Can rural renewable energy projects simultaneously meet the multiple goals of sustainable development, climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation? If so, under what conditions? Rural communities throughout Latin America have increasingly suffered the impacts of climate change and few policies exist to help them adapt to these impacts. The basic infrastructure and services that they frequently lack can be provided by low carbon technologies, potentially funded by international carbon finance flows that could enable the Millennium Development Goals of economic growth and poverty alleviation to be met while minimizing carbon emissions. This research will focus on this interrelationship among development, climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation policies and practices using political ecology to analyse community renewable energy projects in rural Central America. I assess fifteen community-owned renewable energy projects in Guatemala and Nicaragua to analyse whether current renewable energy projects are achieving these goals in an integrated way. The projects were established primarily as development, emissions reductions, climate change adaptation and disaster relief. The projects are evaluated on economic, development and climate change indicators that include sustainable development, poverty alleviation, emissions reductions, and climate vulnerability. I examine how the type of common property governance, local historical and environmental background and project implementation process influence the project success in meeting multiple objectives of climate adaptation, mitigation and development. Research methods include participatory poverty assessment techniques, semi-structured interviews, stakeholder analysis, and a combination of rapid and participatory methods. The analysis of sustainable development and vulnerability used the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach methodologies and emissions reductions were calculated using standard carbon reduction methodologies. The results show that, under certain conditions, renewable energy projects can simultaneously meet these three objectives, and thus that responses to climate change can be integrated with poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Small scale hydroelectric and solar systems can reduce emissions, enable adaptation and help local livelihoods although there are numerous problems that limit the success of projects including poor design, inequitable distribution of benefits, and poorly designed governance and maintenance structures.

This thesis is offered as a contribution to studies of social and cultural change in the Icelandic fisheries and fishing communities. Such changes may be seen as a result of the interplay of internal dynamics with both national and global forces and processes, not least with regard to the impacts of fisheries governance. These changes occur also in an international context of new environmental ideologies and perceptions of marine mammals, with consequences for social dynamics of local resource-use. Here it is argued that the conflicts over the harvesting or conservation of cetaceans can productively be understood from a cultural perspective. The thesis discusses the elevation of whales as symbols of particular value, and the metaphorical and cognitive aspects of, in particular, anthropomorphism, the projection of human motives and values onto animal behaviour, as a significant and effective part of conservation rhetoric and ideology. Specifically, the thesis deals with issues concerning whaling and whale watching along with issues and debates concerning these alternative forms of exploiting marine mammals. It also discusses central questions regarding fisheries governance and rights to fishing with reference to social and economic viability in Icelandic fishing communities. The unifying themes of this thesis are: how marine-mammal issues and controversies and social impacts of fisheries governance form part of globalization processes; how environmental and economic paradigms influence change, particularly in terms of marine-mammal conservation campaigns and market liberalist resource policy; and how these external ideological forces call for responses at local and national levels. The adaptive actions of the human agents and communities involved are described as creative, cumulative and complex. The thesis also highlights the central transformative role of the new regime of private property rights introduced into Icelandic fisheries governance in the 1980s.