This thesis analyses how Chiquitano people engage with the state and to what effect,based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between September 2006 and August 2007 in the Bolivian Concepción, San Javier and Lomerío municipalities, in the eastern Bolivian lowlands. It focuses on the most contentious areas of Chiquitanostate relations, namely the emergence of the Chiquitano social movement, the struggle for territory and territorial autonomy and participation in the local state bureaucracy. While Chiquitano interact with the state in order to protect their sociocultural communal reproduction, this thesis finds that in many ways the Chiquitano organisation acts as part of the state and replicates its neo-liberal multicultural rhetoric. The state remains the main shaper of forms of political engagement and collective identification (such as indigeneity), resonating with Fried’s (1967) and Scott’s (1998) notions that the state implies some sort of process, one of ‘restructuring’ and ‘making legible’. Consequently, this thesis argues that from the Chiquitano perspective, the election of Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2005 and his radical state reform project through the 2006-2007 Constituent Assembly, has not fundamentally transformed previous patterns of indigenous-state engagement. It posits that the more successful resistance continues to reside, perhaps more subtly, in comunidades’ socio-cultural relations.

Despite the importance of satellite-enabled applications to society, geographical discussions of the space sector have been dominated by accounts of the geopolitics ‘up there’, without due consideration of the industry driving the use of space ‘down here’. As a result, the geography of the space sector, and the interactions between the agents and institutions involved, have been overlooked in the academic literature. To address this ‘silence’, this thesis explores the competitiveness, organisation and governance of the UK space sector. The primary method of data collection for this thesis was eighty semi-structured interviews with representatives from the UK space sector. The conceptual framework integrated economic and geopolitical concepts on competitiveness, organisation and governance. Key findings of this thesis include: (i) orbital slots and frequency spectrum are competitive assets, which highlight the verticality of our economy; (ii) heritage is a source of competitiveness, which can cause technological lock-in; (iii) different segments within the UK space sector manage their own production projects, which are linked by buyer-supplier relationships (BSRs); (iv) BSRs are influenced by buyers, contracts, technology, time and geography; and (v) the governance of the UK space sector is multi-centric, with a dominance of regulatory forms.

Recent debate has focused on the role of state spatial approaches to the governance of an increasingly networked and fluid economy. This has seen transitions in both the scale of practise, focused on meso-level spaces, and the form of scalar fix, progressing from region to city-region and Functional Economic Area. As theories of spatial economy argue an increasingly dispersed mode of practise, integrated into global exchanges, state spatiality has responded through spatial reform to capitalise on this networked model. This study seeks to understand the link between spaces of economic governance, the formal spaces in which meso-level policy is pursued, and spaces of economic production, created by flows of firm transaction and exchange. Situated in the Southern Staffordshire area of the English Midlands, it considers how these forms of space are constructed, interpreted and integrated through articulations and practices of state spatial policy. Using a relational framework, interpreting space as a dynamic phenomenon, it considers the critical factors linking spaces of economic production and economic governance and the influence of ongoing rescaling tendencies within state and industrial strategy. It proposes whilst the sub-national has been debated as a critical point of convergence for these separate spatial articulations, this is highly selective through its capacity to interpret spatial economy and privileging of specific spatial and sectoral interests.

The research examines the way gender relations affect land management and the perception and experience of degradation in two communities in rural Kano, northern Nigeria. Gender plays a central role in the organisation of northern Nigerian society, not least because of the prevalence of wife seclusion and the strict separation of male and female space. The Nigerian government considers desertification and land degradation to be the main environmental issue affecting northern Nigerian communities and links it to poverty and food insecurity, and considerable sums are targeted towards it. Agriculture is the mainstay of rural economies in the region, but women farmers are a minority of the public workforce in agricultural production and the extent of their involvement decreases with increasing seclusion. The study focuses on this minority and examines the interaction of 2 groups of women with natural resources, one secluded and the other non-secluded, their perception of and response to land degradation and their land management practices. The study finds that though gender is an important differentiation, both men’s and women’s views are influenced by their socio-economic positions. The study finds that the women’s land management practices are mediated by their relationships with men and with other women. Men act as a cushion to certain aspects of land degradation such as food insecurity, but other important aspects of women’s lives such as their social net-works and their economic independence are vulnerable. The study also uncovers the centrality of faith in people’s experience of and response to environmental change.

As the global population urbanises, the benefits derived from contact with nature increasingly depend upon the presence of diverse urban ecological communities. These may be threatened by changes in land-cover and the intensification of land-use. A key question is how to design and manage cities to retain desirable species, habitats and processes. Addressing this question is challenging, due to the dominant role of humans in shaping spatially and temporally complex urban landscapes. Earlier research identified ecological patterns along urban–rural gradients, often using simplified measures of built form and disturbance. The central theme within this thesis is that we require a more mechanistic understanding of the processes that created today‘s ecological patterns, which recognises the interactions between social and ecological sub-systems. Using bats (Chiroptera) as a case study group, I identified a broadly negative association between bat activity and built density. Urban tree networks appeared beneficial for one species, and further work revealed that their role in facilitating movement depended upon the size of gaps in tree lines and their illumination level. Resilience analyses were used to map diverse dependencies between the functioning of urban bat habitats and human social factors; illustrating the value of a more mechanistic systems-based approach.

One response to the increasing pressure of urban living is in the re-appropriation of public spaces and urban green to help sustain and enhance the environmental, social and cultural life of cities. But a major paradox arises here: while they are increasingly leaning on voluntarist discourses of sustainability, the pressure of privatization, the implementation of risk-based policies and the general principles of consumer-based urban economies only scarcely fit with the notion of common, public spaces, and hardly accommodate with the freedom of their users or their alternative or even subversive occupation. Using an explicitly anarchist analytical lens and based on extensive fieldwork in Birmingham and Belfast (UK) and Amsterdam (NL), this thesis uses an ethno-geographic approach, consisting mainly of documents and policy analysis, semi-structured interviews and field notes to replace urban green commons in their broader spatial, social and political networks. It demonstrates how sustainability is a consensual but ultimately undetermined political object. Emerging co-operative processes of environmental governance and stewardship are identified and traced to the development of a new category of actors and networks. The potential of urban green commons to foster more resilient, socially inclusive cities is assessed alongside the need for radically re-politicized urban environments.

Research into coworking has failed to take space seriously. I address this concern by analysing three ‘coworking spaces’ as meeting places constituted as a ‘bundle of trajectories’, following Doreen Massey’s (2005) reimagining of space. Understood as the product of lively interrelations and coexisting heterogeneity, I examine claims that these pay-to-access shared workplaces create the conditions for happenstance meetings between ‘like-minded entrepreneurs’. In doing so, I make connections with feminist and poststructural geographies concerned with relational performances, working bodies and diverse economic practices (Gregson and Rose, 2000; McDowell, 2009 and Gibson-Graham, 2006a; 2006b). By researching through coworking, I make three interconnected arguments. Firstly, despite attempts to separate spaces of home and work, these boundaries are continuously negotiated and contested. Secondly, amidst claims that these architectural spaces are designed to feel like ‘fast-paced laboratories’ orchestrating chance encounters, I insist that embodied experiences can be far more ambiguous. Thirdly, I consider how the performative ontologies of diverse economies might fracture and infect the coherence of these apparently ‘entrepreneurial’ spaces. Together, this brings a new perspective to recent geographic scholarship on architectural inhabitations addressing concerns that there has been limited attention towards human subjectivities.

While many countries in the West have been broadly pursing policies of deinstitutionalisation since the latter half of the 20th Century, orphanages remain the norm for many countries. Orphanage research has often tended to be conducted through a bio-psychological lens, and there remains little qualitative research to reveal the nuances of micro-scale practices taking place within these institutions. This thesis employs a multi-sited ethnography and explores the orphanage as a complex institution influenced by Soviet and Post-Soviet practices of childcare. In particular, this research draws upon an ethnography conducted in an orphanage for children with severe intellectual disabilities. The thesis considers the multiscalar nature of this institution and explores childhood mobilities, agency and elements of discipline and control within the institution, destabilising the notion of the orphanage as an environment of care. This research addresses significant empirical lacunae in human geography and studies of post-socialism through an ethnographic study of Russia's disability orphanages. This research also challenges understandings of mobility in children's geographies by drawing upon theories of coerced and disciplined mobility. Finally, in highlighting the vulnerability of these children, this thesis develops the concept of 'contingent agency' to provide a more nuanced understanding of agency in children's geographies.

This thesis presents a comprehensive institutional analysis of China’s urban tap water provision system from a ‘source to sip’ holistic research perspective. With the examination of each agent’s function in the system, this thesis coins the concepts of semi-potable tap water and Hybrid Institutional Architecture to illustrate the essence of China’s urban water provision system as a ‘source to consumer’ semi-potable tap water provision system. Based on this argument, the concept of Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix is established with analyses of its seven facilitating factors to explain Chinese tap water consumers’ involvement in the potable water production. Their activities have established a ‘consumer to sip’ potable water production process, functioning as a compensation to ‘source to consumer’ urban semi-potable tap water provision system. The combination of these two systems is a ‘source to sip’ urban potable tap water provision system. This thesis also provides a detailed analysis of the three institutional inconsistencies in this system, arguing that they have filled the Hybrid Institutional Architecture with internal inconsistencies, which makes semi-potable tap water an inevitable outcome of Hybrid Institutional Architecture. Meanwhile, this thesis illustrates the concept of Consumer’s Normalisation to semi-potable tap water, the Hybrid Institutional Architecture and Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix, arguing that such normalisation has disguises and justified not only the existence of the aforementioned concepts, but also the existence of the latent social injustice and consumer’s powerlessness. All of these analyses contribute to the form of consumer’s institutional distrust in semi-potable tap water. With this institutionalised distrust, an imbalanced dialectical relationship between the Hybrid Institutional Architecture, the Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix and water crises will turn consumer into the trigger of sociogenic water sustainability crises. A detailed case study of Harbin is presented to demonstrate the two sociogenic water sustainability crises occurred in Harbin with archival data and the establishments of contingent combination model, and the Hybrid Institutional Architecture of Harbin’s urban tap water provision system with examining interview materials from four senior officials of key departments.

Everyday occupations have mainly been studied in the fields of occupational therapy and occupational science within a Western context. Research has mostly focused on individual occupations of people with disabilities, and findings were mostly interpreted within Eurocentric and human-centred perspectives that misrepresented marginalised communities and their daily lives. Aiming to reduce some of this gap in knowledge, I set out to explore everyday activities of olive farmers in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). My ‘liminal’ positionality of being a Palestinian living and working in the UK enabled a bridging between Palestinians’ ways of life in the Global South and occupational science as a Global North perspective. I posed two research questions: How do the structures, policies and practices of Israeli settler colonialism and its military occupation influence the daily activities of olive growing communities in the oPt? What are the means that communities adopt to enable the daily occupations of olive farming to continue? I wished to study the motivations and principles for the activity of olive growing which were used as active responses – or resistance – to occupational injustices caused by settler colonialism. I designed a study that adopted de-colonial ethnographic methods. Field trips were carried out throughout the olive growing cycle, during which 11 in-depth interviews were conducted with – and observations made of – participant families and individual participants. An iterative (inductive and deductive) thematic analysis and an ‘intercultural translation’ (Santos, 2014) resulted in identification of themes, which were analysed in relation to Wilcock’s ‘occupational determinants of health’ (2006). Sutra expressed the Doing for Well-being principle of olive growing, A’wna was identified as the collaborative aspect of the activity, or the Doing for Belonging to land and people, and Sumud – as a third principle of action for olive growing – means that olive farmers do this activity for Belonging and Becoming, or as a resistive daily act. Sutra-A’wna-Sumud were collectively conceptualised as Everyday-Forms-of-Resistance (to occupational apartheid), were found to extend occupational sciences’ notions of Doing-Being-Becoming-Belonging, and illustrated communal Palestinian ways of knowing and resisting. Sutra-A’wna-Sumud demonstrated a set of means of action and interpretation that move beyond the individual as the main area of concern, and perceive human communities as a continuation, and in mutual relation to, their environment. This study provides insights, learned from a Global South group, on specific manifestations of occupational apartheid, a unique collective occupation (olive growing) and an occupational consciousness (Sutra-A’wna-Sumud/ Everyday-Forms-of-Resistance) that was employed to counter occupational apartheid. This is hoped to widen occupational science’s and occupational therapy’s understanding of people, their environments and occupations, which will be useful in other fields of study concerned with humans, their daily activities and their well-being.