Search

The discovery of commercial quantities of oil and gas resources in the Gulf of Guinea and parts of East Africa has once again raised expectations that sustained development will emerge in one of the world’s poorest regions. At the same time there is great concern that Africa’s new resource-rich countries will succumb to the so-called resource curse phenomenon because of their generally weak governance institutions. In response to this challenge, the international community has intensified its efforts to promote good governance mechanisms in such countries, focused on transparency and accountability, and informed by a dominant institutionalist literature which argues that the differences in resource governance outcomes can be explained by the differences in institutional design and performance. A recent turn to politics in both the development and resource curse literature has begun to move the research agenda beyond the primacy of institutions to look at the politics that underpin the emergence and performance of institutions. This is particularly evidenced in the emerging literature on political settlements that emphasise the distribution of power amongst social groups in society and how these power relations shape institutions and in turn development outcomes. This new political lens is helping to deepen analysis of how and why resource-rich countries prevent or succumb to the resource curse and provides an opportunity to interrogate the inclusive development prospects of Africa’s new oil-rich countries. In this thesis, I apply and extend the political settlement approaches by incorporating ideational and spatial dynamics, to analyse the prospect of inclusive development outcomes in Ghana where oil and gas resources were discovered in 2007. Focusing on the power relations between and amongst national elites and elites in the oil producing Western Region, I interrogate the ways in which the spatial dynamics of Ghana’s prevailing competitive clientelist political settlement is shaping the governance of the oil sector, and the implications it has for inclusive development. I find that at the onset of a resource boom, the dynamics of local politics, and the dominant incentives and ideas generated by the political settlement has strongly shaped the content and enforcement of Ghana’s foundation institutions to manage the oil sector, in ways that reinforces the pre-oil settlement around the governance of natural resources and undermines the long-term prospects for inclusive development. At the same time, the oil boom has also been accompanied by the increased use of formal institutions and suggests that Ghana may be moving away from personalised to more programmatic forms of clientelism.

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 is about territory, mining conflicts and social movements in South East Ecuador. The Andean country with no large scale mining history is experiencing a recent expansion of large scale mining with growing levels of social conflict. Social movements have been questioning and contesting the forms being taken by the extractive economy as well as proposing an alternative pathway to development through the indigenous concept of sumak kawsay. The Socialist Government is pushing the nation’s extractive model forward to include large scale mining, motivated by the much needed revenues to diversify Ecuador’s oil based economy. El Pangui, my field site, is located on the foothills of the Cordillera del Cóndor, where a large copper deposit is proposed to be developed by a Chinese mining corporation. The Cordillera is an area of great biological diversity and home to the traditional territories of the Shuar, one of the largest indigenous ethnic groups in Ecuador. The years of colonization of ancestral lands and of border war with Peru, the establishment of parks-for-peace, small scale gold mining activity and an expanding agricultural frontier, together have formed a complex territorial mosaic that contribute in shaping the social and physical landscapes. Since 2005 a mining conflict has been unfolding and that can be considered yet another layer of territorial disputes and symbolic contestation in the regions´ history. My fieldwork was carried out from an engaged research and activist scholarship position. I used an ethnographic methodology to explore the bidirectional influences of territorial dynamics and the anti-mining struggle by looking at multi scalar impacts these have on people’s daily life, corporate social responsibility and environmental development debates. I also looked at the ways in which memories and meanings associated with past conflicts resonate in subsequent resource struggles to form a layering of conflicts. I was particularly interested in the less visible dimensions of environmental mobilisation embedded in the routines of daily life, as well as in the ways in which the memory and history of territorialisation and settlement influence social movement organizing. Theoretically, I propose a territorial approach to studying natural resource struggles and social movements that contest mining. This concept allowed me to examine the effects of the extractive projects on pre-existing territorial dynamics and the influence of these dynamics on the ways in which mining investments are contested.

President Hugo Chavez was first elected President of Venezuela in 1998 on an anti-neoliberal platform that promised “power to the people” via processes of state-grassroots collaboration. The current process of social change is framed within a wider discourse and policy that aims to build “Socialism for the 21st Century” through the development of new forms of political, social and economic engagement based on new conceptualisations and practices of democratic participation. Central to this process are the Communal Councils and Social Missions; initiated by the government not only to provide essential services, but also to help educate and encourage marginalised individuals and communities to organise and mobilise for change. Supporters argue that the “Bolivarian Revolution” is promoting social inclusion, protagonist participation and the redistribution of power. On the other hand many critics see Chavez’s reforms to date as an outmoded, top-down model of social change or as a classical populist project that serves to consolidate authoritarian social structures. Based on extensive fieldwork in Caracas from January 2009 to April 2010, I look beyond the rhetoric to uncover whether or not the ongoing processes of social change have contributed to new forms of political awareness and popular agency and whether or not there has been a transformation of power relations and structures. In doing so I contribute to theoretical debates into how radical change can be achieved in the 21st century, through a focus on grassroots movements, education and their changing relationship with the state.

The overuse of agrochemicals by arable crop farmers in Guyana is of increasing concern. But the literature reveals a paucity of information concerning the reasons for farmers‟ persistence of this inappropriate practice. No previous study has been conducted using a structured format to reveal the scope or reasons for farmers‟ sustained overuse of these chemicals. This research adopted an original structured-type approach, suitable for unearthing and explaining the reasons for this phenomenon. The study was theoretically and analytically guided by the theory of practices and critical realist theory respectively, to identify the prevalence, intensity and significant factors of farmer‟s pesticide and fertiliser overuse, but more importantly to elucidate reasons for overuse and formulate relevant recommendations. This investigation utilised a mixed methods strategy of complementary quantitative and qualitative techniques; comprising analysis of data from 229 farm unit surveys and 38 farmer and 19 key informant interviews, respectively. Quantitative analysis, conducted via SPSS software using tables and regression, revealed widespread prevalence of both pesticide and fertiliser overuse among farmers. The overuse consisted of high frequencies and concentrations of the chemicals. The study notes the factors which were significantly associated with overuse including farmers‟ age, education level, area cultivated, land tenure status and the „source-type‟ of information they accessed. However, qualitative analysis, utilising a grounded-theory approach with the aid of NVivo software, demonstrated that unlike the suggestions by other studies, the reasons for farmers‟ overuse were not the single factors which showed statistical significance for overuse practices. On the contrary, this study revealed original findings, which indicated that the reasons for farmers‟ overuse practices were embedded within an intricate network of contingent, support and contextual factors. These explained both the instigation and continuance of agrochemical overuse by farmers. Overall the findings emphasise the need for policy redress, especially regarding the mandate and conduct of farmer-training regarding chemical use, and the regulatory enforcement of appropriate agrochemical use. Understanding the reasons for farmers‟ inappropriate practices revealed new insight into the interpretation of these practices; as consequences of policy deficiency instead of farmer delinquency. Thus, the implications provided to address this problem of farmers‟ agrochemical overuse presented a new orientation to the type of suggestions previously suggested in other studies. The proposals indicated by this study for a targeted resolution of overuse in arable farmers of Guyana are more policy-oriented than farmer-targeted, since this study revealed that farmers‟ overuse behaviour is largely a response to policy-influenced support and contextual factors.

The aim of this dissertation is to provide a critical understanding of a Rural Territorial Development (RTD) intervention in a context of conflict dynamics, by looking at the case of the Programme for Development and Peace in Middle Magdalena (PDPMM) - Colombia. To accomplish this task the research process discussed both theoretical and empirical inputs. Firstly, a theoretical framework was developed to understand the dynamics of the development-conflict nexus in rural territories. Secondly, supported by the examination of a case-study, systematic empirical information was collected, incorporating quantitative and qualitative evidence in order to explore the explicit conflict dynamics, namely the practical and theoretical incommensurability between opposite views of rural development taking place in the Middle Magdalena region. Such analysis was further elaborated in three steps: first, the research characterized the main visions of rural development that are being pursued in Middle Magdalena; second, a comparative analysis was carried out in order to identify incommensurabilities and contradictions among those views of development; and third, the study focused on the PDPMM in order to examine how its rural territorial development strategy influences the course of conflict dynamics. On the basis of this methodology, the study shows that rural territorial interventions should focus on building pragmatic articulations among opposite views of development to establish a common development proposal that overcomes conflict and poverty in rural territories.