This thesis examines the role of corporations as political authorities, focusing on corporate land acquisition and corporate provision of services and infrastructure. It considers these activities as "Company Rule," a political project to secure corporate control of territory and population, shaping power relations between corporations and the people they govern. The thesis asks what motivates companies to rule, and whether Company Rule can achieve political legitimacy. The thesis makes four main contributions. First, it develops a framework for analysing the political agency of corporations, informed by international relations theory, management science, and economic history, including empirical analysis of three historical cases of Company Rule: the British East India Company, the British South Africa Company, and the New Lanark mill town. Second, the thesis applies the framework to three contemporary case studies: the Reliance oil refinery and township in India, the Del Monte pineapple plantation and estate in Kenya, and the Lonmin platinum mine and surrounding settlements in South Africa. It finds that company actors are motivated by one or more of three key factors: utopian visions of the society their governance can deliver, a desire to counter resistance to business operations from labour, community groups or other stakeholders, and internal bureaucratic power struggles which take governance policies as a site of conflict. Third, the thesis finds that the balance of these motives varies across time and space. The policy context in which companies operate influences the particular ideological motives expressed in Company Rule. In highlighting the significance of policies that postcolonial governments have taken on the regulation of land, the thesis situates Company Rule in wider discussions of the role of territory and the social construction of space in the creation of political authority. Fourth, the thesis finds that any legitimacy Company Rule achieves relies not only on the material quality of company-provided services and infrastructure, but significantly on their normative content. Workers, communities and regulators respond to the ideological motives expressed in company governance, and it is their acceptance or rejection of these motives that determines the legitimacy of Company Rule.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between electricity market reforms and the development of renewable energy through interviews with policymakers, energy experts, and industry representatives in Brazil. Within the context of market-oriented power reforms initiated in the 1990s, policymakers have attempted to diversify the energy supply and reduce the country’s reliance on hydroelectric power. However, Brazil’s pre-existing hydropower infrastructure has hindered the diffusion of alternative options. By looking at energy auctions and net-metering regulations for wind and solar energy, this research explores the role of independent regulators in facilitating the development of non-hydro renewable sources of energy. While academic and policy debates center on designing public support schemes for renewable energy, this research argues that adaptive regulation can provide opportunities for new technologies that policy instruments alone are unable to achieve. In particular, the governance characteristics of regulatory agencies are critical to the effective articulation of renewable energy policies. Three subnational case studies further demonstrate how states and regions contribute to developing and deploying wind and solar energy technologies.

A revision of the author's thesis, Université de Paris. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-364).

Background Child development is adversely affected by the socioeconomic status of the family and community. In view of the increasing socioeconomic disparity in Hong Kong in the past decade, this proposed study aims at investigating the existence, magnitude, pattern and manifestations of socioeconomic gradients in school readiness of preschool children, as well as interpreting how these are shaped and mediated through families, institutions and the wider communities. Objectives 1) To adapt and validate the Chinese Early Development Instrument (CEDI); 2) To investigate the socioeconomic gradients in school readiness of preschool children in relation to family SES, contextual effect, and family processes. Methods This study employs a cross-sectional research design comprising two stages. Stage one was a stand-alone pilot study to translate and validate the Chinese version of Early Development Instrument (CEDI). A total of 167 K3 children (4 kindergartens) from Hong Kong Island (HKI, the affluent district) and Yuen Long (YL, the disadvantaged district) were recruited. Stage two was the main study to examine socioeconomic gradients in school readiness. 567 K3 children of 21 kindergartens from YL and HKI were recruited. Four hypotheses regarding socio-economic gradients in terms of existence, magnitude, pattern, and mediating mechanism were tested using two-level linear models. Results CEDI showed adequate internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha ranging from .70 to .95. The concurrent validity of CEDI was established using The Pearson correlations between CEDI and Hong Kong Early Child Development Scale (HKECDS), locally developed direct assessment, ranged from .39 to .66 with statistical significance (p<.05). The test-retest reliability of CEDI was analyzed, and the kappa coefficient was .89, demonstrating a good stability of CEDI. In the main study, children from YL have a significantly lower total CEDI domain score of emotional maturity (p= .025) and language and cognitive development (p= .01) than their counterparts from HKI. Girls scored significant higher on the total CEDI scores (mean= 44.5, sd= 4.80) than their male counterparts (mean=42.52, sd=6.10), and significantly less proportion of girls than boys were classified as developmentally vulnerable in at least one CEDI domains (26.0% girls vs. 35.8% boys, p=0.12). Hypothesis testing regarding existence of socioeconomic gradient by multi-level modeling suggested a significant association between the overall developmental outcomes of children and family SES index. Testing of kindergarten’s contextual effect showed that kindergarten level variables (annual school fees, teacher education background and working experience) accounted for significant proportion of variance in the total CEDI score. Additionally, our results supported the mediating effect of family processes (i.e., frequency of parent-child interactions and management of child digital use at home) in explaining socioeconomic gradients in child developmental outcomes. Conclusions CEDI is a psychometric sound measurement tool for early child development and assessing school readiness in Chinese society. Using CEDI, the evidence gathered from the main study demonstrated the existence of socioeconomic gradient with a significant association between the developmental outcomes of children and family SES, and highlighted the mediating effects from kindergarten and family levels, which are potentially modifiable to bridge the gap between the rich and poor. / published_or_final_version / Public Health / Master / Master of Public Health

There is a growing body of literature that outlines a contemporary view of the role of forests and forestry in rural development. The most common argument highlighted by the contemporary literature indicates that forests provide a wide variety of important products, both for subsistence purposes and as sources of income. This study is based on the premise that an understanding of the issues that relate to access and utilization of forest resources and their management cannot be neglected in the field of rural development, more especially in the African context wherein much of the population is still defined as rural dwellers. Furthermore, given the paradigm shifts that have been witnessed in both the approaches to rural development and natural resource management over the years, it is necessary to examine how forestry has responded to new demands, particularly in relation to its contribution to rural livelihoods. This study intended to examine the conservation and management of forest resources and their impact on sustaining rural livelihoods by using the case study of the Saint Bernard community in the Nhlazuka village in Richmond, KwaZulu-Natal province. In Saint Bernard, a communal system of managing community resources such as trees and forests forms an integral part of decision-making. The study looked at the management of both the natural and plantation forests and their impact on the livelihoods of rural communities, especially in communally owned areas. Given the nature of this study, both qualitative and quantitative methods of social science research were employed to generate data relating to the research objectives and questions. Qualitative participatory techniques used include the ranking exercise, mental mapping and venn diagram. Quantitative data was mainly obtained through a questionnaire survey. The primary data was supplemented with the secondary data relating to the focus of this study. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine to what extent Sen's freedom-centred view of development, with its existing theoretical foundations, offers sufficient theoretical insights for guiding development policies towards the enhancement of human freedoms. The theoretical part of the dissertation focuses on the three foundational building stones of Sen's freedom-centred view of development. First, the capability approach sets the evaluation space of development in the capabilities that people have reason to choose and value, but by doing so, it is argued that Sen's capability approach contains tensions between human freedom and human well-being that can be loosened by thickening this evaluation space with a substantial view of human well-being. Second, the capability approach views individual agency as central in development, but because of the socio-historical dimension of human freedom and agency, it is argued that concepts of collective capabilities and of socio-historical agency are more central in promoting human freedoms. Third, promoting human freedoms cannot be dissociated from democratic policy-making. But because the link between the two is not necessary, it is argued that the capability approach's consequentialist evaluation of human well-being will have to be thickened by a procedural evaluation which assesses the exercise of political freedom through certain normative principles of decision-making. The empirical part of the thesis illustrates these theoretical arguments through the analysis of two case studies, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. The case studies particularly point to a country's socio-historical agency, or collective capability in promoting human well-being, through socio-historical narratives. These narratives assess a country's collective capability in promoting human freedoms by looking at the country's socio-historical reality, and how its members have appropriated that reality in the course of the country's history, opening up or closing down opportunities for realising policy decisions towards the removal of unfreedoms.

Dissertation (DPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Waikato, 2007. / Title from PDF cover (viewed March 3, 2008) Includes bibliographical references (p. 308-343)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 316-336.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 165 p. : ill. (some col.), col. map. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 116-120).