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The idea that we can 'save energy' has become a commonplace homily. But with a moment's reflection it is clear there is nothing self-evident about saving energy. Do we save fuel or a system's ability to 'do work'? Do we conserve for perpetuity or to prolong use? Is the motivation resource economy, scarcity, productivity, or - more recently - climate change mitigation? And what stops the fruits of individual parsimony being consumed elsewhere? This thesis offers a history of the idea that we can conserve energy by using it more efficiently. In recounting this story, it is argued that conserved energy is a 'metrological resource' produced by practices of measurement, calculation, and computation. A second argument is that the history of ERC offers an under examined example of a 'resource ontology'; the social processes through which nature is imbued with utility and value. Accordingly, the study of, what is termed, energy resource conservation (ERC herein) involved a novel research method which focused upon the scientific and intellectual processes of resource making, as much as the material. This thesis begins in 1865 with the publication of William Jevons' The Coal Question (1865), in which the resource conservative principles of Classical political economy were overturned. Jevons argued that increased efficiency of coal use would serve only to increase the rate and scale with which coal was used. Proceeding from this anti-thesis, the following chapters outline how, irrespective of Jevons' claim, policies based on the principles of scientific management were applied to the conservation of fuel resources for conserving natural resources. In pre-war America, a complex system of 'pro-rationing' extraction licenses were introduced to conserve the productive capacity of petroleum wells. However, a significant shift occurred during the Cold War, as the conservation of fuel became increasingly conflated with the econometrician's notion of efficient resource allocation. But the most significant developments occurred in the nineteen-seventies, in response to a perceived crisis in energy supply. Fuel policy became a more systemic 'energy policy', which drew on scientific management, graph theory, systems theory, statistical mechanics, and computational econometrics in an attempt to quantify and demonstrate how society could act to conserve energy resources by increasing the efficiency of energy use. The resulting science, and its concomitant policies were an odd mix of cold war rational decision making theories, détente science, scientific radicalism, and liberal economic theory, all given a countercultural and environmentalist gloss in the latter half of the decade. On the basis of this conflation of ideas, a new approach to energy saving that emerged, which transformed the principles of energy resource governance, shifting the onus to conserve from producer to consumer, with distinct implications for post-war theories of political economy.

This thesis presents a political geography of transparency, regulation and resource making in shale gas projects in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). The emergence of shale gas as a politically and economically desirable resource occupied national political aspirations, most notably in the US and to some extent in the UK, for reasons of energy security and economic development. Although shale gas has become a globally desirable resource, this thesis shows that the resource is not same everywhere. Following knowledge making practices in distinct regulatory regimes of the UK and the US, I trace how making of shale gas resource is subjected to contestation in a range of technical fields, such as law, economics, geosciences and environmental impact assessment. The study is based on in-depth analysis of technical and policy documents, and interviews with a wide range of actors (i.e. regulators, gas companies, investors, scientists, landowners), and field visits in the US (New York, Pennsylvania and Texas) and the UK (Lancashire, Litchfield and London). Drawing on theoretical insights from the Science and Technology Studies (STS), legal and resource geographies, I empirically showed that both regulatory practices and resource materialities matter in encapsulating making of shale gas projects in different national contexts. Documenting how information production and its contestation is entangled with assemblages of materials and technologies, as well as regulatory, geoscientific and market interventions in the context of the UK and the US, this thesis offers an alternative account of the geography of transparency and regulation regarding the development of shale gas policies. The political viability of shale projects depends on how these informational spaces are generated, contested and transformed in nationally specific scientific practices and regulatory regimes.

This thesis considers (inter)disciplinary spaces and research objects associated with geomorphology. Employing an ethnographic methodology, established Actor-Network Theory (ANT) themes are examined; the study considers the displacement of research objects amid the spaces of scientific inquiry and the role played by a range of actors in enabling this displacement. However, these well-known themes are given new impetus; the thesis seeks to address deficiencies in ANT accounts of space and it offers an alternative approach to conceptualising scientific research objects. Building on this analysis it considers how the spaces of geomorphological inquiry are reworked to accommodate interdisciplinary research objects. In this way, the study provides a strong theoretical contribution to the literature. However, this theoretical contribution is complemented by an important empirical base. The study is one of only a few Science and Technology Studies (STS) analyses to consider the geosciences. Focusing on late twentieth and early twenty-first century geomorphology, it provides an insight into an interdisciplinary field of research found in both geography and geology departments. In this way it offers an important contribution to the histories of geography literature and the literature on interdisciplinarity. Relatedly, through its attention to the interdisciplinary field of biogeomorphology, the study provides a bridge between existing STS literatures on the biosciences and nascent explorations of the geosciences.

This thesis offers a political geography of unconventional energy development through a study of a particular fossil fuel resource called oil shale. Having long occupied a critical place in the politics and economy of certain states, most notably in Estonia, oil shale is now widely known as an ‘unconventional’ resource that is yet to become technically possible, commercially viable and socially acceptable to exploit. Following the movement through which oil shale becomes both unconventional and conventional, the thesis traces the resource through a series of geo-scientific, economic and political interventions. This study is based on analysis of technical literature and policy documents along with ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and site visits conducted in Estonia, Colorado, Utah, Jordan, London and Brussels. Drawing together relational accounts of natural resources in political ecology and economic geography with insights from Science and Technology Studies, this project both contributes to critical research on the carbon economy and to recent debates on the concepts of materiality, anticipation, and marketization in social sciences. The thesis proposes a relational conceptualization of resource materiality, situating oil shale in multiple and conflicting forms which derive from geographically disparate practices in both resource assessment and technological development. The future of oil shale exploitation is not pre-determined by the process of global resource decline, nor is it precluded by international demands to move towards lower-carbon futures. Rather, it is determined through the conjunction of different future-oriented economic and political calculations that are entangled with resource materials and associated technological systems. Developing a non-essentialist account of markets as socio-technically distributed arrangements, the thesis argues that these rival calculations influence the design of market rules for both energy and emissions trading. The thesis concludes that what counts as ‘unconventional’ is not given, but continues to be both created and contested at the same time as it is ‘conventionalized’.

In this thesis, a critical analysis is proposed of the relationships between Inuit participation, science and policy in wildlife governance in the Nunavut Territory, Canada. This analysis situates the emergence of a participatory regime for the governance of wildlife in Nunavut, explores its performance and examines the relations between the ways in which wildlife governance arrangements are currently represented in policy and how they are played out in practice across the territory. To pursue these objectives, this research draws upon a number of theoretical perspectives and methodological strategies poised at a crossroads between environmental geography, science and technology studies, political ecology and ecological anthropology. It combines participant observation, semi-directed interviews and literature-based searches with approaches to the study of actor-networks, hybrid forums and scientific practices associated with Latour and Callon, as well as with Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian analyses of power, governmentality and subjectivity. This analysis suggests that the overall rationale within which wildlife governance operates in Nunavut remains largely based on a scientific and bureaucratic framework of resource management that poses significant barriers to the meaningful inclusion of Inuit views. In spite of their participation in wildlife governance through a range of institutional arrangements, consultation practices and research initiatives, the Inuit of Nunavut remain critical of the power relations embedded within existing schemes, where significant decision-making authority remains under the control of the territorial (or federal) government, and where asymmetries persist with regard to the capacity of various actors to produce and mediate their claims. In addition, while the use of Inuit knowledge, or Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, in wildlife governance in Nunavut has produced some collaborative research and management endeavours, it has also crystallised a divide between ‘Inuit’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge, generated unresolved conflicts, fuelled mistrust among wildlife co-management partners and led to an overall limited inclusion of Inuit observations, values and beliefs in decision-making.

This thesis investigates the rise and performance of corporate foundations in the mining industry. Corporate foundations work to distribute the benefits of mining activities in developing countries. They are a hybrid organizational form that is connected to the funding and founding corporation, and yet to different degrees they independently govern their resources and activities. In addressing the problem of uneven benefit distribution, they are related to a growing interest in improved corporate social responsibility. This thesis examines corporate foundations' forms and functions from an economic geography perspective that situates their rise and performance within the diversity and heterogeneity of economic activities that formulate the current context of the political economy of the mining industry. Through an overarching framework of organization and institutional theory the thesis investigates if: 1) corporate foundations in the mining industry are fit for purpose; 2) how the form of corporate foundations influences function, and vice-versa; and 3) how are these foundations shaped by, and in turn shaping, their (corporate/local/regional/national economic/regulatory/political/social) environments? It finds that corporate foundations in the mining industry currently lack a larger strategy to articulate the goal of their long-term performance. This is based on the findings of the empirical chapters that: 1) the organizational legitimacy of corporate foundations is particularly related to their form; 2) that problems of local failure to distribute benefit are an underdeveloped aspect of the resource curse, and requires close coordination with the technical changes of the mining industry and their effects on the regional population to manage; 3) that corporate foundations represent the path dependency of the mining industry, but when operated with a specific strategy for change are able to affect evolutionary institutional change in corporations; and 4) that the hybrid form of corporate foundations is best suited to build capacity and foster partnerships that facilitate processes of regional economic development through improved economic linkages with the mining industry. From these findings, the conclusion proposes that corporate foundations should adopt a strategy to serve as a mediator between mining corporations and the region to build institutional capacities and partnerships to facilitate the distribution of benefits from mining.

For more than two decades there has been a growing niche for ethically sourced coffees, at the same time as a revitalisation and development of sourcing models focused on indicators of coffee quality and measures of taste. Small independent and multinational buyers and roasters have become progressively interested in sourcing coffee in a way that privileges sustainable and/or high quality indicators, and are increasingly engaged in debates about solidarity versus mainstreaming, quantity versus quality, and provider of caffeine versus taste. Research on one coffee producing country, Guatemala, suggests how these debates have affected the historical evolution of the coffee market. This ethnographic study traces the qualifications of Guatemalan coffee and argues that responses to both the enactment of the technologies, as well as the perceived limitations of sourcing models have produced new articulations of ethics and taste. Producers and small entrepreneurs located in Guatemala reconfigure the practices of cultivation, processing, and selling/buying in relation to circulating market indicators. They create locally situated attachments to the coffee through skill transfer and knowledge exchange and in this way they imitate and also transform international valuations of taste, ethics and quality. This thesis works to make visible the range and diversity of processes and agencies involved in the production of markets for ethical coffee and considers coffee as vital and mobile; an active producer of public effects rather than a passive object moved through a commodity network. This view enables a more open, relational and mobile account of both coffee and of ethics, one which is capable of making clear the important and emerging role of taste. This thesis extends the qualifications of coffee to the daily enactments of cultivation and the skills and techniques that work to reveal taste. On this view, taste mediates the agency of the materials in both high quality and sustainable coffees and this expands and extends ethics to interpersonal, material and bodily relations that link producers and consumers in multiple ways.