Browsing by Subject "Governance"

This is a dissertation about identity and governance, and how they are mutually constituted. Between 1838 and 1917, the British brought approximately half a million East Indian laborers to the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations. The dissertation argues that contrary to previous historiographical assumptions, indentured East Indians were an amorphous mass of people drawn from various regions of British India. They were brought together not by their innate "Indian-ness" upon their arrival in the Caribbean, but by the common experience of indenture recruitment, transportation and plantation life. Ideas of innate "Indian-ness" were products of an imperial discourse that emerged from and shaped official approaches to governing East Indians in the Atlantic. Government officials and planters promoted visions of East Indians as "primitive" subjects who engaged in child marriage and wife murder. Officials mobilized ideas about gender to sustain racialized stereotypes of East Indian subjects. East Indian women were thought to be promiscuous, and East Indian men were violent and depraved (especially in response to East Indian women's promiscuity). By pointing to these stereotypes about East Indians, government officials and planters could highlight the promise of indenture as a civilizing mechanism. This dissertation links the study of governance and subject formation to complicate ideas of colonial rule as static. It uncovers how colonial processes evolved to handle the challenges posed by migrant populations.

The primary architects of indenture, Caribbean governments, the British Colonial Office, and planters hoped that East Indian indentured laborers would form a stable and easily-governed labor force. They anticipated that the presence of these laborers would undermine the demands of Afro-Creole workers for higher wages and shorter working hours. Indenture, however, was controversial among British liberals who saw it as potentially hindering the creation of a free labor market, and abolitionists who also feared that indenture was a new form of slavery. Using court records, newspapers, legislative documents, bureaucratic correspondence, memoirs, novels, and travel accounts from archives and libraries in Britain, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, this dissertation explores how indenture was envisioned and constantly re-envisioned in response to its critics. It chronicles how the struggles between the planter class and the colonial state for authority over indentured laborers affected the way that indenture functioned in the British Atlantic. In addition to focusing on indenture's official origins, this dissertation examines the actions of East Indian indentured subjects as they are recorded in the imperial archive to explore how these people experienced indenture.

Indenture contracts were central to the justification of indenture and to the creation of a pliable labor force in the Atlantic. According to English common law, only free parties could enter into contracts. Indenture contracts limited the period of indenture and affirmed that laborers would be remunerated for their labor. While the architects of indenture pointed to contracts as evidence that indenture was not slavery, contracts in reality prevented laborers from participating in the free labor market and kept the wages of indentured laborers low. Further, in late nineteenth-century Britain, contracts were civil matters. In the British Atlantic, indentured laborers who violated the terms of their contracts faced criminal trials and their associated punishments such as imprisonment and hard labor. Officials used indenture contracts to exploit the labor and limit the mobility of indentured laborers in a manner that was reminiscent of slavery but that instead established indentured laborers as subjects with limited rights. The dissertation chronicles how indenture contracts spawned a complex inter-imperial bureaucracy in British India, Britain, and the Caribbean that was responsible for the transportation and governance of East Indian indentured laborers overseas.

Transnational governance has been advanced as a viable option for regulating commodities produced in emerging economies—where incapable or unwilling states may undersupply institutions requisite for overseeing supply chains consistent with the quality, safety, environmental, or social standards demanded by the global marketplace. Producers from these jurisdictions, otherwise left with few venues for securing market access and price premiums, ostensibly benefit from whatever pathways transnational actors offer to minimize barriers to entry—including voluntary certification for compliance with a panoply of public and private rules, such as those promulgated by NGOs like the Fair Trade Federation or multinational retailers like Wal-Mart. Yet, such transnational “sustainability” governance may neither be effective nor desirable. Regulatory schemes, like third-party certification, often privilege the interests of primary architects and beneficiaries—private business associations, governments, NGOs, and consumers in the global North—over regulatory targets—producers in the global South. Rather than engaging with the international marketplace via imported and externally-driven schemes, some producer groups are instead challenging existing rules and innovating homegrown institutions. These alternatives to commercialization adopt some institutional characteristics of their transnational counterparts yet deliver benefits in a manner more aligned with the needs of producers. Drawing on original empirical cases from Nicaragua and Mexico, this dissertation examines the role of domestic institutional alternatives to transnational governance in enhancing market access, environmental quality and rural livelihoods within producer communities. Unlike the more technocratic and expert-driven approaches characteristic of mainstream governance efforts, these local regulatory institutions build upon the social capital, indigenous identity, “ancestral” knowledge, and human assets of producer communities as new sources of power and legitimacy in governing agricultural commodities.

There is growing recognition that conventional Western approaches to fisheries governance and management are globally falling short in addressing many social and ecological challenges. Calls to “reinvent” or “reimagine” fisheries institutions through adaptations of ecosystem-based approaches increasingly intersect with interest in the “integration,” “bridging,” or “weaving” of knowledges and values held by Indigenous peoples with Western approaches. Generally, the intent is to improve decision-making processes and management outcomes, and to better recognize Indigenous rights following national and international legislative commitments such as UNDRIP. However, without appropriate strategies these efforts can echo harmful colonial histories, further marginalize Indigenous communities, and fail to restore fisheries of concern. Reimagining fisheries institutions will fundamental systemic changes to dominant worldviews, including how we approach multiple knowledges, conceptualize social and environmental relations, and even the very question of what constitutes “good” fisheries governance.The purpose of the dissertation is to consider what it means to pursue “integration” of Indigenous and Western scientific ways of knowing for improved fisheries governance and management and to meaningfully recognize Indigenous rights and knowledges. I present a case study of salmon in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island (WCVI). Salmon are highly valued by WCVI coastal communities and are integral to the wellbeing of local Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations, but are at risk of extirpation. The federal government, through Fisheries and Oceans Canada, is tasked with recognizing Indigenous knowledges and the recently formalized commercial fishing rights of five Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations into WCVI fisheries. Development of the five Nations’ fisheries within a context of multiple overlapping Indigenous and Canadian actors and authorities presents a particularly entangled challenge for local governance reform and directly confronts colonial legacies and the historical distribution of power between Canadian and Nuu-chah-nulth governance structures. In this dissertation, I present the findings of research built through five years of partnership with Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations and Ha’oom Fisheries Society and based in the Tla-o-qui-aht hahouthli (traditional territory). The methodology includes a combination of archival and place-based methods informed by approaches in critical geographies and Indigenous relational practice. The broader goal of our partnership is to support ongoing efforts to mobilize Nuu-chah-nulth knowledges and values in WCVI salmon governance and management for productive, healthy, and abundant salmon fisheries. In presenting the work, I first review the case study context with attention to colonial histories of BC salmon fisheries. I then present a literature review summarizing primary concerns and recommendations from other efforts to “integrate” or mobilize Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in fisheries. With these recommendations in mind, I detail the case study findings considering the mobilizations of knowledge and governance relations in WCVI salmon governance. I first identify pluralistic approaches to Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in Tla-o-qui-aht’s internal management and governance structures. I then consider how specific relational approaches to knowledge coproduction and institution building support local decision-making and knowledge mobilization in the entangled salmon governance arrangements of Clayoquot Sound. Finally, I consider how the five Nations’ fisheries are impacted by and strategically respond to colonial structures and knowledge hegemonies in State fisheries management, with implications for disrupting feedbacks between colonialism and conventional Western fisheries science. Throughout, I discuss insights regarding strategies for Indigenous rights implementation and knowledge mobilization which transform governance and power relations in small scale, multispecies fisheries. The dissertation chapters collectively contribute to the following findings. First, Nuu-chah-nulth governance structures approach fisheries management through knowledge pluralisms and should be recognized as legitimate and capable governing bodies for self management. Second, relational strategies to partnership building between rightsholders and governance actors support coordinated decision-making, adaptive management actions, increased local capacity, and robust knowledge co-development, especially in when reflecting Nuu-chah-nulth embodied relational practice and with deference to Nuu-chah-nulth governing authority. Finally, strategically utilizing pluralisms and relational partnerships to challenge knowledge hegemonies and the settler state’s authority can disrupt feedbacks between colonialism and conventional Western fisheries science and offers a potential avenue for decolonization in the context of a resistant bureaucratic structure. The findings of this dissertation also contribute insight regarding broadly applicable steps forward through alternate pathways of information, understandings of relation, and arrangements of governance. Pluralistic approaches to knowledge and governance conducted in collaboration with Indigenous scholars and communities should be prioritized in efforts to mobilize multiple knowledges in the management of fisheries. Indigenous leadership and power sharing through co-governance are imperative to these approaches. Broadly, knowledge pluralisms and more-than-capitalist relational reimaginings present promising avenues for meaningful fisheries reform.

Anti-corruption efforts in authoritarian regimes are often seen as insincere charades or tools used for intra-elite struggles and factional purges. This paper advances an alternative view that considers their substantial effects. I argue that authoritarian anti-corruption efforts can have positive effects on foreign direct investment (FDI) by disciplining officials and improving the environment for foreign investors. I substantiate this claim by examining how China's anti-corruption efforts and in particular, the ongoing large-scale anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping influence FDI inflow to China. Theoretically building a formal model and empirically using an original province-origin-level panel dataset for the period from 2008 through 2019, two-way fixed effects models, and a difference-in-differences strategy, I show that anti-corruption efforts are conducive to FDI inflow to China and such positive effects are more significant when the effort is in large-scale. Yet Xi's campaign has a non-differential effect on foreign investors from different origins. I propose three explanations for this non-differential effect: the effectiveness of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, the sincerity of Xi's campaign, and pre-campaign perfect price discrimination. These findings highlight the substantial effect and limitations of authoritarian anti-corruption efforts.

The need for effective multi-level governance arrangements is becoming increasingly apparent because of the high functional interdependencies between biophysical and socioeconomic factors in the realm of natural resource governance. Such arrangements provide a basis for the exchange, discussion, and deliberation of information, knowledge, and data across diverse user groups and entities. Multi-level governance is operationalized by using a microinstitutional analysis that links decision-making arenas across three distinct levels: operational, collective-choice, and constitutional. Within this context, I argue that the effectiveness and success of actors' participatory processes across these three levels depend on the amount of social capital among actors within the governance system. I assessed the concept of social capital using two different models: (1) a structural approach focused on resources embedded within an individual's network, and (2) a combined structural-cultural approach that incorporates various aspects of group membership with relations of trust, rules, and norms. To explore the effects of social capital on participatory processes related to the implementation and management of natural resources, I analyzed different small-scale fisheries governance regimes from the Gulf of California, Mexico. I collected data using surveys (n=371), interviews (n=82), and participant observation techniques conducted among the residents of four small-scale fishing communities that live adjacent to marine protected areas along the Baja California, Mexico, peninsula. Data analysis included both quantitative (logit regression model), and qualitative (narrative analysis) approaches. Overall, my results suggest that both social capital models reveal the multidimensional nature of social capital where none of its individual types form a consistent and statistically significant relationship with the six outcomes that I measured. However, these types are related in different ways to fishers engagement in participatory processess across the three levels. The extent of fishers' engagement in participatory processess across different levels was not high. Qualitative analysis revealed that participatory processes related to fisheries conservation and management, although present do not reach their full potential and are stymied by a historical context and a lack of general participatory culture.

My dissertation investigates twin financial interventions—urban development and emergency management—in a single small town. Once a thriving city drawing blacks as blue-collar workers during the Great Migration, Benton Harbor, Michigan has suffered from waves of out-migration, debt, and alleged poor management. Benton Harbor’s emphasis on high-end economic development to attract white-collar workers and tourism, amidst the poverty, unemployment, and disenfranchisement of black residents, highlights an extreme case of American urban inequality. At the same time, many bystanders and representative observers argue that this urban redevelopment scheme and the city’s takeover by the state represent Benton Harbor residents’ only hope for a better life. I interviewed 44 key players and observers in local politics and development, attended 20 public meetings, conducted three months of observations, and collected extensive archival data. Examining Benton Harbor’s time under emergency management and its luxury golf course development as two exemplars of a larger relationship, I find that the top-down processes allegedly intended to alleviate Benton Harbor’s inequality actually reproduce and deepen the city’s problems. I propose that the beneficiaries of both plans constitute a white urban regime active in Benton Harbor. I show how the white urban regime serves its interests by operating an extraction machine in the city, which serves to reproduce local poverty and wealth by directing resources toward the white urban regime and away from the city.

This dissertation focuses on raiding and sovereignty in the Central African Republic's (CAR) northeastern borderlands, on the margins of Darfur. A vast literature on social evolution has assumed the inevitability of centralization. But these borderlands show that centralization does not always occur. Never claimed by any centralizing forces, the area has instead long been used as a reservoir of resources by neighboring areas' militarized entrepreneurs, who seek this forest-savanna's goods. The raiders seize resources but also govern. The dynamics of this zone, much of it a place anthropologists used to refer to as "stateless," suggest a re-thinking of the modalities of sovereignty. The dissertation proposes conceptualizing sovereignty not as a totalizing, territorialized political order but rather through its constituent governing capabilities, which may centralize or not, and can combine to create hybrid political systems. The dissertation develops this framework through analysis of three categories of men-in-arms -- road-blockers, anti-poaching militiamen, and members of rebel groups -- and their relationships with international peacebuilding initiatives. It compares roadblocks and "road cutting" (robbery) to show how they stop traffic and create flexible, personalized entitlements to profit for those who operate them. The dissertation also probes the politics of militarized conservation: in a low-level war that has lasted for twenty-five years, the European Union-funded militiamen fight deadly battles against herders and hunters. Though ostensibly fought to protect CAR's "national patrimony" (its animals and plants), this war bolsters the sovereign capabilities of a range of non-state actors and has resulted in hundreds of deaths in the last few years, many of them hidden in the bush. The dissertation then shows how CAR's recent cycle of rebellion has changed governance in rural areas. Though mobile armed groups have long operated in CAR, they used to work as road cutters and local defense forces and only recently started calling themselves "rebels" -- a move that has landed them in new roles as "governors" of populations while leaving them without the welfare largess they seek. Throughout these various raiders' projects, the idea of the all-powerful state serves as a reference point they use to qualify themselves with sovereign authorities. But their actions as rulers undermine the creation of the unitary political authority they desire and invoke. Failure to appreciate these non-centralized micropolitical processes is a main reason peacebuilding efforts (such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) in the region have failed.

The relationship between the senior pastor and the board of elders is critical to the flourishing of any congregation, but its importance is amplified by the size dynamics and collective governance polity of large Presbyterian churches. When the board of elders (session) either matches the pastor’s passivity or micromanages the congregation, or when the session either rubber-stamps or resents the pastor’s authoritarian leadership, the senior pastor’s tenure can become tenuous and the congregation will be hindered from carrying out its mission. It may even suffer significant harm. How can a congregation wisely order this relationship so that the senior pastor and the session can jointly pursue God’s vision in a way that enables empowered pastoral leadership, ensures pastoral accountability, and values corporate spiritual discernment? Rooted in real congregational dynamics, this thesis suggests a two-pronged solution to help large, Presbyterian churches better realize this ideal.

First, the Policy Governance model, which is widely utilized by corporate and non-profit boards, can clarify the roles of the senior pastor and the session to help them better lead together. In the words of John and Miriam Carver, who pioneered the model, it’s an approach to governance that “enables extensive empowerment to staff while preserving controls necessary for accountability.” When adapted to the uniqueness of Presbyterian polity, the Policy Governance model can create a framework in which the session truly governs and in which the senior pastor and the session discern and pursue God’s vision for the congregation together.

Second, in order for the elders confidently to discern God’s vision alongside the senior pastor within the framework that Policy Governance creates, a session must also commit themselves to spiritual shepherding. Samuel Miller, an early 19th century professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, provides a learned historical perspective from American Presbyterianism from which we can reimagine the role of the ruling elder not merely as an institutional administrator but as a spiritual shepherd. Miller envisions elders as men and women trained and ordained for an office that differs from the senior pastor’s in job description but not in divine sanction. He expects that an elder’s work of governing and guiding the sheep during session meetings will only be enhanced because of her work feeding the sheep between session meetings. Only if ruling elders possess the training and qualifications concomitant with their high spiritual calling, and only if elders engage in both governing and feeding shepherding, will they grow the spiritual muscles to lead competently and confidently alongside the senior pastor.

Each congregation must determine how best to apply these solutions in light of its own culture and current senior pastor-session dynamic. But the concluding examples of two congregations and one denominational program further illuminate how to put these solutions into practice. They can inspire congregations who also want to experience the benefits of Policy Governance and spiritual shepherding.

The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, created a rupture with a series of neoliberal policies implemented in Mexico and on a global scale over the last few decades of the 20th century. In a moment when alternatives to neoliberal global capitalism appeared to have disappeared from the world stage, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) initiated a movement and process that would have significance not only in Chiapas and for Mexico, but for many struggles and movements around the world that would come to identify with a kind of "alter-globalization" project. This dissertation examines the historical moment of neoliberal globalization, what the EZLN calls the "Fourth World War," the Zapatista initiative to construct an alternative political project, and the importance of this process of rupture and construction for our understanding of social organization, political participation, struggle and subjectivity.

Taking up theories of new forms of domination as dispersed forms of power operating through non- state institutions and a kind of participative subject in the public realm (following Raúl Zibechi and Stefano Harney), I argue that lines of antagonism can no longer be drawn between public and private, or state and non-state realms, but must be viewed as different strategies of subjectification, one as the subject-making of a form of governance, still but more subtly a form of domination, and one as a form of struggle for collective self-making. While both forms employ mechanisms and imaginaries of cooperation, the former cultivates subjective compatibility with an existing system while the latter I associate with the Zapatista concept and practice of autonomy.

Drawing on several years of fieldwork in Chiapas as well as the extensive theoretical work of the Zapatistas themselves, I trace the development of Zapatista autonomy as a concept and exercise of power and in its implementation as a system of self-government and provision of services through the construction of autonomous territory. This use and understanding of power has been both encouraged by and enabling of the autonomous judicial, health, education, communication and production systems in Zapatista territory. My argument here is that, beyond control over land, services, and the mode of production, territorial and political autonomy has permitted the Zapatistas to create an entire system of "new" social relations, an ecology of practices that create a mutually constructive relationship between (autonomous) system and (self-determined) subject in a cycle that continually widens and deepens the scope of what is possible for both. I then turn to an investigation of the Zapatista initiative to create a larger political project, and a more extensive and diverse collective subject of struggle, through the launching of the "Other Campaign" as a non-electoral anti-capitalist movement. If governance as a new form of domination performs the function of interpellating individuals into, using Stefano Harney's terms, a "class with interest" identifiable by its stakes in the system, I understand the Other Campaign to be a project to gather those "without interest," often considered expendable or dangerous to the system or "society" in general, into a "class beyond interest," a self-determined community engaged in a struggle not for a moment of liberation to be won but as the construction of emancipation as a way of life.

Environmental governance refers to a number of possible arrangements and decision-making processes that aim to structure the activities of humans in relation to the environment or natural resources. Governing the world’s fisheries remains a complex and pressing challenge, one that must reconcile the interests of an increasingly diverse cast of actors, including fishers and post-harvest workers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), scientists, local and national governments, and even global organizations like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Projects to govern the world’s small-scale fisheries in particular face the challenging task of establishing order and regularity in what are dynamic and spatially dispersed activities that have socio-cultural, economic, political and ecological implications.

In Mexico, cooperativism is an important form of organization for small-scale fishers that is embedded in a long history of state-led development and intervention. Cooperatives form regional associations (federations), which in turn form national organizations (confederations). Federations and confederations are emerging as important yet understudied forms of organization through which cooperativist fishers in Mexico are enacting new forms of collective action and political representation. The purpose of this dissertation is to expand our current understanding of these nested or multi-level cooperative institutions, and their roles as key actors in the governance of fisheries in Mexico. The research adopts a critical institutionalist stance for understanding the roles of cooperativist institutions in the governance of fisheries, responding to critiques of more resource- and rule-centered analyses by focusing on the discourses and politicized dimensions of fisheries governance. The chapters in this dissertation address the following research questions: (1) What kinds of discursive and political practices do cooperativist fishers employ to represent themselves and other actors involved in the governance of fisheries? (2) How do cooperativist fishers assemble around and contribute to understandings of governance problems, and what are the implications for collective action? (3) What do the discourses of cooperativist fishers, examined in historical context and considering other circulating discourses, reveal about contested or politicized aspects of fisheries governance in Mexico?

The dissertation builds on and draws connections between different theoretical traditions for understanding natural resource governance and collective action: institutionalist scholarship on common-pool resources and the commons; human geography, political economy and political ecology; science and technology studies; and discursive or interpretive approaches to policy analysis. The data collection and fieldwork that inform the dissertation were conducted in the context of a collaborative research project, the National Diagnostic of Fishing Organizations (DNOP), which involved one national confederation of fishing cooperatives, two environmental NGOs in Mexico, and researchers from Duke University. The dissertation relies primarily on different forms of qualitative data, including audio recordings and participant observation of national assemblies of the confederation and regional meetings for the DNOP; focus groups and plenary discussions with fishers at regional meetings; key informant interviews with leaders of fishing organizations, NGOs, academics and government officials; and extensive review of legal documents, policies, and academic literature.

Collectively, the chapters in this dissertation demonstrate the importance of examining discourses, and the political practices and subjectivities associated with them, as a way to understand how different actors become positioned in conflicts and debates about the governance of resources such as fisheries. A key theme that emerges from this research is that, through their nested or multi-level organizations, cooperativist fishers engage in political practices of representation that aim to re-center the interests of the cooperativist sector in the wake of more recent policy changes associated with neoliberalism, which have reduced government support for the sector. Cooperativist fishers employ discursive, affective and strategic political practices that are problem-centered – aligning around complex sets of problems or problemáticas. Through these diverse politicized practices, they contest or call into question the dominant approaches for governing fisheries in Mexico, as well as the very nature of the cooperativist sector. Lastly, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of elements such as affect, storytelling, and the legacies of historical policy changes, as factors influencing the forms of collective action that are emerging and being re-negotiated through the work of cooperativist institutions that seek to remain central in the governance of Mexican fisheries.