<p>Tanzania is famous for it’s beautiful nature and rich wildlife. Proud of it’s natural heritage, Tanzania has dedicated over 20% of it’s territory as protected areas to shield the wildlife from human interference. But the wildlife is regarded as a menace by the local communities that lives close to the impressive national parks. At the same time, the increasing human population threatens the survival of the large migratory species in the parks by blocking vital dispersal areas.</p><p>This essay describes the human/wildlife conflict around Tarangire National Park and focuses on communities close to park borders. The intention is to examine if a buffer zone could solve the conflict in this area. By studying the political ecology of wildlife conservation in Tanzania, from local to global scale and through a historical perspective, it is concluded that the poor state-society relation as experienced in local communities is a crucial factor for the diminishing wildlife.</p>

Current processes of deforestation and development in the Amazon Basin continue historical trends that have devastated indigenous populations and drastically reduced their land rights. While protection of the Amazon ecosystem has become a worldwide concern, many indigenous and folk groups employ forest management strategies that utilize natural resources without causing permanent degradation. This paper considers historical, political and socioeconomic circumstances that threaten the survival of indigenous groups and their sustainable forms of forest use. The paper argues that discrepant cultural models and attitudes contribute to the differences in land use between traditional Amazon residents and newcomers. The problems and possibilities entailed by efforts to protect traditional land rights are also discussed.

This thesis presents the analysis of environmental movements in Russia.Through a collective memory and discourse framework, this study reviews the overlap and disparity in perceptions of environmental movements in the Soviet Union and Russia.The portrait that emerges from the analysis of the environmental movements suggests that the impact of environmental movements in Russia may be limited in part because it has developed in contravention to existing discourses. More importantly, the context and underlying assumptions of environmental movements are not formulated in ways that are compatible with existing collective identities in Russian society.

This dissertation is aimed at analyzing how ethnic hierarchies question the environmentalization of indigeneity, which is the foundation of the Colombian state's multicultural policy. In particular, the dissertation develops a comparative ethnographic approach to the way in which the "multicultural turn" of 1991 impacted three indigenous communities located at San José del Guaviare, a colonization frontier in the Colombian Amazon: the Nükak, the Jiw and the Tucano. Against the assumption of multicultural policy that indigenous communities form a vast mass of people radically diferent from mainstream (even portrayed as anti-modern), in San José there is an unequal distribution of the Nükak, Jiw and Tucano in different positions inside local ethnic hierarchies. For some, Nükak incarnate what Hale (2004) label as a "good ethnicity", that serves to promote Guaviare as an eco-touristic destination, the Jiw are a "bad ethnicity" that annoys White people in San José, while the Tucano are portrayed as "civilized Indians". Thus, the dissertation states how these ethnic hierarchies contradict some of the core assumptions of multicultural policies that are based on an essentialized understanding of indigenous peoples as "ecologically noble savages." The dissertation argues that the analysis of contemporary experiences on indigeneity in an Amazonian context such as San José, could be better understood if it observes a set of processes and actors including: the historical transformation of senses on otherness, the production of forests as a field of domain under state regulations, the economic crossroads affecting indigenous peoples on their "resguardos" (indigenous lands) and the intervention of state laws, NGOs, indigenous political organizations, settlers, foreign governments and state officials. The analysis of such a variety of processes and actors shaping contemporary experiences on indigeneity in the Colombian Amazon follows the environmentality approach (Agrawal, 2005). From that perspective, I discuss the following ideas: a) indigenous resguardos were designed as governmentalized localities in multicultural policy to regulate and control how indigenous peoples manage natural resources; b) those communities portrayed as followers of the ecological nobility script act as regulatory communities; c) the technologies for governing the ecological realm do not necessarily assure the formation of environmental subjectivities.

The transformation of cities is a challenge of global significance that will depend on the capacity to re-imagine the potential of cities, and thus needs more than standard technocratic urban planning approaches. Deep engagement with the arts provides one avenue for recasting the future of cities. This thesis explores the question of how ‘critical urban art interventions’ develop alternative ways of knowing urban nature, and the opportunities and limitations of using art to reimagine the future of cities. By drawing on urban political ecology and cultural geography, the thesis documents and explores the aims and tactics used in five urban art interventions to reimagine sites of urban nature in Stockholm. Qualitative interviews and participant observation were carried to explore these questions. Findings suggest that tactics used in urban art interventions promote embodied ways of knowing, and simultaneously interacting with the physical and socio- historical constructions of sites of urban natures.

Sweden has been praised for its achievements, and promoted as a role model, in sustainable urban development. This thesis, comprising five separate articles and a cover essay, is a critical study of the Swedish urban sustainable imaginary. The first article examines how this imaginary is produced. Using an actor-network theory approach, I view the Swedish pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010 as a node in a wider network, arguing that the notion of decoupling GDP growth from CO2 emissions constitutes a central storyline. The second and third papers study the circulation of this imaginary in practice, specifically examining two cases of exporting Swedish sustainable urban planning to Chinese eco-city projects. Few of these plans, I note, were materialised in built form; rather, they contributed to the circulation of a repetitive model of sustainable urbanism, reinforcing a paradoxical idea of urban sustainability as “green islands of privilege”. The storyline of decoupling – and the circulating business of sustainable urbanism into which it feeds – is based on a deficient territorial view of space. In this research, I advocate a political ecology perspective and relational view of space, wherein there are no such things as sustainable or unsustainable cities. Rather, planning should aim for more just socio-environmental relations within and across urban borders. The fourth and fifth papers address the wider question of how planning can foster more socio-environmentally just forms of urban sustainability. Here, I emphasise a consumption perspective on greenhouse gas emissions as an important counter-narrative and analyse two Swedish municipalities’ efforts to lessen citizens’ consumption through policy and planning practice.   This research highlights the need to continuously develop and contest imaginaries and planning practices of sustainability, of who is perceived as “sustainable” and what a socio-environmentally just perspective might mean in practice for policy makers and planners alike. / <p>QC 20170120</p>

This dissertation aims to advance understanding of the social and ecological dynamics that transform riparian forests and the human and non-human communities that depend on riparian resources. The four articles that comprise this dissertation examine the causes and consequences of social-ecological transformations in the riparian zone of the transboundary San Pedro River watershed, located in the Sonoran Desert borderlands of southern Arizona, USA and northern Sonora, Mexico. The research utilizes an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach that combines interviews with key informants (including natural resource managers, ranchers, local residents, and political figures), archival research and historical document review, spatial analysis and synthesis of binational datasets, and land use classification and change detection at the watershed scale using methods from remote sensing and geographical information systems.This research is motivated by two objectives. First, I aim to examine how shifts in social and ecological systems have transformed riparian spaces in the transboundary San Pedro River watershed. Second, I intend to assess the consequences of these riparian transformations for the human and ecological communities who depend on riparian resources for survival. Based on these two overarching objectives, there are three interrelated research questions that drive the research and analysis presented in the four chapters of this dissertation: 1) How are social-ecological processes at the watershed scale affecting access to water resources in the riparian zone?; 2) How are shifting relations of access to water and riparian-zone resources influencing and differentiating levels of exposure to hazards over space and across time?; and 3) Following a disturbance event, how are capacity to respond and recover from disturbance and expectations of accountability shifting over space and across time? The findings of this research suggest three broad results. First, social processes of accumulation of land and water resources by the state and industry are creating uneven spatial and temporal experiences of water security and insecurity by shifting the amount, timing, and quality of water resources available and who can physically access the riparian zone to derive benefits from riparian resources. Specifically, the three social processes of resource accumulation that I examine are privatization, expropriation, and conservation. Second, transformations in social-ecological system (SES) dynamics and access to riparian resources differentially impact the production of water insecurity (water quality and water quantity) both between and within communities and economic sectors that depend on riparian resources. Third, the ability for local communities and small-scale agricultural producers to cope with increasing water insecurity and respond to disturbance events is decreasing due to three interrelated causes. The first is limited access of local communities to the wealth and adaptive assets produced from natural resource extraction in the region. The second is the shift at the state and community level toward increasing individuation of responsibility for ensuring livelihood security. And the third is a culture of evasion of accountability to remediate ecological degradation within the transnational mining industry.

This thesis presents an examination of the political ecology of human-elephant relationships in India. Its overall aim is to revitalize the ecology that has been sifted out from the discipline. The thesis draws upon, and consequently develops, more-than-human geography through a sustained engagement of nature-society relations in a non-Western context. The thesis has three broad objectives. First, to examine what more-than-human geography’s emphasis on non-dualistic forms of agency, could contribute to understandings of policy, planning and politics in conservation. Second, to examine the spatial dimensions of human-elephant relations and the social orderings of space which influence these relationships. The third objective of the thesis is to interrogate the politics of elephant conservation through a sustained engagement with diverse modes of human-elephant encounters and the socio-political assemblages with which they are entangled. The thesis first deploys and develops the concept of ‘encounter value’ to account for the different forms of human-elephant encounters and how they contribute to the political economies of biodiversity conservation. The thesis then draws from a multi-sited ethnography examining both encounters and spaces of elephant conservation. It shows how elephants help forge connections across difference and the ways their geographies are reconfigured by global networks of conservation. The third empirical section has an implicit spatial dimension. It is concerned with writing a ‘more-than-human’ geography of landscapes, examining how humans and elephants cohabit with and against the grain of political design. Finally, the thesis examines politics as an ecology of relations, showing how human-elephant relations as well as social and political outcomes may be mediated by materials. Modes of enquiry between these papers overlap. They offer critical insights into three themes that interface between political ecology and more-than-human geography. First, the thesis contributes to conceptualizing modes of human-animal encounters in a symmetrical fashion. It explicates the role of nonhuman agency as an organizing force in political economies of conservation. Second, it posits new understandings of the spaces of animals. This is developed in two ways: landscapes as dwelt, political achievements and as fluid spaces emerging through international networks of environmental governance. Third, the thesis ecologizes politics and goes beyond the humanist frameworks of political ecology. It fosters novel conversations between more-than-human geography and the postcolonial critique of political ecology in the context of human-elephant relationships. Taken together, the thesis offers up a concerted, symmetrical and novel approach to the study people’s relations with animals.

A perennial challenge in efforts to deal with environmental issues is the question of how to simplify. As such, where and when one simplifies is often a source of conflict, but perversely also paramount to finding a solution. This thesis focuses on one long-standing environmental issue, the whaling debate. Specifically, it performs a strategically sited microethnography of Faroese whaling, grindadráp, exploring linkages between actions on local and international scales. This thesis aims to contribute to environmental sociological efforts to analyse and resolve complex socio-environmental problems. The five papers that together constitute this thesis collectively provide a description of grindadráp from the local scale of the bays where pilot whales are killed to the international forums where whaling as a whole remains an issue at the heart of an on-going, deadlocked conflict. Primarily based on three months’ fieldwork in the Faroe Islands, this thesis combines observation, interviews, media and other literature. The theoretical lenses employed are that of the ‘ontological turn’ and the ‘theory of sociocultural viability’ (cultural theory). The former utilised as a tool for ethnographic practice with the latter used to analyse how different perspectives on reality manifest throughout the whaling conflict. This thesis demonstrates that grindadráp has changed through time as a result of the interactions between actors with different views on the matter at hand. However, in contrast to the global whaling debate, this interaction has been mostly constructive, with appropriate changes in practice ensuring grindadráp’s continued popularity within the Faroe Islands. Furthermore, its continuation will likely depend on grindadráp’s continued ability to balance different perspectives. This thesis thus echoes environmental sociological calls for improved dialogue in the framing and resolution of environmental disputes, suggesting that cultural theory provides a tool that balances relativism and pragmatism in dealing with complex environmental problems.

Tourism is often promoted as growing industries that make an important economic contribution especially to marginalized communities in rural areas. But taking a Political Ecology approach, what sort of contribution does tourism really make? Why are its benefits spread unevenly? And have communities necessarily need to give up access and use rights to certain natural resources? This study provides an insight on understanding the different dimensions of justice on water  access by local community from a tourism perspective. In understanding  the issues of justice on water, environmental justice has been a central focus  of this research. Justice issuesrelated to water access is still a complex phenomenal due to the truth that, it is embedded to historical and socio-cultural context and linked to integrity of ecosystem. However, justice issues can be viewed differently from different people in relation to different perspective. Therefore, Schlosberg framework of justice is adopted in this research  to understand and explore water issues in three realms of justice i.e distributive, recognition and participation. Qualitative research method was employed in data collection and findings were presented based on three realms of Schlosberg's theory. However, researcher concluded that, there are mixed feelings and perceptions on understanding the sense of justice to local people in water access. Lastly, due to the fact that, the researches related to justice in tourism studies are still very limited , further research need to be done in investigating the access rights local people have on accessing their natural resources for instance water.