- / Inspired by Douglass North’s work on the role of institutions in economic structure and change and in particular the role of state institutions, this thesis attempts to explore the process of economic transformation through analyzing state-business community relations in the city of Kunshan, Jiangsu, China. The author uses primary data from Kunshan to demonstrate how the open-door policy of China has led to changes in the institutional environment parallel to the economic transformation. Kunshan’s institutional development is analyzed in terms of two factors. First is ‘autonomy’ as in the ability and capacity of the local state to define and pursue its own development strategy. Second is ‘embeddedness’ as in the local state developing a regular relationship with economic elites that share its goals of economic transformation. These two are seen as complementary necessities for economic transformation. This thesis shows how the local state in Kunshan has strengthened both its capacity and integrity to pursue economic transformation and the actual pursuit of it through closer and more institutionalized relations with the business community.

How do authoritarian stales foster civil society growth while keeping unruly organizations in line? This governance dilemma dogs every state that attempts to modernize by permitting civil society to pluralize while minding its potential to stir up restive social forces. This dissertation's main finding is that the Chinese party state the world's largest and arguably the most resilient authoritarian regime-has engineered a flexible institution of state control in which the "rules of the game" arc created, disseminated, and enforced outside of institutionalized channels. This dissertation demonstrates how the coercive apparatus improvises in an erratic manner, unfettered by accountability mechanisms. The regime does not necessarily pull the levers of hard control mechanisms-the tanks, guns, and tear gas-whenever dissenters cross a line of political acceptability. Instead, in keeping with its decentralized political system and its tradition of experimental policy-making, the Chinese state continually remakes the rules of the game which keeps potential rabble-rousers on their toes. Although the regulatory skeleton of state corporatism remains intact, flexible repression is the informal institution-the set of rules and procedures-that structures state-civil society interactions. Specifically, this institution is made up of three key practices: a) decentralization b) ad-hoc deployment c) mixed control strategies. These three practices manifest in two concrete strategies used to govern aboveground and underground civil society: fragmented coercion and controlled competition. Flexible repression enables the Chinese party-state to exploit the advantages of a flourishing third sector while curtailing its threatening potential. Through participant observation, interviews, and comparative case studies of aboveground and underground independent labor organizations, this dissertation accomplishes three goals. First, it identifies the within-country variation in state control strategies over civil society, which includes the above-ground sector as well as the underground sector of ostensibly banned organizations. Secondly, it traces the patterns of interactions between the state and civil society, generating hypotheses about the mechanisms of change. Finally, it identifies new concepts relevant for studying organized contention in authoritarian regime.. .... Overall, this dissertation contributes to the study of authoritarian state control and civil society contention, with an emphasis on the nexus between the two.

This thesis explores the emergence and proliferation of public consultative bodies (PCBs) in contemporary Russia. Created by the government and regulated by law, PCBs are formal groups of NGO leaders, academics, journalists, entrepreneurs and public figures selected by the state, that perform advisory, monitory and support functions to government departments and individuals at federal, regional and municipal levels. The concept of obshchestvennyi kontrol’ (public scrutiny) is employed by Kremlin to refer to the dual activities of oversight and assistance, which PCBs are intended to enact. First appearing ten years ago with the foundation of the Federal Public Chamber in 2004, there are now tens of thousands of PCBs in operation across the country. This thesis constitutes the first systematic analysis of PCBs in English. It uses a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach in order to explore the extent to which the portrayal of PCBs in government discourse corresponds to the practices enacted through these institutions in three regional case studies of Moscow, St Petersburg and Samara. It finds that although PCBs are presented by federal and regional leaders as means for citizens merely to assist the authorities in the performance of tasks decided by the state, in practice PCBs can enable citizens modestly to influence policy outcomes and occasionally to shape public agendas. They therefore cannot be dismissed as mere ‘window dressing’ for the authorities. The thesis shows that PCBs were created as part of the market reform of the Soviet-era public sector, in which processes of privatisation, outsourcing and decentralisation reduced the state’s ability to make public policy without input from domestic non-state actors. It argues that the limited participation in governance afforded to citizens through PCBs exemplifies practices of ‘authoritarian neoliberal governance’, a concept that captures the attempts by the state to control policy outcomes produced through new public participatory mechanisms arising from the marketization of state bureaucracy. Although the thesis focuses on the case of Russia, the concept of ‘authoritarian neoliberal governance’ raises the question of the existence of commensurable mechanisms in other non-democratic polities.

This dissertation addresses the question “how disasters change state-society relations under authoritarian rule?” Specifically, I investigate how space and social capital were created after major earthquakes and the relationships between local governments and civil society organizations (CSOs). Based on four years of interviews conducted with government officials and CSO leaders and two rounds of surveys in 126 villages in rural Sichuan province, utilizing experiments, focus groups, and interviews, I argue that social capital and space for CSOs were created after major earthquakes. Adding to the literature of consultative authoritarianism and graduated control, I demonstrate that within the newly created space, local governments use a deliberate differentiation strategy towards different CSOs. Such differentiation is more driven by the state’s interest to extract productivity and outsource responsibility for public goods provision by regime-supporting CSOs, and less dictated by the state’s need to acquire information from regime-challenging CSOs with collective action potential. Such approach contributes to the authoritarian resilience in China. Despite the interference from the state from above, the newly created space also faces challenges from the private sphere with individual citizens being skeptical of the CSO sector due to limited interactions, mismatch of criteria, institutional constraints, and lack of civility. I then draw from the qualitative data and construct a dynamic framework of state-society relations under an authoritarian state after disasters by starting from co-operational, complementary, competitive, and confrontational relations, and end up in either co-optation or confrontation in the long run. Finally, I trace the development of the newly drafted charity law and the foreign NGO law. I argue that the state-organized legalization process would first allow the state to use the “zone of indifference” to get to know the new developments in the public sphere. Then, through a process of toleration, participation, initiation, replication, and bifurcation, the state manages to extract productivity from, and outsource responsibility to, the regime-supporting players, and drive out the regime challenging ones. The laws, made through this process, is also vulnerable to state intervention at any time, and therefore, prevents China from having a meaningful civil society. / 2020-02-22T00:00:00Z

The temperature trends and variations of the contiguous United States as a whole and ten designated regions were investigated from 1935 to 1986. To obtain reliable results, 263 stations of the Historical Climate Network (HCN) were used. The HCN stations are corrected for many non-climatic factors which may bias the data. The data for the contiguous United States reveals that the annual, summer, and winter temperatures are free of clear positive or negative trends. Unlike the annual and summer data, winter temperatures exhibit relatively strong variations. Each region was then studyed individually. The summer temperatures for all the ten regions were free of significant trends except Region 2 (Central East Region), which exhibited a significant negative trend. The winter temperatures of the ten regions also lack a statistical significance except for Region 3 (Southeast Region) which shows a significant negative trend. The annual temperatures for the ten regions were also significant except for Regions 2 and 5 (Central East Region and Southern Plains Region). These two regions exhibited significant negative trends. The annual temperature trends for nine of the ten regions were negative while the annual temperatures for the United States as a whole show a positive trend. None of these trends were significant except for Regions 2 and 5. To examine whether or not the differences between the trends of the contiguous United States as a whole and those of the ten regions represents a significant departure from each other, the Expansion Method was used. Applying this method on the annual, summer and winter trends indicated that these differences did not represent a significant departure from those of the contiguous United States. By studying the annual spatial temperature variations of the ten regions it was found that in more than 80% of the years, when the region with the highest positive deviation is in the western United States, the region with the highest negative deviation is in the eastern United States and visa versa.

Desertification is a problem occurring in arid and semiarid zones all over the world. It is a consequence of mismanagement of the land. Human activities and livestock pressure on such fragile ecosystems lead to a deterioration of the soil by increasing its salinity, lessening its moisture, and covering it with sand and dust. Aerial photographs and satellite images constitute a tool for mapping and monitoring the desertification process. Multispectral data can assist in detecting the indicators of desertification in early stages in order to plan adequate action. The improvement of the resolution of satellite images and the fact that they are available on a periodic basis make the use of these data suitable for mapping the evolution of desert patches at large scales. The green band of Landsat MSS is used in this study. Two images taken, respectively, in 1976 and 1985 and covering the province of Ouarzazate in southern Morocco are used to map the desertification process and its evolution in the region. At the scale used and given the ground resolution of the MSS (80 meters), significant changes were found between the two images. However, changes occurring at scale smaller than 80 meter square were impossible to detect by visual interpretation of this band.

The 52,830-acre Mammoth Cave National Park, located in the karst region of south-central Kentucky, was formally established in July of 1941, culminating nearly three decades of park creation that displaced several thousand residents of the region. This thesis sampled residents using the 1920 manuscript census for the United States Census of Population and Housing and tracked their migration destinations using the 1930 and 1940 manuscript censuses. Migration patterns for the entire sample, as well as by race and homeownership status, were identified through mapping. Out-migrants generally chose locations north, west, and east of the proposed park area, noticeably neglecting the Deep South. Statistical analyses proved significant differences between proportions of Black out-migrants and White out-migrants moving to urban areas, as well as those of homeowners and renters who were not successfully tracked during analysis. The research underlines unintended consequences of the forced out-migration from the proposed Mammoth Cave National Park and several factors that contributed to it. In the process, the thesis fills a gap in research on Mammoth Cave National Park and sheds light on an important aspect of Kentucky’s history.

This dissertation project examines how value is changed and created through organic certification and the universalizing ideas of capacity building within the olive oil industry in Jordan and how these shifts affect the social and material processes of production. I approach organic olive oil production in Jordan as one method that producers use in accessing markets and capacity building. By shifting from looking strictly at organic certified farms to examining the larger context of capacity building and international standards, I identify how organic is just one strategy in a larger effort to diversify Jordanian agricultural production and to access global markets. However, more work needs to be done to elucidate how development shapes organic and other ‘alternative’ initiatives differently than in European and North American contexts. In order to do this, I incorporate postcolonial critiques of GPN and critical development studies to further our understanding how of these certifications and standards are taken up, challenged, and sometimes abandoned in favor of other production methods in local spaces of the Global South. The local embeddedness of olive oil production and the relative recent history of export provide a unique opportunity for examining how producers, organizations, governments, and universities create new export industries. In order to trace how these capacities are built, this dissertation examines the following questions: how is value redefined as producers try to access distant consumers? What are the material and social strategies? In answering these questions, I examine three types of value: taste/sensory, organic/environmental, and gendered tradition. Through the examination of these values, I found that they were each built through a mechanism: re-asetheticizing local taste, creating a new commodity network, and pushing domestic labor into the public sphere. Each mechanism has intended and unintended consequences for the social relations of production. In summary, this dissertation explores the use (and abandonment) of organic certification within the larger context of development and capacity building in Jordan. In order to explore how value is being created in new ways, the three empirical chapters examine extra virginity, organic certification, and women’s rural organizations. By looking beyond a singular commodity chain, this dissertation examines the processes through which institutional assemblages are formed and destabilized. Therefore, each of the three empirical chapters covers a different aspect of the institutions that are defining value within the larger network of the olive industry. This approach will further our understanding of how quality and conventions function in systems under transition. (Higgins, Dibden, and Cocklin 2008a). Together these findings provide a broad picture of efforts in Jordan to improve and expand the Jordanian olive oil industry. A large aspect of this effort is to produce exportable olive oil. While only a small percentage of producers are exporting, governmental and development networks want to build the capacity of the olive industry so that more farmers are producing to international standards. Through this broad initiative, traditional ideas of quality and the best practices of production are being challenged. These shifts create new networks and products through which rural producers try to capture value. While the overall ramifications of this shift for the average farmer are small now, with further government standardizing, production and its associated social relations could be significantly changed. The traditional farmers who were able to sell within their personal networks may lose their ability to sell flexibly, and simultaneously larger irrigated producers may flourish, having larger environmental impacts.

Understanding women’s experiences of mangrove forest conservation in the Global South is important because mangrove forests are a crucial defense against climate change, and are also increasingly the targets of global climate change policies. The intervention of postcolonial feminist theory combined with feminist political ecology has the potential to bring forward women’s seldom-heard experiences of climate change in these valuable ecosystems. This work supports previous feminist political ecology scholarship focused on understanding women’s complicated relationships to the environment and the gendered effects of climate change policies, while challenging dominant conservation discourse around women as a monolithic group. This thesis focuses on women living in Madagascar’s largest mangrove, particularly under current mangrove reforestation efforts and emerging blue carbon climate change policies. This project explores how the women in this mangrove forest are situated along axes of power differently, the implications of social divisions for conservation, and the ways in which current mangrove conservation projects reproduce power relations in the mangrove by failing to recognize difference.

This thesis is a case study of a small agricultural community located along the eastern edge of Everglades National Park, The purpose of this study was to document the way land use decisions have been made and how these decisions have affected this community and the Everglades ecosystem. This research demonstrated that decisions made by the involved agencies have negatively affected both the community of Pariah, Florida and the Everglades ecosystem. Research methods included extensive document research, participant observation and formal and informal interviews. It appears that public concern over “saving the Everglades” has been used to provide a legitimating framework for the achievement of a plurality of personal goals and unstated agency agendas that have little or nothing to do with either the Everglades or the environment in general.