This research investigates the implementation of e-government systems in Dubai, as seen through and shaped by the lived experiences of ICT professionals who work in the public sector. The research employs a conceptual lens based on Fountain’s technology enactment framework for e-government. This is used to capture the discursive relationship between institutional arrangements within the UAE’s public sector and enacted technology. Concepts of sensemaking and enactment are used to explore the local perceptions and actions of ICT professionals drawing on both new and existing institutional resources. The research draws on the case study of one of the largest public sector organizations in Dubai that was engaged with the implementation of e-government projects in the period of 1999-2007. The research explores the lived experiences of ICT professionals working on the planning, development and management of e-government systems and their responses to events over the course of the project. The research focuses on key events during three definitive time periods: The beginning of the e-government project; progress in the implementation of the project and finally the closure of the project and starting the new. The implementation of the e-government project is informed by these lived experiences that occur within and relate to wider institutional dynamics. Namely, the dynamics as new public management and e-government encounter local traditions of bureaucracy and socio-cultural norms of the UAE’s public sector. The research shows how micro level interactions are part of an on-going process of appropriating the newly arrived formats for e-government. The main argument in this thesis is that the ICT staff’s actions respond to dynamics between new and existing institutions and this substantially contributes to the emergence and shaping of locally meaningful ICT innovations in Dubai’s public sector. The research adds to the limited body of exploratory studies of e-government implementation that are based on a social constructivist view. The research further extends the discourse on globalization and ICTs by discussing how the influences of disembedded global institutions take form within local contexts and shape e-government projects.

This thesis is conducted on the premise that the existing legal, policy and governance frameworks are insufficient to protect biodiversity from the alarming loss it is facing now. It argues that these frameworks are crafted to conform to the dominant paradigm of anthropocentrism; a paradigm which believes that humans are the pinnacle of creation and everything on Earth, including the Earth itself destined to satisfy only the interests of humanity without having their own purpose. By showing how anthropocentric worldview conceived, developed and spread, and how this worldview managed to influence societal collective consciousness to govern the relationship established between humans and the nonhuman nature, the thesis argues that loss of biodiversity not a problem in itself. Rather it is a symptom of the underlying problem rooted in human thinking, guided by anthropocentric worldview. Anthropocentrism has become a powerful paradigm that succeeded in permeating into dominant religions, knowledge base and legal systems of countries of the world, including Ethiopia. The thesis contends that law, as mirror of dominant paradigms and perceptions, reflects the values of these paradigms, at international as well as national levels putting protection of biodiversity within the interpretations of these paradigms. It argues that the human treatment of the natural environment is on a scale of violence which puts the survival of humans and that of the environment at a precarious condition. Based on evidence from the review of evolutionary science and the Holy Scriptures, the thesis argues that humans are deeply connected to and dependent on the Earth systems and are responsible to maintain these systems which are functioning in a holistic manner to support all life on Earth. Promoting the proposition of Thomas Berry that the Earth is a community of subjects not a collection of objects, it contends that biodiversity has intrinsic value in addition to instrumental value, deserving ethical extension. Drawing on these concepts, the thesis suggests, by adopting a reformist approach, a shift from the reductionist notion of anthropocentrism to ecocentrism via the new philosophy called Earth jurisprudence. Earth jurisprudence is believed to correct and heal the conflicting relationship that humans established with the nonhuman nature, with the view to reconciling the present legal, policy and governance systems which have been dominated by anthropocentric perspectives. Through the vehicle of Earth jurisprudence, it is hoped that humans assume a stewardship responsibility for the mutual benefits of humans and nonhuman nature. The thesis finally deals with a case study conducted in Sheka zone in the Southwest Ethiopia. The case study is done with the purpose of exploring the TEG systems of indigenous/local communities which are believed to conform to the tenets of the Earth jurisprudence, the philosophy of law which is chosen by this work to guide the protection of biodiversity. The case study came out with findings that the Sheka TEG systems are good examples of customary practices that provide better protection for biodiversity. Exemplary lessons can be drawn from the Sheka TEG systems to amend the dominant legal, policy and governance regimes.

This thesis explores formative assessment and feedback in China. The study examined how Chinese students at a university in China experienced different feedback types from their Chinese instructors, and what their attitudes towards those were. A mixed-methods approach, using a self-administered, electronically distributed questionnaire and a semi-structured, one-on-one, face-to-face interview, was employed to this end. A total of 232 students – mostly undergraduates – took part, each of whom completed the questionnaire and 30 of whom were interviewed. A large number of students conveyed an awareness of the formative potential of feedback as well as an expectation towards it playing this role, primarily in terms of learning improvement and being psychologically supportive. Marks and grades were shown to play a dominating and not always unsupportive role. The majority of participants reported overall positive effects of the feedback they were given on aspects of their learning and psychology. However, many felt the feedback they received to be qualitatively as well as quantitatively insufficient. The study aimed to shed light on a research area and geographical context where accounts in English from a Western perspective are limited. The overarching conclusion of the study’s findings is that there appears to be significant convergence between scholars’ and Chinese students’ expectations of effective feedback. A key recommendation for future research is to conduct further studies into students’ perceptions of feedback in non-Western contexts.

Ethiopia has experimented with land law reforms linked to agriculture-led national development strategies that Emperor Haile Sellassie I, Derg, and EPRDF introduced since Emperor Menelik II enacted modern Ethiopia’s first reform intended for development in 1908. Nonetheless, the country’s smallholder productivity averaged 1.0 ton/hectare and its poverty ranked 174th in the UNDP Human Development Index in 2011. This thesis examines whether and how land law reform can be used to help raise smallholder productivity and tackle poverty in Ethiopia notwithstanding the challenges of legal pluralism. By drawing upon evidence from law and development research and experience and analysing it in the Ethiopian context, the thesis argues that reform can help raise smallholder productivity, but only by recognising legal pluralism and changing the land tenure system’s formal state or non-formal customary land policies, laws, and institutions which constrain the provision and implementation of productivity-raising smallholder land rights that enhance tenure security, facilitate the transfer of rights over land, and authorise the collateralisation of land rights; and tackle poverty by thereby increasing food supplies, raising incomes, and improving health, education, and other necessities for the country’s predominantly rural population. Specifically, the thesis explores the possibility of using reform to adopt a hybrid state-private-customary land policy that combines the advantages of state land ownership policy that the government enforces, private ownership that critics favour, and non-formal arrangements that society uses. It then highlights how within the framework of this hybrid policy reform may help issue land laws boosting the provision of land rights that enhance tenure security by specifying definition of state, private, and communal landholdings, certification of lifelong usufructuary landholding, stricter eviction and confiscation procedures, and clearer expropriation and compensation mechanisms; that facilitate transfer by easing lease, donation, and succession restrictions; and that authorise collateralisation conditionally. Finally, it demonstrates how reform may help establish land institutions that improve implementation by incorporating non-formal arrangements, establishing a federal executive institution, clarifying the mandates of regional institutions, and assigning the judiciary greater dispute resolution role.

The thesis examines the nature and mechanisms of land alienation in the context of Ethiopia's history of land relations and the role of national and global actors. In consideration of these themes, the study has adopted a contextual analysis of law and policy. Data from fieldwork has informed the core themes. It has also involved a combination of doctrinal legal research and documentary policy research augmented by quantitative data. The research considers issues of land alienation in the situation where the main relevant perspectives argue for the abolition of the people's ownership of land approach embodied in the country's 1995 Constitution and its replacement by private ownership of land (privatization perspective) or for its modification to allow alienation of land use rights (revisionist perspective) or for its change into village ownership of land with a possibility of market transfer of land use rights (associative ownership perspective). In addition to their promotion of one or another form of land alienation, the above three perspectives focus on consideration of ways to break the bureaucratic power of the State over land. This study contends that a focus on these issues has prevented the perspectives from fully identifying and thus explaining features of the ongoing land alienation in Ethiopia including the position of international institutions. This thesis therefore claims that there is an underlying shift towards marketable property in land in favor of actors who are assumed to be 'better land improvers. This is happening in a dual context of significant land poverty and economic growth.' Land alienation is being manifested in rural land expropriation laws, administrative and judicial endorsement of kontract, absence of recognition of communal lands and transfer by the State of the communal rural lands to large-scale farmers through the deployment of discourses such as 'empty land' and the 'tragedy of the commons.' This gravitation clashes with the people's ownership of land approach that provides for agricultural land for peasants and pastoralists, security of their landholdings and a ban on land alienation. The tilt has resulted in another tension between federal and regional governments where the Centre claims that efficiency demands that it handle land transfers to developers whereas the regions assert their constitutional power over land. Similarly, global institutions are involved in a contradiction because they prescribe land rights to the poor as a strategy to reduce poverty in Ethiopia and at the same time they encourage large-scale land grants in accordance with `principles of responsible agricultural investment.' The thesis proposes an affirmation of the constitutional principles concerning land with a proper form of constitutionality.

The thesis is about a contextual and prospective analysis of the Ethiopian variant of plea bargaining focusing on the major components of legal culture, legal structure and principles of criminal law and procedure. To this end, it makes use of a thorough analysis of policy and reform documents, laws, as well as comparative literature, interviews and questionnaires. The thesis argues that the Ethiopian variant of plea bargaining is less desirable and feasible. It hardly fits into the Ethiopian legal system for it is constrained by inherent due process concerns in an exacerbated fashion as well as structural/institutional and cultural limitations. Here three subarguments emerge: First, plea bargaining which inherently relates less to evidence and circumvents fundamental principles of criminal law and procedure, aimed at ensuring the integrity of the process, is likely to yield , inter alia, inaccurate outcomes- the innocence problem. With a less developed legal structure (weak defence in particular) and weak legal culture/rule of law, the problem would be exceptionally formidable in Ethiopia. Second, huge structural and functional limitations of legal institutions- the police, the prosecution, the judiciary, and the defence/legal aid, mean plea bargaining would not fare well. Third, plea bargaining tends to be incompatible with the prevailing legal culture. In America and Western Europe, it is often characterized by problems of fairness and outcome inaccuracy. On the face of weak legal culture/rule of law, it remains to be more so in Ethiopia. While plea bargaining may solve problems of delay and enhance efficiency in many jurisdictions, it is not a universal prescription, though. With jurisdictions like Ethiopia whose legal institutions and legal culture are less developed; whose trial appears to be simple, inexpensive, less utilized and correlates very loosely as an underlying cause of delay, plea bargaining is less likely to offer the desired efficiency gains even at all costs. Conversely, it would be more of a liability than an asset at least in three senses: it is likely to yield inaccurate outcomes- wrongful convictions in an aggravated fashion; put defendant`s rights at greater risk, and leave a room for abuses and corruptions.

Amidst intense port competition in Northeast Asia, competitiveness in port operations is a critical issue in adopting and implementing sustainability practice that incorporate economic, environmental, social and operational perspectives. Notwithstanding the importance of sustainability practice for sustainable port operations, very few studies have investigated its links with operational sustainability and competitiveness. For this reason, in order to encourage the proactive adoption and implementation of sustainability practice in port operations, this study aims to analyse the role of sustainability practice in managing competitiveness and continuous improvements in operational performance, based on mega container ports operations. To address this issue, this study adopted a two-phase research design which incorporates a preliminary field study and empirical research. At first, to understand the specific and general features of sustainability practice in commercial port operations, preliminary field work through semi-structured face-to-face interviews were undertaken. Interviews validated the attributes of sustainability practice in the container port operational context, investigating the relevant issues. Thereafter, based on data collected from 203 organisations engaged in container port operations in Northeast Asia, the feasible relationships among sustainability practice, competitiveness and performance were analysed using hierarchical moderator regression analysis in SPSS 21. Finally, the results revealed that sustainability practice has a significant contribution as a moderator to the relationship between competitiveness, particularly in operational efficiency and service quality, and operational performance. The two-phase research design made it possible to define and validate the role of sustainability practice in managing the relationship between competitiveness and performance. With regard to theory, this study has placed the case of Northeast Asia in a global context. Secondly, the direct relationships between determinants of megaport competitiveness and performance in the context of container port operations were verified. Thirdly, the specific routes, what is achievable and how sustainability practice contributes to enhancing the relationships between determinants of megaport competitiveness and operational performance, were revealed in a container port operational context. For the ports industries, this study has provided useful insights to establish strategies for sustainable port operations and a strategic agenda to assist ports to incorporate sustainability practice, providing evidence that this will contribute to enhancing their overall competitiveness. The findings are expected to be utilised further in future studies on sustainable port development and operations, as well as to provide guidance for port operators in its future improvement strategy.

The problem of biodiversity loss has been raised as a significant global issue for several years. There have been many significant attempts to cooperate at an international level. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was launched as a mechanism for multinational cooperation for global biodiversity conservation at international policy level among the signatory parties. Despite the formulation of the CBD, biodiversity policy has suffered in its framework, institution and practices. Biodiversity has continued being destroyed at a rapid rate. Previous research on biodiversity policy evaluation studied only some parts of the policy cycle but did not point out the strengths and weaknesses clearly leading to difficulties in holistic policy cycle of both formulation and implementation. This thesis evaluates effectiveness of biodiversity policy in Thailand as a signatory nation of CBD, principally in Indo-Burma and Sundaland biodiversity hotspots. They are important as a reservoir of the richest but most threatened plants and animals. While biosphere reserve has been established to allow locals utilising biodiversity as well as conservation, biodiversity threats have continuously been found. The policy was formulated and implemented to conserve them. The research was conducted to address this gap by thoroughly investigating the policy cycle in the development, implementation and evaluation of biodiversity policy, which truly reflecting political, socio-economic, cultural and environmental contexts. Thailand was taken as a case study and within this, three culturally diverse geographic locations were selected: North, Northeast and South biosphere reserves reflecting different ecosystems and cultures. This offered a detailed and complex analysis of development and implementation of the biodiversity policy throughout Thailand. An inductive approach and qualitative methods were applied using in-depth semi-structured and unstructured interviews with policy makers, decision makers, as well as focus groups with local stakeholders through the application of culturally sensitive policy evaluation methods. The findings suggested that biodiversity policy implementation failed in Thailand and policy formulation had a low level of participation from the locals. Local stakeholders demonstrated little engagement with the need for biodiversity information from the government. Bureaucrats, decision makers and policy developers also shared little enthusiasm for initiating effective policy. It is important that awareness raising and education enhancement, particularly with children so that they will learn from early age. At local level, the policy must be carefully implemented to engage local stakeholders in biodiversity conservation. It is significant that biodiversity policy will be effective if it applies a bottom-up approach and requires grassroots participation. The recommendations for biodiversity policy, in the long term, the government should take into account local views towards national policy and bring this to the international level to achieve sustainable biodiversity conservation. Thus, it offers new insights into the success or failure of biodiversity policy in developing countries that was affected by cultural factors which must be taken into account during the entire policy cycle by the international community.

This thesis examines how Israeli critical activist engagement with the Palestinian call for just peace reframes Israel-Palestine. The thesis makes a political-theoretical intervention by arguing that Israeli civil society engagement with the principles underlying just peace requires, if it is to be successful, the utilisation of non-statist conceptualisations of peace politics. The thesis draws upon feminist critical theory and postcolonial critique to theorise peace politics as a practice of solidarity. From this perspective the conflict is analysed through the prism of Nancy Fraser’s ‘all affected’ principle which asserts that all those whose lives and wellbeing are affected by an institution of power, whether that be a state or a transnational corporation, are subjects of justice in relation to that institution, whether they hold the same citizenship as its representatives or not. Thus, by virtue of sharing the same, albeit politically diffentiated, geo-political space Israelis and Palestinians residing in Israel within its 1948 borders, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as the refugees outside Israel-Palestine, are subjects of justice and potential solidarity. As such, the Palestinians have the right to demand justice not only from the state of Israel but also from its citizens. The activist work, narratives and responses of three critical Israeli case study groups are examined in relation to the call for just peace: Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW), the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), and Zochrot (Remembering). The activist narratives and practices examined testify to the way in which critical Israeli engagement with nonviolent ethical responsibility towards the Palestinian people can result in unprecedented narrative convergence, practical solidarity, and the possibility for non-domination and cohabitation. These critical activist practices reveal just peace as an emergent and ongoing project to reframe and rearticulate the contemporary relations of oppression and domination in Israel-Palestine.

In documented incidents alone, between January 2006 and December 2009, 900 people were killed in 534 incidents of group conflict in Turkana. On the basis of this apparent lawlessness, the central research question queries whether the apparent inability of the state law and its institutions to manage group conflicts in Turkana districts denotes a crisis of application or a crisis of substance. Is the problem merely the extension of structures of state law such as courts, prosecutors, security agents, prisons and advocates to Turkana or does the crisis speak to a more fundamental challenge. The research argues the latter, that the relationship between state law and group conflicts in Turkana demands an interrogation of the conceptual and institutional dimensions of modern state law. The thesis interrogates how state law is incorporated; an apparatus of power through which certain regulative rationalities come to reframe the terrain upon which people in Turkana live and define their lives. In order to move state law in a radically improving direction, the research argues for a reorientation of rationalities and legality. The reorientation is advanced through two corresponding techniques that allude to the structural and perspectival elements of state law. Fashioned from amongst the unfinished representations of modernity and the initial task of conceiving a (post)colonial tension between regulation and emancipation, the first task involves building on those progressive aspects of state law that enhance its political legitimacy. The second requires the adoption of a transgressive mode of thinking described as 'knowledge-as-emancipation'. On the basis of these two prescriptions, state law can develop a more purposeful and emancipatory purpose within the conflict context of Turkana in particular, and Kenya in general.