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This dissertation undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the Costa Rican banana industry, including a case study based on fieldwork at an independent banana plantation in Costa Rica's Atlantic zone. A basic premise is that a coherent understanding of the banana industry and its consequences can only be achieved through the appreciation of the complexity of its organization. That is, the Costa Rican banana industry is a political-economic, socio-cultural, and environmental system articulated through a high degree of interaction at the micro and macro levels. Modernization and world systems theories are shown to provide partial and insufficient accounts of the dynamics at work in the Costa Rican banana industry. An embedded model of world systems theory, which includes aspects of sustainable development, is proposed to address these concerns. The analysis at various levels is intended to support the argument that consideration of environmental dynamics must be addressed in future theoretical accounts of development. / Following world systems theory, the strong role of the banana transnationals within the industry and in relation to national development is examined. Other links between the Costa Rican banana industry and the broader international political economy are also examined, including the 'banana wars', as well as environmental issues, such as DBCP and other agrochemical usage. Significant changes in the Costa Rican banana industry since the 1980's are considered. These include: (1) a sharp increase in banana production, and an increase in independent banana producers, (2) the dissolution of the banana unions, and their replacement with a new system of labour relations (solidarismo); and (3) the recent concern for issues of environmental destruction. These changes, combined with the centrality of the banana industry to Costa Rican development, have resulted in significant consequences at the micro level. These are manifested in the organization of banana production and in operations on the plantation, as seen with respect to working conditions, quality control and of transnational power. In addition, environmental degradation, and underdevelopment and marginalization beyond the plantation are examined as direct consequences of the Costa Rican banana industry. This is supported with extensive ethnographic detail.

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McGee in his recent writings on Asian urbanization highlights extended metropolitan regions and proximate non-urban settlement systems with an intense mixture of agricultural and non-agricultural activities. The latter McGee terms as desakota, a neologism coined in Bahasa Indonesian, to signify the fusion of desa (rural) and kota (urban). Some of the ecological preconditions for desakota are high rural population densities; labour intensive rice cultivation with agricultural labourers in need of non-farm work in the off seasons and/or labour shedding by green revolution effects. McGee however recognizes that desakota can also occur in other ecologically dense habitat of non-rice crops with high population densities. Kerala State in India is one such region with a mix of rice and non-rice crops. This study examines the urban-rural fusion that is observed in Kerala and provides an empirically informed assessment of the McGee desakota hypothesis. While basically affirming the desakota hypothesis, the study at the same time raises some caveats. First, desakota in Kerala is not dependent on any central urban system and intra-desakota dynamics are significant. While M c G e e has recognized that such desakota do occur, his writings tend to neglect this type of desakota. Second, McGee's writings on extended metropolitan regions and desakota are increasingly associated with the recent rapid e c o n o m i c growth occurring in some of the Asian countries. Desakota in Kerala blurs this characteristic as it appears to have occurred beginning in the late colonial p e r i o d of the British Raj. Third, a unique mix of factors in Kerala make the political economy central to making desakota in Kerala intelligible. Undoubtedly in the specificity of the Kerala context the political economy is important. Nonetheless this study raises a critique of the underemphasis of the political economy in McGee's work on extended metropolitan regions and desakota. The research on desakota in Kerala involved the examination of the regional geography of Kerala. Kerala with its radical politics and remarkable social development in a context of low economic growth, attracted the attention of social scientists. But in these studies the spatial dimensions were largely ignored. This study emphasizes that geography matters in understanding Kerala, and that there is an important nexus between the space and political economy of Kerala.

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Having critically examined the dominant approaches to the study of development now current in Irish geographical and historical research, the thesis outlines the need for a structurally based, historical analysis of uneven sectoral and regional development in Ireland from circa 1550 to 1750. This is achieved through examining the dialectical relationships between class, colonialism and development, involving an analysis of, in turn, land confiscation and colonisation policies, the creation of a new landed aristocracy, legislation against trade and manufacturing, and the overall retardation of development on the island. Uneven regional development is examined through contrasting the differing evolution of the North-east, where factory based industry eventually became firmly established and the remainder of the island, where agriculture remained predominant. Throughout the thesis the changing relations between internal class, and external colonial, aspects of development are highlighted.