This dissertation develops a political ecology of suburban peasants to describe the lives of Haitian farmers residing in a neighborhood on the margins of Port-au-Prince. The category of suburban peasants has been well described for Chinese small-scale farmers but has yet to be applied elsewhere as an analytic category. Using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and in-depth, key informant interviews, an ethnographic account is provided of changes in agricultural practices made by Haitian peasants as a result of environmental changes that impact their ability to make a living in contemporary Haiti. Farmers’ primary concerns are related to an increased need for agrochemicals because of declining soil fertility, but increased fertilizer prices make this a significant barrier to their economic activities. In addition, the influx of non-Haitians into the neighborhood has resulted in less available land to farm. In many cases worldwide, these two challenges have led to out-migration patterns, either within-country rural-urban migration or to another country altogether. Yet, in the study site this is not happening. The changes in agricultural practices that the Dounet peasants have made, like changing to wage-based labor and occupational multiplicity, have also created greater poverty, in which they are more vulnerable to the risks associated with environmental change while at the same time rendered immobile in the face of future extreme environmental events. This study uses the suburban peasant concept to explore how environmental changes simultaneously intersect with urbanization processes like the enclosure of land and changes in rural land use.

The gender and climate change literature has set out to underscore the differential impacts of climate change within populations. Much of this literature has conflated gender to equate to women, and has focused mostly on women in the developing world, mainly in rural areas where women are usually assigned reproductive social roles and seen as victims of climate change. This overlooks the intersecting and multiple identities of women, their role and voice as agents of change in all regions, and does not use the full range of feminist theory and methods. This dissertation uses feminist geography to challenge the dominant scales and sites of climate change governance and draws attention to the micropolitical, situated, and relational practices through which power relations surrounding climate change are (re)produced. The overarching research question is: How can we include gender and intersectional voices in the study and practice of climate governance? More specifically, I examine how gender and climate policies were and are created; I expose how discourses of gender and climate change are perpetuated and by whom; and I make clear the relationship between these discourses and social inequality and vulnerability to climate change. Paper A examines the experiences of women who are authors of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and finds that while some women experience active forms of gender discrimination such as silencing or being dismissed, other have a more positive experience, but encounter barriers such as lacking childcare or support from their employers. Paper B shows how feminist geography can investigate the micropolitical and everyday interactions in important geopolitical spaces. It finds that the simple formulation around gender in international climate debate erases important differences amongst women and their struggles; creating an identity politics that excludes people with similar goals, weakening potential for positive change. Paper C contests the mainstream climate change and gender discourse that constructs the ‘third world women’, showing women in rural Mexico as agents of change instead of vulnerable and passive victims and including self-reflection on my own fieldwork. The appended paper shows that, in most cases, carbon offset projects have consolidated gendered regimes of differential access to markets and economic opportunities while also reifying property tenure structures that may further exacerbate gendered distinctions.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The Yayo district in southwest Ethiopia is a biodiversity hotspot area historically containing a rich diversity of wild coffea arabica cultivars and Afromontane forest species of commercial and scientific value. Informed by political ecology and using qualitative research methods, notably participant observation, personal interviews, transect walks and analysis of secondary literature and videos, the study documents three major shifts in access, use, control and management of wild coffee and other natural resources in the Yayo district: first, village-level small-scale wild coffee cultivation and forest product harvesting; second, conservation and designation of protected forest areas and use zones, and most recently, coal mining and the future development of a fertiliser plant. The study details in depth how these three resource control regimes came to be and especially the social impacts they entailed on local (indigenous) communities residing in four villages in the Yayo district: Achebo, Gechi, Wabo and Wutete. It concludes with a discussion on the local socio-ecological impact and challenges facing the long-term survival of the local communities and wild coffea arabica forest biodiversity in the area. Since the early 1900s, the wild coffee forests were managed and used by local, indigenous communities based on customary social institutions including Abbaa lafaa, Ciiqaashuum, Qoroo, Tullaa, Xuxxee, and Shaanee. These institutions eroded overtime as the Ethiopian state working in tandem with professional conservationists valued the wild coffee forests for their forest biodiversity and strove to control historic wild coffee use through protectionist approaches. The thesis discusses how the restriction of access not only resulted in a range of negative social effects (such as displacement, joblessness, and landlessness) but also gave rise to occasional local conflicts and formal and informal resistance towards the conservationists and their programmes. As such, the protectionist approach did not succeed in safeguarding the wild coffees or the livelihoods of the local communities. Threats to the wild coffee forests were subsequently raised again with the rise of largescale coal mining operations in the forest. Driven by concern for economic growth, the state has shifted its attention from biodiversity preservation to supporting a coal mining operation in the area and the construction of the first-ever in country fertiliser factory in Yayo. With the advent of coal mining interests, not only have the historic customary rights and livelihoods of local communities been further weakened but also those of the power of the conservation regime. The early construction phases of the fertiliser factory have led to involuntary displacements, unfair expropriation of villagers’ properties, forest and wild coffee clearance, emergence of new diseases such as malaria, and damage to physical infrastructure. Overall, the study shows that the progressive shifts in resource access, control and use have occurred as a result of changing ecologies, ecological knowledge and values, community dynamics, economies, and the shifting policies and strategies of the government of Ethiopia. These changes, especially the control of resources by mining proponents, suggest major challenges for the future existence of wild coffea arabica cultivars in the area and the wellbeing of local communities who had used and managed them in the past.

In Chile’s neoliberal economy, large-scale timber plantations controlled by national and multinational forest corporations have expanded significantly on traditional indigenous territories. Chile’s forestry sector began to expand rapidly in 1974, the year following the military coup, owing to the privatization of forest lands and the passing of Decree 701. That law continues to provide large subsidies for afforestation, as well as tax exemptions for plantations established after 1974. As a consequence, conflicts have developed between indigenous communities and forestry companies, with the latter actively supported by government policies. The Mapuche people, the largest indigenous group in Chile, have been demanding the right to control their own resources. Meanwhile, they have been bearing the physical and social costs of the forestry sector’s growth. Since democracy returned to Chile in 1990, governments have done little to strengthen the rights of indigenous peoples. Government policy in this area is ill-defined; it consists mainly of occasional land restitution and monetary compensation when conflicts with the Mapuche threaten to overheat. This, however, is coupled with heavy-handed actions by the police and the legal system against Mapuche individuals and groups. From a political ecology perspective, this thesis examines how indigenous communities resort to various political strategies to accommodate, resist, and/or negotiate as political-economic processes change, and how these responses in turn shape natural resource management and, it follows, the local environment. My findings are that the environmental and social impacts associated with landscape transformation are shaped not only by structural changes brought about by economic and political forces but also, simultaneously, by smaller acts of political, cultural, and symbolic protest. Emerging forms of political agency are having expected and unexpected consequences that are giving rise to new processes of environmental change. Evidence for my argument is provided by a case study that focuses on the political strategies followed by the Mapuche movement. I analyze the obstacles that are preventing the Chilean government from addressing more effectively the social, economic, and cultural needs of indigenous peoples through resource management policies. Government policies toward the Mapuche have not encompassed various approaches that might facilitate conflict resolution, such as effective participation in land use plans, natural resource management, the protection of the cultural rights of indigenous communities, and the Mapuche people’s right to their own approaches to development. Employing Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, while the Mapuche have widely contested the state’s neoliberal policies, they have nevertheless been drawn into governing strategies that are fundamentally neoliberal in character. These strategies have reconfigured their relationship with the state, NGOs, and foreign aid donors. Operating at both formal and informal levels of social and political interaction, this new mentality of government employs coercive and co-optive measures to cultivate Mapuche participation in the neoliberal modernization project, while continuing to neglect long-standing relations of inequality and injustice that underpin conflicts over land and resources. / Science, Faculty of / Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute for / Graduate

This thesis documents the genealogy of the development of Jakarta’s urban water supply infrastructure from 1873 (the inception of the first colonial water supply network) to the present. Using an analytical framework of governmentality, supplemented by insights from postcolonial studies and political ecology, the thesis explains the highly unequal patterns of water access in Jakarta as the product of (post)colonial governmentalities, whose relations of power are expressed not only through discursive categories and socio-economic relations, but also through material infrastructures and urban spaces. The thesis presents material from the colonial archives, Jakarta’s municipal archives, and the publications of international development agencies and engineering consultancy firms. This is combined with primary data derived from interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation of the implementation of current pro-poor water supply projects in Jakarta. This data is used to document how water supply is implicated in the discursive and material production of the city and its citizens, and to challenge conventional developmentalist and academic analyses of water supply access. Specifically, a conceptual triad of water, space, and populations – produced through, but also productive of government rationalities – is used to explain two apparent paradoxes: (1) the fragmentation of access in Jakarta despite a century of concerted attempts to develop a centralized system; and (2) the preferences of lower-income households for non-networked water supply, despite its higher cost per unit volume. This analysis hinges on an elucidation of the relationships between urban governance and urban infrastructure, which documents the interrelated process of differentiation of types of water supply, water use practices, populations, and urban spaces from the colonial period to the present. This, in turn, is used to explain the barriers being encountered in current pro-poor water supply development projects in Jakarta. The thesis thus makes a contribution to current academic debates over the ‘colonial present’. The contribution is both theoretical – in the emphasis placed upon the materiality of governmentality – and empirical. Finally, the thesis also makes a contribution to the urban and development studies literatures through its reinterpretation of the urban ‘water crisis’. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation develops the conceptual framework of landscape political ecology (LPE) to consider particular forms of socio-ecological transformation resulting from the relatively re- cent but heavily contested practice of ‘swiftlet farming’ in Malaysian cities. Swiftlet farming is a colloquial term given to the semi-domestication of edible-nest swiftlets (Aerodramus fuciphagus) in converted buildings within urban areas in order to harvest their nests. These nests have long been a highly sought-after delicacy in China and overseas Chinese communities, and subsequently fetch over US$2000 on the international market. The primary research question investigated asks how the industry has been perceived and contested on an everyday basis in Malaysian cities. Engaging these controversies provides the opportunity to capture the significant negotiation that is embedded in the mechanisms of landscape production and capital accumulation as they take place through struggles over swiftlet farming in contemporary Malaysian cities. This research also seeks to understand how the swiftlet farming industry has transformed not only the cities in which it has been located, but also the ecology of swiftlets and their breeding patterns. The dissertation is centered on a six-month participatory ethnography which took place primarily in the city of George Town, Penang, but also investigated other related sites in peninsular Malaysia. I maintain that such ‘co-productive’ research has enabled a more situated view of socio-ecological transformations that have transpired through urban swiftlet farming in Malaysia, and the controversies surrounding them. The empirical chapters aim to unpack the controversies and discourses that emerged in response to swiftlet farming in the study areas, primarily its perceived impact on urban health, forms of cultural heritage, and the wider implications of ‘farming’ such animals in urban residential areas. In exploring these topics, LPE provides a cohesive and integrated approach that helps to untangle the interconnected economic, political, ecological and discursive processes that together form increasingly heterogeneous socio-natural landscapes. The implications of this thesis thus speak to the fraught cultural politics underlying processes of urban socio-ecological transformation in contemporary Southeast Asian cities.

Coal mining carries significant impacts for surrounding livelihood practices. Yet, in order to explain how specific impacts become grounded within a particular community, attention must be given to the complex assemblage of socio-political and economic forces operating at the local scale. As such, this paper builds upon 3 months of field research in 2010 to describe the impact of decentralized extractive resource governance at coal mines near the rural coastal village of Sekerat, East Kalimantan. Employing evolutions in political ecology research, the analysis focuses on the evolving governance ‘space’ in order to explain how institutional analyses of resource extraction governance and livelihood governance can be integrated to understand how scalar processes construct a range of real and perceived impacts which condition the decision-making modalities of local villagers. A case is then made for giving greater consideration to the importance of temporality and materiality to explaining how land-based and wage-labour livelihood practices have become ‘reified’ within the local village.

Studies of adaptive governance in social-ecological systems have identified common features that assist social actors in responding to environmental pressures. Among these features, multiple sources of ecological knowledge, trust, and networks between actors have been highlighted as properties that contribute to successful governance arrangements. However, studies in adaptive governance have also been critiqued using a political ecology approach. This is due to their under-theorization of political elements that can constrain or promote the formation of the features of adaptive governance. In particular, power dynamics between actors and the subsequent privileging of one source of knowledge over another might have an effect on governance arrangements. In China, environmental degradation is a serious issue. The Qinhuai River, located in the city of Nanjing, has experienced significant ecological decline over the last 30 years as urbanization pressures on the system increased. Over the same period, China has undergone changes in state-society relations, including allowing the formation of NGOs. Since the turn of the millennium, several NGOs have begun working on issues related to the Qinhuai River, including raising awareness and producing information on the environment. This study examines the features of adaptive governance in a critical light by situating them in the local political context of China. The relationship between NGOs, fishers who use the Qinhuai River and government are examined using Social Network Analysis and semi-structured interviews in order to understand the production of information, networking and trust between these actors. It is shown that the existing arrangements to include NGOs and fishers in the river’s governance activities are guided by a corporatist system of state-sanctioned representation. This is not conducive to adaptive governance arrangements, despite the increasing existence of ENGO networks and new sources of knowledge over the last decade. It is thus important that studies of adaptive governance take steps to contextualize their findings within the local political climate.

This research aims to understand environmental conflicts generated by large investment projects. Theoretically, this research locates itself within the historical political ecology perspective. It seeks to understand environmental conflicts as a clash of historical representations over the environment that can be traced from the process of dispossession by colonialism and the consolidation of the national state. It is argued that certain places have been constructed as specific socio-natural entities for the reproduction of power relations over nature and people through environmental transformations by discourses and frameworks about environment and society, the establishment of material practices, and the collapsing of biophysical features within political-economy. The case under analysis is the construction of dams in Chilean Patagonia through the HidroAysén project. This project belongs to the transnational company ENDESA and the Chilean private company Colbún. HidroAysén aims to build five dams across two rivers located in the Aysén region in Western Patagonia, a region that has been a scene for the territorialisation of the colonial and postcolonial state over the last four hundred years. The research questions to understand this environmental conflict are: How has Chilean Patagonia been socially constructed in the past? What political economic conditions and discourses enable dams to be built in Chilean Patagonia? Which discourses are in conflict regarding the HidroAysén Project? This research follows a qualitative approach focused on Foucauldian genealogy to understand discourses and representations about the environment. Data have been collected through secondary sources about the history of Patagonia, including accounts from explorations, government reports, scholarly articles, information from the HidroAysén company, and information from the anti-dam campaign Patagonia without Dams. I have also used fifty interviews conducted in Patagonia with people who live in the places that could be affected by the construction of dams. Data have been analysed through the constructionist approach of grounded theory and critical discourse analysis. The main findings are that environmental conflicts have historical and cultural content. Patagonia is a cultural landscape created through the territorialisation of the colonial and postcolonial state, and at the same time, through a process of counter-territorialisation spontaneously performed by settlers. Elites have used Patagonia to increase their power in a material and symbolic way through the mobilization of pre-existing discourses. Therefore, Patagonia does not pre-exist its construction: there is nothing natural about Patagonia but a revisited history of otherness and dispossession. Consequently, environmental conflict over HidroAysén is not only about the hydroelectricity project, but about how territories are constructed and socially and environmentally transformed through the mobilization of representations. The conclusion is that the environmental transformations are one of the most severe forms of inequality.

This research looks at the change in ethical sensibilities towards a mangrove in a fishing colony in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at how they may have changed as the mangrove became a protected area and entered the environmental assemblage. Formerly called Z-1, this was the first of 800 cooperative fishing colonies founded along the Brazilian coast in 1920 as part of a government initiative. The study unveiled the following pattern around the mangrove: from being a source of livelihood and place for communal activities up until the 1970s, it became the locus of an environmental movement in the 80s and 90s after it was devastated by a big fire. The concrete outcome of the movement was the creation of the APARU, Area of Environmental Protection and Urban Regeneration, which meant that after more than seventy years under a system of tutelage by the Navy, the colony and the mangrove were subjected to an environmental form of governance administered by the City Council, and the mangrove went from being a taken-for-granted thing to an environmentally-oriented concept. It finally fell silent and isolated as it became increasingly polluted, even if ‘protected’ by a municipal decree. The main argument presented is that, as the mangrove passed from nature to environment, which implied a change in governance from the Navy to the Department of Environment, people found creative ways of holding on to its thingness, and to ethical values that at times conflict with the broader environmental assemblage. Those local ethics forge the links that sustain an ecological assemblage, and the ethics prescribed by the environmental governance currently in place can be undermined by more embedded values. That said, local knowledge and practices are environmentally informed, and different ways of being political emerge. This community was not only created literally on a mangrove, but it was also symbolically and politically reproduced through the mangrove, and even more so after it became a protected area. The dialectical outcomes of the relationships between human beings and the mangrove, and between human beings as they multiply, transform the landscape continuously, just as the mangrove in its perpetual unfolding impresses itself upon human matters and sustains the social ordering of things. As new elements are assembled around the mangrove, from discarded utensils to stories of environmental activism, the mangrove is enacted as heritage, as nature, as a biome, as culture, as pollution, as an institution, and as environment. This thesis hopes to contribute towards the broader body of literature on environmental anthropology, political ecology, and anthropology of moralities, by focusing on ‘human-disturbed environments’ (Tsing 2013) and bringing attention to the value of local perceptions in policy making.