This thesis examines the challenge of regulation in China’s dairy industry—a sector that went from being the country’s fastest growing food product to the 2008 melamine-milk incident and a nationwide food safety crisis. In this pursuit, it attempts to bridge the gap between analyses that view food safety problems through the separate lenses of the state regulatory apparatus and industry governance. It offers state-business interaction as a critical and fundamental component in both of these food safety mechanisms, particularly in the case of China where certain party-state activities can operate within industry chains. Using this framework, it traces party-state involvement in the dairy value chain from the industry’s initial takeoff in the late 1990s and early 2000s through the years leading up to and following the melamine-milk incident. It reveals that the realities of upstream dairy production diverged significantly from party-state and industry demands, creating space for food safety issues. At the same time, state-business interaction—particularly at the local level—limited the ability of actors to address these vulnerabilities. It constrained coordination and control between lead firms and their suppliers, between chain actors and party-state institutions and within the operations of vertically integrated enterprises. In sum, dairy’s regulatory challenges stemmed from structural issues in the way that the party-state interacted with business, and not necessarily from a lack of appropriate legislation or value chain models. The thesis draws on fieldwork conducted from 2009-2010 and incorporates material from relevant government policy as well as from a set of internal documents detailing the operations of a particular Chinese dairy processor, here called “Company X,” one year prior to the melamine-milk incident.

This thesis examines the impact of the recent introduction of public opinion polling on the quality of elections in sub-Saharan Africa to understand why it has contributed to greater transparency and representativeness in some context and not in others. It makes a unique contribution to the literature in documenting the emergence of the public opinion polling industry on the continent and in developing a theoretical framework for understanding the influence of polling on elite perceptions and behaviour during electoral periods. The thesis situates the proliferation of polling in sub-Saharan Africa within the historical and contemporary debates on the relative merits and drawbacks of public opinion research in democratic politics and elections, while exploring the theoretical link between public opinion polling and the expansion of transparency and representation by elites. The framework developed here posits opinion polling as a new, modern form of political participation to which elites must adapt, creating opportunities for either expansion or contraction of political space around elections. In this model, elites’ perceptions of shifts in political competition play a critical role in shaping both the degree of change within the electoral process and the direction, whether toward greater or reduced transparency and responsiveness, of that change. The thesis employs a mixed method approach, using content analysis of print media and key informant interviews to inform detailed case studies of electoral campaigns in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda. Consistent with the model, the case study chapters present historical narratives that capture significant examples drawn over multiple elections from each of the four countries in which public opinion polling and elite perceptions of political competition have instigated changes in political behaviour, ultimately contributing to improvement or deterioration in the quality of elections.

This thesis is concerned with core assumptions and practices in dominant approaches to Occupational Health and Safety (hereafter, OHS). I critically evaluate these through an anthropological exploration of the everyday perceptions, experiences and practices related to OHS risks amongst the cooperative miners employed in the Cerro Rico of Potosí (Bolivian Highlands).
Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2011, the thesis examines the lives and livelihoods of the miners during a time of socio-political and economic transformations and of industry upheaval due to rising mineral prices. I describe how men and women navigate the challenges and opportunities in their lives and livelihoods and how these affect their perceptions and ability to manage the OHS risks associated with cooperative mining.
The thesis hinges on the Andean idea of ‘looking at risk with both eyes’, which connotes various overlapping and changing ways of understanding, perceiving and managing OHS hazards. This approach makes visible numerous inter-connected issues, which include the miners’ individual subjectivities and values, backgrounds and lives, their different motivations for mining and the consequent everyday relations in the mine and beyond. It also allows unveiling the complex net of actors, factors and relationships which, from the individual to the global spheres and vice-versa frame, in a diverse and dynamic manner, both the OHS choices and opportunities of the miners and the particular risks they encounter.
On the basis of this ethnographic evidence about miners’ shifting and context-specific perceptions and behaviours in managing risks that are transformed as circumstances change, I question the value of a universalising OHS approach based on assumptions of static and manageable OHS risks that disregard the precarious, complex, uncertain, heterogenic and mutable context in which miners live and work.

The Ethiopian Highlands have been studied extensively, hosting a large amount of research for development projects in agriculture and forestry over several decades. The encounters in these projects were also encounters of different ways of knowing that were negotiated by the actors meeting in the space provided by the projects. This research explores these encounters and the social worlds they are embedded in, drawing on actor-oriented approaches as well as theories of narratives and framing. Ways of knowing and citizen epistemologies are taken as a lens to understand the role of identities in knowledge production and use.

The two case studies were agroforestry research projects in the Ethiopian Highlands. The research followed a range of qualitative and ethnographic research methods. Different types of farmers and scientists meet in the case studies. I recognise that they all have individual agency, nevertheless I use the terms ‘scientist’ and ‘farmer’ in this thesis. I use the terms to describe certain groups of actors who all draw on different ways of knowing, and different value systems, when interacting with each other and their environment.

The results indicate that the importance of social worlds at different scales and the contexts of research projects tend to be underestimated. In spite of good intentions scientific methodologies, terminologies and narratives tend to dominate. Scientists in the case studies acknowledged the existence of farmers’ ‘indigenous’ knowledge, but they determined the value of knowledge by its scientific applicability and the replicability of experiments. Research systems force the scientists into a certain modus operandi with limited possibilities to experiment and to respond to the complexities and diversities of people's social worlds.

Farmers in the case studies preferred observation from their parents, observing from others or the environment as a way of learning and gaining knowledge. Depending on their personalities and their life histories they also relied on alternative ways of knowing rooted in spirituality, emotions and memories. Powerful influences on ways of knowing resulted from the way languages and authority had been used. These often led to the exclusion of marginalised community members from access to knowledge and technologies.

Unfortunately, common narratives prevailed in the case studies, and alternative ways of knowing were often marginalised. By acknowledging different ways of knowing and the importance of different social worlds and different ways of doing research, both scientists and farmers could benefit and develop more sustainable pathways for agricultural and forestry land use.

This research addresses the following question: ‘In the context of climate change, how do different actors narrate the uncertain, ambiguous and risky future of maize agriculture, and what are the implications?’ A multi-sited and institutional ethnography approach was adopted in order to look critically at how knowledge and narratives of future change in Kenyan maize agriculture are constructed by a variety of actors. The thesis describes: contested narratives of climate change and climate change impacts (through an analysis of the global climate impact modelling endeavour); contested narratives of change on smallholder farms (based on two case study sites in Kenya); contested narratives of pro-poor technological interventions (including the development of genetically modified drought tolerant maize); and contested narratives of technology regulation (with a focus on Kenyan biosafety policy). It is shown that narratives are contested in multiple sites and by a variety of actors and, although the resolution of these contestations often fall along familiar lines of power and elite capture, there are examples in which alternative perspectives find agency. This is the case not only in national policy-making arenas and the board-rooms of international development initiatives, but also in the fields and communities of smallholder farmers, the offices of national research centres, and the operations of civil society organisations. It is argued that, within these diverse settings, critical analysis of the constructed nature of knowledge is a necessary foundation on which to open up the negotiation of Kenya’s agricultural future to multiple alternatives.

This thesis aims to contribute to an understanding of how citizenship is constructed, sensed and practiced by people who have experienced violent conflict and displacement. In the Acholi region of Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) created large-scale insecurity and mass-displacement between the late 1980s until the region returned to stability in 2006. In this thesis I compare two conflict-affected locations in the Acholi region with one non-affected location in Lango region. The overall proposition of this study is that the experience of protracted conflict and displacement leads to a lack of a sense of citizenship and to diminished forms of citizen engagement, due to the limited opportunity for learning and experiencing the practice of citizenship.

I used qualitative research methods during ten months of fieldwork in 2010. For an analysis of people’s sense of citizenship, I studied how people perceive and feel themselves to be members of the wider political community; as members of the Acholi tribe and as citizens of Uganda. For the analysis of the practice of citizenship I studied various forms of citizen engagement: with local authorities, in community institutions, for development and for accountability purposes.

Numerous challenges to citizen participation exist across Uganda. These include a lack of knowledge about the system and lack of self-confidence, barriers associated with the micropolitics of participation, and democratic deficits of the overall political system. However, underlying reasons for non-participation can vary. In Acholi, some of these reasons are attributable to people’s experiences during the war.

I conclude that protracted conflict diminishes a sense of citizenship and radically changes the social environment in which active citizenship is learnt, through the narrowing and securitisation of institutions and the public sphere. The sense and practice that exist in the post-conflict situation are therefore characterised by certain ideas, perceptions, emotions and behaviours that were developed during the conflict.

This thesis centres on the lives of women who live in Khayelitsha and who receive AIDS biomedicines through South Africa’s public health system. It is tiered across five ethnographic chapters to elucidate a single overarching argument: biopolitical precarity is networked into the permeable body. This argument is based on ethnographic research and seeks to challenge the discursive construction of distance that divorces women’s lives and bodies from the governance of AIDS biomedicines as life-­giving technologies.

The multi-­sited ethnography underpinning this thesis was configured to follow the networked threads that weave women’s embodied precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance. To this end, fieldwork was conducted in South Africa from October 2010 – July 2011 in order to understand the embodied and political dimensions of access to AIDS biomedicine. Thereafter, fieldwork was conducted in Brazil from August 2011 – September 2011 to explore the networked connections spanning activist organisations, government coalitions and economic blocs to move out from the intimate spaces of women’s lives and bodies to locate them in the regional and global spaces of biomedical developments and health policy dynamics.

This thesis argues that although it is crucial to anchor technologies in people’s lives, it is also analytically and politically necessary to link people’s lives - and the technologies that sustain them - back into the global assemblage that is networked around the governance of medicine. Therefore, I locate biomedical technologies in social and political contexts of lives of the people with whom I worked in Khayelitsha, and I argue further that their lives also need to be understood as part of a complex network of actors (spanning international organisations, regional coalitions and national governments) and actants (HIV and ARVs) that assemble in dynamic configurations and that are woven into and through the body.

This thesis seeks to examine the politics of building resilience to climate change by analysing the manner in which policy contexts and initiatives to build climate change resilience interact.

For analysis, the ‘policy context’ is broken into its three constituent parts- actors, policy spaces and discourses. This permits the addition of new knowledge on how discourses attached to resilience are dissonant with those prevailing in ossified policy environments in developing countries; the influence of actor networks, epistemic communities, knowledge intermediaries and policy entrepreneurs in helping climate change resilience gain traction in policy environments; and the dynamic interaction of interest, agendas and power within decision-making spaces attached to resilience-building processes.

This analysis takes place by employing a case-study of a major, international climate change resilience initiative unfolding in two Indian cities. Using data gathered through a variety of rigorous qualitative research methods employed over 14 months of empirical inquiry the thesis highlights issues of politics and power to argue that they are significant determinants of processes to deal with climate impacts.

More specifically, it expands current understandings of engaging with climate impacts by exposing gaps in resilience thinking and argues against a technocratic approach to designing and executing resilience policies. In doing so it also demonstrates that resilience, with its emphasis on systems thinking, dealing with uncertainty and community engagement brings new challenges for policy makers. As the study is located in the urban context, it highlights the manner in which fragmented urban policy environments, dense patterns of settlement in cities, urban livelihood patterns and prevailing epistemic cultures can pose obstacles for a policy initiative aimed at building resilience to climate change. Finally, the research underlines the importance of coupling resilience with local narratives of dealing with shocks and stresses, argues for genuine iteration and shared learning during decision-making and highlights the need to celebrate multiple visions of resilience.

Findings from this research can help inform a growing number of policy initiatives aimed at deploying resilience to help those battling the exigencies of a changing climate in some of the world’s most vulnerable areas.

This thesis examines the shifting nature of accountability and clientelism in dominant party politics in Tanzania through the analysis of the introduction of a Constituency Development Fund (CDF) in 2009. A CDF is a distinctive mechanism that channels a specific portion of the government budget to the constituencies of Members of Parliament (MPs) to finance local small-scale development projects which are primarily selected by MPs. While existing studies argue that the control of resources is essential for dominant parties to maintain their power in politics, the adoption of a type of CDF in Tanzania poses a puzzle; why did the dominant ruling party of Tanzania accept a CDF that would give the legislature financial autonomy and might weaken the party’s power over MPs?

Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, the thesis demonstrates that a CDF proposal was moved forward as part of the reform to strengthen the legislature, and the ruling party accepted it to re-establish party coherence and gain public support in preparation for the general elections in 2010, after it was plagued by the revelation of corruption scandals involving party leaders and intraparty competition. The thesis has also found that a CDF was adopted when clientelistic voters were increasingly dissatisfied with the performance of MPs and some MPs had begun providing financial assistance to voters systematically. With a formal project-selection and monitoring mechanism in place, the Tanzanian CDF has more potential to restrict the prevalence of clientelistic accountability than the provision of private or club goods by MPs based on private resources. The Tanzanian case demonstrates that CDFs can potentially mitigate the influence of clientelism in the accountability relationship between MPs and voters in developing countries.

Since 2005, the Thai government has, as a matter of policy, been seeking to increase production of biodiesel from oil palms. As a result, the number of oil palm plantations in the Northeast region has been growing, particularly in Nong Khai province. Nong Khai is a relatively remote, predominantly agricultural area and is the field site for this research. However, oil palm production is a complex and hotly contested issue both globally and in Thailand and it has ardent critics and supporters. For example, expanding oil palm production could, on the one hand, contribute to deforestation and a range of social problems that threaten traditional livelihoods, whilst on the other hand it could offer a source of renewable energy, alleviate poverty, and lead to a higher standard of living for farmers. The ultimate purpose of this study is to understand the changeover to oil palm production, specifically in the Thai context, through the development and application of a distinctive analytical approach. This approach is a synthesis of: the eight elements of farmers’ decision-making (Ohlmer et al., 1998), the IDS Knowledge, Technology, and Society (KNOTS) team’s framework on policy processes (Keeley and Scoones, 1999; 2001; 2003; KNOTS, 2006).

This analytical approach is used to investigate factors influencing farmers’ decisions to take up oil palm cultivation, and the rationale behind the government’s oil palm policy and how it is implemented in the Northeast Thailand. Approximately nine months were spent carrying out the research in three selected villages in Nong Khai province, using qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews, purposive sampling and snowballing techniques. The results show that economic security is an important factor for farmers in deciding to change over to oil palm cultivation. However, it has emerged that what farmers really want is to achieve a comfortable lifestyle and to live in the same locality as their children, which implies urban to rural migration. Other critical factors are characteristic of oil palm cultivation, such as long life-span and short harvesting period, governmental projects supporting oil palm production, the roles of inspirational local leaders and large-scale oil palm producers, the price of oil palm fruits, the links between farmers and local buyers, and the experiences of oil palm growers in the southern region of Thailand, as well as the low productivity and high production costs involved in rice cultivation, and the success of rubber plantations.

The findings also suggest that the oil palm policy processes in Nong Khai province do not have policy space for farmers to participate in the networks, or to design the oil palm policy that directly affects them. The policy was made in top-down in which the government only transferred oil palm knowledge through seminars and trainings. There were also issues concerning inequality amongst farmers and how that affects participation in the oil palm projects. Indeed, the OPPSP favours rich farmers, as they need a significant amount of capital to prepare for and maintain oil palm crops. Implementation of a ‘farmer-first’ approach is recommended in order to push the policy forward to serve resource-poor farmers properly. New behaviours and attitudes must be encouraged in most of the professionals encountered in this research.

This thesis examines the underlying causes of food insecurity, famine in general and green famine in particular in the enset-dominant livelihood zones of Kambata land in southern Ethiopia, which are historically considered more resilient and less vulnerable to food insecurity and famine than other parts of Ethiopia. Given Ethiopia’s long-standing history of food insecurity and famines, the discourse of food insecurity and famine is dominated by natural and demographic factors as the main causes. In order to unpack the multi-layered underlying causes of food insecurity in general and green famine in particular, the thesis adopts Sen’s analytical framework of ‘entitlement to food’. Using multi-site qualitative research techniques, this thesis captures the perceptions of different actors at different levels about the causes of green famine, identifies the sources of livelihood vulnerability and the types of livelihood strategies undertaken by households in the study area. By systematically capturing and analysing these different aspects, the study concludes that the causes of green famine extend beyond the dominant narratives of drought and population growth, and that these factors alone cannot fully explain famine occurrence. Green famine is caused by a web of complex and intertwined policy-related, political, natural, socio-­‐economic and demographic factors that have long been present in the study area.

The thesis further investigates how the contemporary understanding and classification of famine is dominated by anthropometric and mortality outcomes (‘objective indicators’) and thresholds set by outsiders and how ‘subjective indicators’ such as the perceptions, knowledge, experience and coping strategies of famine victims are undervalued and given less weight by ‘famine scales’. By incorporating ‘subjective indicators’ of famine, this thesis
challenges conventional famine conceptualisation and measurement and recommends that these indicators be given equal treatment and weight to ‘objective indicators’ in famine classification.

Over the past two decades the expansion of soybean production in Brazil has been assessed and used as an example of the success or failure of large-scale, mechanized agricultural production. Indeed, the economic, social and environmental implications of this agricultural expansion are highly contested. Nevertheless, the complexity behind this process is rarely depicted. Instead simplistic and monolithic notions of agronegocio (agribusiness), and linear interpretations of soybean expansion are offered. These general accounts reduce agrarian dynamics, diversity of farming styles and differences in livelihoods to a homogenous phenomenon in all soybean production regions in Brazil. This limits the scope to understand processes of socio-technical, socio-economic and socio-environmental transformations and the existence of diverse pathways related to the soybean agri-food systems.

This study therefore rejects the simple narratives, and argues for a more nuanced understanding of the diverse processes and dynamics between soybean farming styles and its actors' interactions as part of fast‐changing agri‐food systems. This is done through a case study approach in the municipality of Querência in the state Mato Grosso, Brazil. An examination of narratives (the ways different people talk about and construct farming and its objectives) and practices (the different farming styles and livelihood strategies) informs this analysis. In particular, the research explores how a heterogeneity of soybean farming styles – contrasting large-scale, medium-scale and smallholder soybean farmers – is constructed in a particular place, offering in turn a more nuanced account of the standard, highly polarised assessment of farming styles and their implications. It then contributes to an understanding of how policies and practices related to diverse soybean agri-food systems in Mato Grosso state are played out. This sheds light on how notions of rural development are constructed and how pathways to sustainable development are seen.

Despite emerging consensus on its use by multiple stakeholders, the human health sector has continued to identify One Health from a strong human health security perspective, often ignoring concerns of other sectors that relate to trade, commerce, livelihood issues and sustainable development. In the absence of a clear vision of One Health goals, a culture of collaboration, conceptual clarity and operating frameworks, this disconnect between human health and One Health efforts has often impeded the translation of One Health from concept to reality beyond emergency situations. Effective and sustainable One Health partnerships will require identification of clear operating principles that allow flexible approaches for inter-sectoral collaborations. Trans-sectoral methods for measuring the risks, burden and costs across sectors and examples of best practices models backed by the catalytic role of informal collaborations are needed to convince the political and technical leaderships, instill societal wellbeing into the human health sector’s view of One Health and make necessary structural adjustments.

The study aimed to determine costs to the state government of implementing different interventions for controlling rabies among the entire human and animal populations of Tamil Nadu. This built upon an earlier assessment of Tamil Nadu’s efforts to control rabies. Anti-rabies vaccines were made available at all health facilities. Costs were estimated for five different combinations of animal and human interventions using an activity-based costing approach from the provider perspective. Disease and population data were sourced from the state surveillance data, human census and livestock census. Program costs were extrapolated from official documents. All capital costs were depreciated to estimate annualized costs. All costs were inflated to 2012 Rupees. Sensitivity analysis was conducted across all major cost centres to assess their relative impact on program costs. It was found that the annual costs of providing Anti-rabies vaccine alone and in combination with Immunoglobulins was \$0.7 million (Rs 36 million) and \$2.2 million (Rs 119 million), respectively. For animal sector interventions, the annualised costs of rolling out surgical sterilisation-immunization, injectable immunization and oral immunizations were estimated to be \$ 44 million (Rs 2,350 million), \$23 million (Rs 1,230 million) and \$ 11 million (Rs 590 million), respectively. Dog bite incidence, health systems coverage and cost of rabies biologicals were found to be important drivers of costs for human interventions. For the animal sector interventions, the size of dog catching team, dog population and vaccine costs were found to be driving the costs. Rabies control in Tamil Nadu seems a costly proposition the way it is currently structured. Policy makers in Tamil Nadu and other similar settings should consider the long-term financial sustainability before embarking upon a state or nation-wide rabies control programme.

This study attempts to develop an understanding of the iterative and multi-scaled
process involved in transforming the state from below by examining the relationship
between two of the most politicised rights-based legislations in India: the Right to
Information Act (RTI) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee
Act (NREGA). Based on one and a half years of ethnographic and interview based
research, and five years of working with the RTI campaign, I examine the reciprocal
relationship between the rights to information and work, and the multi-scaled activism
necessary to instantiate both. First, I trace different phases of the struggle for the right to
information, beginning with the creation of alternative public spheres, Jan sunwais (or
rural public hearings) that responded to demands for the right to work in rural
Rajasthan. Second, as this demand culminated in a broad-based advocacy network, I
examine the role of actors from diverse institutional arenas that succeeded in passing the
national RTI legislation. I also look at how the same national network of activists
introduced the public accountability mechanism of social audits, inspired by the Jan
sunwai, into the new right to work law or NREGA. Finally, bringing the process full
circle, I look at the ongoing efforts of the MKKS and the Suchna Evum Rozgar Adhikar
Abhiyan (The Right to Information and Work Campaign) to implement the right to
work on the ground in rural Rajasthan. In contrast to existing studies, I provide a more
comprehensive analysis of the interdependent struggle for rights to information and
work as one long iterative process to transform the state from below. I conclude with
some reflections on the different vision of “transparency” and “accountability”
emerging from rural grassroots struggles and what the RTI and NREGA experiences
teach us about the possibilities for their realisation.

Drawing on the recent identification of anthropogenic dark earths (ADEs) in West Africa's Upper Guinea forest region, this article engages with Amazonian debates concerning whether such enriched soils were produced intentionally or not. We present a case study of a Loma settlement in Northwest Liberia in which ethnography, oral history, and landscape mapping reveal subsistence practices and habitus that lead African dark earths (AfDEs) to form inevitably around settlements and farm camps. To consider the question of intentionality and how the inevitability of AfDE is experienced, we combine historical and political ecology with elements of nonrepresentational theory. The former show how the spatial configuration of AfDEs in the landscape reflect shifting settlement patterns shaped by (1) political and economic transformations, mediated by (2) enduring ritual practices and social relations between first-coming and late-coming social groups that are symbolically related as uncles and nephews. We use nonrepresentational theory to show how the Loma phenomenological experience of these soils and their origins is better conceptualized in terms of sensual objects, the formation of which is inflected by these social and political processes. We thus reframe the debate away from intentionality, to theorize enriched anthropogenic soils and landscapes in terms of shifting sociocultural, political, and historical factors interplaying with the practical, sensually experienced, and inevitable effects of everyday life.