led to the implementation of this new institutional arrangement in order to question - both empirically and theoretically - the literature’s general assumption that privatisation reforms in urban water services in the South arise from structural issues, e.g. a water crisis, an economic crisis and/or a governance crisis. The three main schools of comparative studies are used systematically to test hypotheses about causal relationships between selected variables. The structural approach is applied to examine the influences of the redistributive rentier state, oil price fluctuations and regional energy integration over the privatisation process. Adopting a Post-colonial perspective, the political culture approach is used to examine critically the contemporary influences of traditional cultural features, key local institutions and foreign cultural influences over the fluctuating roles of both the State and the markets in the local urban water supply since the late 19^th century. Finally, the rational agency theory is used to examine the role in the recent privatisation process of key political figures from the ruling families. This research demonstrates that the privatisation process of desalination units in Abu Dhabi and Doha was not driven by structural factors during the 2000s, a period of high oil prices, but was initiated in the 1990s and driven the following decade by the agency of a reforming elite wanting to privatize the water sector as part of a broader dynamic of construction of a neoliberal post-rentier economy – i.e. an intermediary political economic paradigm that aims to mediate the transition from rentierism to a fully liberalized economy. The political culture approach shows that these privatisations were facilitated by a gradual shift from pure rentierism towards a post-rentier form of neoliberalism in the political philosophy of liberal water technocrats on the one hand, and towards a regional trend of ‘pious neoliberalism’ (Atia, 2011) among practicing Sunni Muslims. Nevertheless, the enduring rentier mentality has constituted a strong counter-force to privatisation dynamics. The PPPs were implemented in Abu Dhabi and Doha because the local ruling elites situated the political bargaining within the tribal institutional milieus that they mastered completely through the control of the rent and related benefits. In Kuwait however, negotiations between the ruling elites and the leading political forces, the tribes and the opposition, were situated in a parliamentary institutional milieu that the ruling elite could not control and where the opposition and tribal MPs have opposed all reforms of the rentier ruling bargain. These findings illustrate that institutional changes in desalinated water governance are not neutrally driven by uncontrollable structural forces, but are the product of political bargaining between and among various rational political actors and their coalitions. This thesis also shows that in non-democratic or semi-democratic settings, the choice of a specific institutional milieu by the authorities is critical to the successful bargaining of institutional reforms, since it determines whether some key actors - along with structural factors (e.g. rent) and cultural factors (e.g. tribal influence) - will support the process or will be able to act against it.

In this thesis, a critical analysis is proposed of the relationships between Inuit participation, science and policy in wildlife governance in the Nunavut Territory, Canada. This analysis situates the emergence of a participatory regime for the governance of wildlife in Nunavut, explores its performance and examines the relations between the ways in which wildlife governance arrangements are currently represented in policy and how they are played out in practice across the territory. To pursue these objectives, this research draws upon a number of theoretical perspectives and methodological strategies poised at a crossroads between environmental geography, science and technology studies, political ecology and ecological anthropology. It combines participant observation, semi-directed interviews and literature-based searches with approaches to the study of actor-networks, hybrid forums and scientific practices associated with Latour and Callon, as well as with Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian analyses of power, governmentality and subjectivity. This analysis suggests that the overall rationale within which wildlife governance operates in Nunavut remains largely based on a scientific and bureaucratic framework of resource management that poses significant barriers to the meaningful inclusion of Inuit views. In spite of their participation in wildlife governance through a range of institutional arrangements, consultation practices and research initiatives, the Inuit of Nunavut remain critical of the power relations embedded within existing schemes, where significant decision-making authority remains under the control of the territorial (or federal) government, and where asymmetries persist with regard to the capacity of various actors to produce and mediate their claims. In addition, while the use of Inuit knowledge, or Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, in wildlife governance in Nunavut has produced some collaborative research and management endeavours, it has also crystallised a divide between ‘Inuit’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge, generated unresolved conflicts, fuelled mistrust among wildlife co-management partners and led to an overall limited inclusion of Inuit observations, values and beliefs in decision-making.

This thesis concerns the history of humanitarian nutrition and its political implications. Drawing on aid agency archives and other historical sources, it examines how food has been delivered in emergencies, from the First World War to the present day. The approach is ethnographic: this is a study of the micro-level practices of relief, examining the objects distributed, the plans made, the techniques used. It is also historical: examining how such practices have changed over time. This thesis makes five interlocking arguments. First, I make a political point: that humanitarian action is always political, and that it is impossible to adhere to ‘classical’ humanitarian principles such as neutrality, impartiality and independence. Second, I make a sociological argument: that the activities of humanitarian nutrition have been shaped by a number of themes, which include militarism, medicine, modernity, and markets. Third, I make a historical argument: that the main features of humanitarian nutrition were solidified between the 1930s and the 1970s, and were largely in place by the time of the Biafran war. Fourth, I make a sociological argument: that these mid-century changes involved a profound redefinition of hunger and food (with hunger conceived as a biochemical deficiency, and food as a collection of nutrients). Finally, I make a normative argument, suggesting that this redefinition has not necessarily benefited the starving: the provision of food in emergencies, I argue, is often concerned with control and efficiency rather than the suffering individuals themselves.

This thesis explores the ways in which discourses of citizenship are circulated and incorporated into the practice of non-formal educational filmmaking initiatives for young people in London. I utilise an ethnographic approach focusing on young participants, adult facilitators and funders to demonstrate how youth filmmaking facilitates an exploration of abstract conceptions of citizenship with the on-the-ground reality of young peoples’ “practice” as citizens. To provide context for this material, I present both a theoretical overview of the heady yet labile term “citizenship” and a historical narrative of youth filmmaking, particularly in its relationship to wider political economies of funding and youth policy. Although discourses of citizenship in youth filmmaking have changed subtly over time, the youth filmmaking programmes considered here marshal three central conceptions of citizenship; “engagement,” “empowerment” and “belonging.” To explore each of these notions, I draw on case studies to show how these citizenship discourses become operationalised. First, I consider the Reelhood project for young Muslims, which aimed at encouraging “political engagement.” I demonstrate how young people challenge notions of “disengagement” and operate as “justice-oriented” citizens, in contradistinction to the premise of the funding source itself. Second, I use the example of the This is My Story project, amongst other films that dealt with youth violence, to explore discourses of “empowerment.” Using the metaphor of the “shot/reverse shot” sequence, I demonstrate how youth filmmaking projects situate themselves as an alternative to the representation of young people in mainstream press. Finally, I describe the River Lea project in which the sensory and technological processes of filmmaking became a means for young people to “focus in” and attune their sensory and perceptive faculties to the experience of “place-making.” Each of these case studies exhibits how the creative, social and technical processes of filmmaking provide a challenge to or re-interpretation of citizenship discourse.