There is remarkable cooperative organization scarcity in the United States. Particularly in the credit union and worker cooperative sectors, this scarcity is not satisfactorily explained by neo-classical economic models that assume competitive conditions and profit-maximizing organizations. This paper supplements the conventional economic understandings of credit union and worker cooperative scarcity with an institutional analysis. Mechanisms of coercive, mimetic, and normative institutional isomorphism developed in DiMaggio and Powell’s theory of organizational isomorphism are applied to provide greater understanding of credit union and worker cooperative scarcity in the US. It appears that these forces of isomorphism work in conjunction with one another, as well as with competitive forces of isomorphism, to cyclically reproduce the scarcity of credit unions and worker cooperatives which prevails in the US.

Hospitality exchange (HospEx) networks – online platforms facilitating the connection between a traveler and a local resident – embody many of the cyber-utopian promises intrinsic to the Web as it started out 25 years ago. Such sites have often been conceptualized as a new and daring trend in a booming ‘sharing industry’ and have been researched for topics such as trust, reputation, and online identities. Yet, a more critical look uncovers that crucial issues of ownership, power, digital labour, and organizational structures have often been left out. To fill this gap, this thesis investigates upon the antagonistic struggle between the commons and processes of commodification in the light of critical theory and political economy. The research shows that examples with characteristics of both concepts are manifested in the niche social networking space of HospEx platforms. The biggest of those platforms, Couchsurfing.org, changed its organizational orientation from a non-profit, commons-based project towards a for-profit company in 2011 – an instance of commodification. An analysis of both quantitative and qualitative community data shows that the transformation consequently concerns a member on multiple levels. The structural change of ownership results in a loss of transparency and privacy, an alteration of the platform’s integrity, a sacrifice of the ‘uniqueness’ of the community, and a differing relationship between the user and the platform. To shed light on an antagonistic force and suggest an alternative, community-based governance approach, the work further explores the specifics of a platform guided by the logic of the commons. Interviews with volunteers of the non-commercial, non-profit HospEx platform BeWelcome.org helped to deepen an understanding of how a digital commons can be sustained and what challenges they face. The thesis concludes that the developments observed on Couchsurfing are not an exception but rather characteristic and part of a broader trend manifested in all areas of digital media, and indeed modern society in general: commodification processes frequently jeopardize the commons and incorporate them into the logic of capital.

The growth of the drug war and rates of narco-violence in Mexico has captured the attention of the international community, leading to international debates about the validity and effectiveness of the War on Drugs mantra. Since 2006, the Mexican government has been actively combating the cartels with armed troops, leading to high rates of human rights abuses as well as growing opposition to official prohibition policies. This thesis explores three movements advocating for alternatives to the Mexican drug war that have their foundation in civil society organizations: the movements for human rights protection, for drug policy liberalization and for the protection and restitution of victims of the drug war. These movements are analysed through a theoretical framework drawing on critical political economy theory, civil society and social movement theory, and political opportunity structures. This thesis concludes that, when aligned favourably, the interplay of agency and political opportunities converge to create openings for shifting dominant norms and policies. While hegemonic structures continue to limit agency potential, strong civil society advocacy strategies complemented by strong linkages with transnational civil society networks have the potential to achieve transformative changes in the War on Drugs in Mexico.

<p>Pro-urban bias in policy is often seen as a common phenomenon in the developing world. Empirical reality though is much more varied. Many governments actively support agricultural producers and rural citizens, even at early stages of development. In addition, the binary distinction between urban and rural bias in policy aggregates over important sub-national variation in the distributive impact of government policies. This dissertation extends the research frontier by analyzing the political roots underlying spatial bias in policy using new theoretical and empirical approaches. First, this dissertation develops a theory that identifies conditions under which politicians will institute pro-urban or pro-rural policies, by considering the threat of a rural insurgency. Second, I argue that elections in rural majority societies can empower citizens in the rural periphery. Competitive elections and high rural turnout induce governments to supply favorable policies to the rural sector as a whole and salient regions in particular. To test the effect of the threat of rural violence, I use new cross-national data on net taxation in the agricultural sector. Data on fiscal transfers and the sub-national effects of agricultural pricing policies in Indonesian districts provide additional evidence for the first hypothesis. To test the effect of elections on urban bias, I exploit a natural experiment from the Indonesian context. Last, I analyze the proliferation of districts in Indonesia from 2001 to 2009, with important implications for future fiscal transfers, and show the process is largely driven by local elite competition within and between districts.</p> / Dissertation

Across municipal governments, the vast and varied web of purchasing regulations known as procurement has effectively grown into a barrier to entry for the civic technology market, allowing government contracts to be secured by a few large software companies with the resources to move through the procurement process. Within the procurement process, the procurement threshold, an arbitrary dollar amount set by the municipal governments, determines how governments are able to purchase goods and services from vendors. Through an OLS regression model, we examine the relationship between proven economic growth factors within cities, and the city’s procurement threshold. We find that there is a significant negative correlation between the number of patents issued for a particular city and the city’s procurement threshold, indicating that there may be a negative relationship between patent adoption and procurement thresholds within a city.

As cities continue to compete for regional and global primacy, governments around the world have drawn upon a series of entrepreneurial tactics to secure investment. Along with city branding initiatives aimed at producing positive images of the city, governments increasingly seek to generate revenue through the corporate sponsorship of public place names, or what I term toponymic branding. Drawing upon government documents and 15 semi-structured interviews, this study examines how the neoliberalization of place through city and toponymic branding is currently reshaping the geographies of urban governance in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), by considering two case studies: the naming of the Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai) and the Dubai Metro Naming Rights Initiative. In addition to semi-structured interviews conducted in situ, this research draws upon a variety of web-based marketing materials designed to promote the Burj Khalifa as an icon of Dubai and the Dubai Metro Naming Rights Initiative as a cutting-edge tool to increase revenue generation for the Government of Dubai. This thesis suggests that, despite efforts to maximize profits through city and toponymic branding campaigns, the renaming of the Burj Khalifa undercuts previous positive associations stakeholders held with the “tallest building in the world,” the city, and its brand. This study also demonstrates that, through the Dubai Metro Naming Rights Initiative, the Government of Dubai has used toponymic branding as a political tool to foster relationships with members of the business community. In doing so, the current research contributes to critical toponymic and urban geographic scholarship by examining the political economy of toponymic branding as a strategy of neoliberal urbanism in Dubai. / Graduate / 0366 / msotou@uvic.ca

This thesis argues from a contrarian point of departure that the successes of GMO agriculture have thus far been limited or underwhelming. It thus asks what accounts for the limitedness of the GMO food economy. From this overarching question, the research is divided into three further questions that consider the roles of law, the structural requirements of the capitalist system, and the use of discourses of nature amongst activists respectively as factors influencing the underdevelopment of GMO agriculture. These questions form the basis for three chapters that comprise the thesis. Chapter one draws on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi in evaluating the consequences of legal regimes that regulate GMOs. Against the tide of neoliberalism, I discuss how a binding, precautionary agreement over international trade in GMOs emerged through the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. I argue that this Protocol is an example of what Polanyi termed the “self-protection of society,” the second phase of his double movement. Chapter two uses Marxist theories of agrarian capitalism to understand both the early successes and later setbacks of GMOs as a capital accumulation strategy. I argue that the successes and failures of GMO agriculture are partly circumscribed by the structural requirements of the capitalist system, as well as by the materiality of GMO crops themselves. The chapter builds on the work of Gabriela Pechlaner and David Goodman to show how processes of appropriationism, expropriationism and the logic of capital more generally can explain not only why some innovations have succeeded but also why so many others have been unsuccessful. Innovations that are geared at consumers rather than farmers have largely failed due to their status as value-added products (whose value is subjective and market-driven) rather than capital goods. Chapter three considers the role played by nature narratives in structuring the cultural politics of GMO agriculture. It argues that natural purity discourses have been central to the success of GMO activism as they have mobilized widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural world from the human world. However, though strategically effective, these discourses hold dubious political implications, as they entrench or naturalize unequal power relations in the social world and deflect attention away from the problematic political economic consequences of GMOs under neoliberalism. The chapter argues that activist campaigns that directly target the political economic, neocolonial, and class implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature, an approach that I argue ought to frame opposition struggles against GMOs going forward. The thesis uses a mixed methods approach that includes document analysis, historical analysis, discourse analysis and literature review. It incorporates a wide lens approach, drawing on a range of case studies from multiple scales to animate the conceptual arguments being analyzed. By problematizing how GMO agriculture has evolved as a capital accumulation strategy for large transnational corporations, this thesis seeks to critically evaluate the practical social justice implications of anti-GMO resistance efforts for those opposed to neoliberal globalization. / Graduate / 0366 / 0615 / mylesc@uvic.ca

Debating over efficiency-enhancing but inequality-increasing reforms accounts for the routine business of democratic institutions. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) hold that anti-reform bias can be attributed to individual-specific uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses resulting from a reform. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that anti-reform bias arising from uncertainty is mitigated by social preferences. We show that, paradoxically, many who stand to lose from reforms vote in favor because they value efficiency, while many who will potentially gain from reforms oppose them due to inequality aversion. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Empirical investigation into afforestation and bioenergy carbon finance projects in Tanzania, Uganda and Moldova demonstrates that effective projects—both in terms of sustainable development and the generation of genuine carbon credits—are more likely to result when the state is able to bring carbon finance initiatives into alignment with national development objectives. Amongst the countries investigated, the most important factor in such alignment was, paradoxically, commitment liberal economic reforms. Contrary to the expectation that the performance of projects under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) would be the same in states with similar administrative capacities, carbon finance projects were more effective in Uganda and Moldova than Tanzania. Commitment to liberal economic reforms in Uganda functions as an animating set of ideas that allows the state apparatus to work in a more purposeful manner and establish institutions and organizations which allow it to generate state power for low-carbon development. For CDM forest and bioenergy projects, the risk of unsustainability is mitigated by a land tenure system and investment regime that (i) offer opportunities for individual smallholders to engage directly with the carbon market and create incentives for domestic investors while (ii) also accommodating historical land governance practices. Genuine carbon credits were associated with project developers who possessed a latent organizational capacity for implementation and were motivated to pursue market opportunities—state forest agencies in Uganda and Moldova. However, the ability of the state to retain latent organizational capacity was restricted to sectors such as forestry that are less sophisticated technically; in the energy sector, such capacity was ceded to the private sector in Uganda and Moldova during structural adjustment. More skeptical of liberal economic policy, Tanzania has retained capacity in the energy sector; however, for the same reasons, it has not treated the CDM as a genuine opportunity. At current carbon prices, CDM projects investigated were effective when the state was able to play a developmental role in the economy. Whether commitment to liberal economic reforms can have similar developmental effects in other parts of the developing world is questionable—a different animating set of ideas may be important.

Empirical investigation into afforestation and bioenergy carbon finance projects in Tanzania, Uganda and Moldova demonstrates that effective projects—both in terms of sustainable development and the generation of genuine carbon credits—are more likely to result when the state is able to bring carbon finance initiatives into alignment with national development objectives. Amongst the countries investigated, the most important factor in such alignment was, paradoxically, commitment liberal economic reforms. Contrary to the expectation that the performance of projects under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) would be the same in states with similar administrative capacities, carbon finance projects were more effective in Uganda and Moldova than Tanzania. Commitment to liberal economic reforms in Uganda functions as an animating set of ideas that allows the state apparatus to work in a more purposeful manner and establish institutions and organizations which allow it to generate state power for low-carbon development. For CDM forest and bioenergy projects, the risk of unsustainability is mitigated by a land tenure system and investment regime that (i) offer opportunities for individual smallholders to engage directly with the carbon market and create incentives for domestic investors while (ii) also accommodating historical land governance practices. Genuine carbon credits were associated with project developers who possessed a latent organizational capacity for implementation and were motivated to pursue market opportunities—state forest agencies in Uganda and Moldova. However, the ability of the state to retain latent organizational capacity was restricted to sectors such as forestry that are less sophisticated technically; in the energy sector, such capacity was ceded to the private sector in Uganda and Moldova during structural adjustment. More skeptical of liberal economic policy, Tanzania has retained capacity in the energy sector; however, for the same reasons, it has not treated the CDM as a genuine opportunity. At current carbon prices, CDM projects investigated were effective when the state was able to play a developmental role in the economy. Whether commitment to liberal economic reforms can have similar developmental effects in other parts of the developing world is questionable—a different animating set of ideas may be important.