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Natural resources are collective goods that the state has the authority and responsibility to protect from overuse and overexploitation. In order to achieve this protection, the state must rely on the actions of local actors, experts, and business leaders who are most closely connected to the natural resource base. The dependence of the state on local actors to implement resource-protection policies makes the conduct of environmental management within authoritarian regimes a particularly interesting area in which to observe the state’s strategic choices concerning its relations with civil society. The potential threat to state control posed by an emergent civil society means that the state must weigh its interests in maintaining its authoritarianism against the benefits provided by civil society, such as the ability to analyze and implement the state’s policies effectively. This dissertation focuses on how the government of Vietnam manages these apparent tensions between allowing participation on a critical issue area and maintaining its control as an authoritarian state. I argue that the state does not respond uniformly or consistently to all types of civil society actors, even within a single issue area such as natural resources protection. Prevailing explanations of why the authoritarian state has shown permissiveness toward civil society actors fail to account for variation in the state’s response to different actors and across levels of governance. In this paper I present an alternative framework that provides a more nuanced understanding of the state’s interests with respect to various types of civil society actors. I argue that the state’s engagement with various civil society organizations depends primarily on three characteristics: 1) the organization’s mobilizing capacity; 2) issue independence; and 3) the external strategic value of the organization. These three characteristics shape whether the authoritarian state of Vietnam views the organization as a threat to be subverted and repressed in order to maintain its own authority, or a cooperative partner in the management of the state’s natural resources. In addition, this dissertation discusses the implications for successful water management in the region.

Jennifer Wallace, ‘“The Real State of Sublunary Nature”: Can Tragedy and Comedy Be So Neatly Divided?’, contribution presented at the roundtable ‘How Do Tragedy and Comedy Make/Unmake the World?’, part of the conference Thinking Through Tragedy and Comedy, ICI Berlin, 4 December 2014, video recording, mp4, 15:22

This study investigates the responses of elite, girls-only secondary schools in Cape Town to the shifting landscape of an increasingly globalised, post-apartheid South Africa, from the perspective of their principals. It sketches the shifts due to neoliberal globalisation and the socio-political changes of the post-apartheid dispensation, and argues that South African schools face the enormously complex task of navigating the impact of these forces from these two, often contradictory, fields on a daily basis. The study draws extensively upon Pierre Bourdieu's notions of habitus, field and capital for the analysis of the qualitative research data gathered by means of semi-structured interviews. The dissertation firstly examines what the field looks and feels like for the six elite schools included in this study from the perspectives of their principals, with a specific focus on the impact of the dual forces identified above as experienced by these schools. Because of the particular position that these privileged, well-resourced schools occupy within the field, they are potentially well-placed to play the field in powerful ways, and thus possibly influence the field in their own right, as well as produce students with the appropriate symbolic and cultural capital to be effective future players in this increasingly globalised, post-apartheid world. This concept of being effective players (for both schools and individuals) draws upon Bourdieu's analogy of the field as a game. If the field, as a structural social space, is compared to a game, those who embody the habitus of the field and posses the appropriate symbolic and cultural capital for that field are best placed to be effective players. They possess, as it were, a seemingly instinctive 'feel for the game' (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 62). This study examines the nature of the habitus of the schools in this study and the advantages that those who enter these schools already possessing this habitus have by being able to embody the regularities of the game. From an analysis of the research data it is clear that the primary concern of all of the interviewees is their students. Collectively the principals viewed many aspects of the changes upon the field as presenting exciting opportunities for their students. These opportunities included the formation of new types of networks as a form of social capital, as well as the ability both to imagine and experience a world beyond South Africa's borders as a result of the ascendancy in technology and the emergence of the knowledge economy. However, there are clear pressures on both schools and students that need to be carefully managed and contained. The common themes that emerged were: market-related issues of financial sustainability;; various challenges presented by the number and nature of the curricula implemented since 1994;; heightened parental expectations;; a general disintegration of the traditional, stabilising role played by families;; and a significant rise in stress levels amongst teenagers, resulting in an increase in phenomena such as cyber-bullying and teenage depression. This study found that the common strategies adopted by these schools to equip their students with the appropriate symbolic and cultural capital to maximise the opportunities and manage these and other pressures included: having high expectations of students;; the instilling of a strong work ethic;; the development of inter- and intra-personal social skills;; an emphasis on the growth of leaders and leadership skills;; a focus on traditional values in a changing world;; and the encouragement of 'giving back' to society by means of involvement in community partnerships. There was also strong agreement that the girls-only feature of these schools could work to the benefit of their students in terms of instilling capital. These, then, are the ways in which these elite schools are 'playing the field'.