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Green Logistics has attracted increased attention from researchers during the last few years, due to the growing environmental awareness. Road Transport is a major factor in climate change and accounts for a large proportion of the total UK emissions, including Carbon Dioxide (CO₂). With traffic and congestion levels growing, efficient routing combined with greener (more environmentally friendly) vehicles will be of great importance. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold: i) to provide an insight into Green Logistics and ways in which green technologies can be combined within the vehicle routing problem and ii) identifying new variants of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) that can be applied to real-life instances; The Platooning Routing Problem with Changing Split Points, and the proposition of a Hyper-Realistic Electric Vehicle Energy Consumption model that can be applied to the E-VRP. A thorough CO₂ experiment was also conducted on a rolling road, providing useful data that future research can use to further increase the accuracy of routing models. The platooning of vehicles proves to be an important technique that can lead to large decreases in fuel consumption and can be easily implemented in most transport systems; the process requires advanced and accurate computer systems that are only now becoming available to manufacturers. The Platooning model is designed and tested within this thesis and it is hoped to spark further interest in this crucial area of research. Extensions to the Platooning Problem include the addition of heterogeneous fleets and how they change the dynamics of the proposed problems, as well as further work on the placement of the critical splitting point. Allowing the consideration of using limited range Electric Vehicles (EVs) as well as Conventional Vehicles (CVs) and Alternative Fuel powered Vehicles (AFVs) can further increase the emission savings and are becoming progressively popular in today's society. We therefore have carried out extensive research around the area of AFV's including detailed battery specifics for EV's. The objective is to minimise the amount of emissions while satisfying the time window requirements of customers maintaining low overall financial costs. The resulting emissions are largely affected by the electricity fuel mix of the country, we found that the indirect EV emissions for a 30kwh EV can vary by as much as 33% throughout the day and as much as 68% throughout the year with different seasons. Various heuristic and metaheuristic solution techniques as well as several classical heuristics are implemented including the Clarke and Wright Savings heuristic algorithm (CWSA), the Sweep Algorithm and the Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) method. These heuristic and metaheuristic models are tested on the Christofides et al. datasets and we achieve solutions that are on average 1.67% and 8.5% deviated from the best-known solution for unrestricted route lengths and restricted max route length problems respectively. Following this a platooning model is generated and tested on various datasets, including a real-life example along the roads of the South East of the UK. Platooning proves to bring benefits to the VRP, with the extensions discussed in this thesis providing increased savings to emissions. On three of the dataset problems of the small and medium size problems a significant fuel saving of more than 1% was achieved. With future research and additional avenues explored Platooning can make a significant reduction to emissions and make an impact on improving air quality. The EV model proposed is designed to trigger further research on ultra-realistic energy models with the aim of being applied to a real-life organisation with various constraints including factors such as battery health, travel speed, vehicle load and transportation distance. This thesis provides useful insights into how important the aspect of environmental route planning is, providing advice on tangible and intangible benefits such as cost savings and a reduction in carbon emissions.

Vegetation is a potential indicator of land contaminated by hydrocarbons. Remote sensing holds great potential for detecting stress in vegetation caused by the presence of hydrocarbons, but as yet this potential has not been realised, largely due to a lack of understanding of the biophysiological impacts of hydrocarbons on plant growth, and the specific spectral expression of them. Previous research has demonstrated success in laboratory simulation of hydrocarbon contamination and the analysis of the spectral and biophysical properties in plants, but has tended to always focus on scenarios with high concentrations of hydrocarbons (> 5 g/kg). It was assumed, that vegetation growing in hydrocarbon polluted areas would show a general decrease in plant health condition and show associated changes in reflectance. However, it is not known if lower concentrations of hydrocarbon in soils (< 5 g/kg) have the same effects as high concentrations and if the impacts observed at leaf scale would be observed at a canopy scale. The aim of this research has been to develop understanding at the leaf/plant scale initially, to then scale up to hyperspectral camera and simulated satellite-based scales to develop operational understanding that will benefit industry, regulators and environmental agencies alike. Two experiments were performed, one at plant scale with willow (Salix viminalis var. Tora) and maize (Zea mays var. Lapriora), and the other at canopy scale with turf grasses. At leaf scale, a pot-based experiment was designed with plants growing in pots containing a hydrocarbon (crude oil or refined oil) layer at the base of the pot with different concentrations levels (0.5 g/kg, 5 g/kg and 50 g/kg). At canopy scale, natural oil seep environments were simulated in 1 m by 0.5 m trays with a hydrocarbon layer with two different concentrations (50 g/kg and 0.5 g/kg) present only in the half of each tray and located at the base. Biophysical, reflectance and fluorescence measurements were made in both experiments using different portable spectrometers (MultispeQ, ASD Fieldspec Pro and Specim IQ camera).Biophysical variables (chlorophyll concentration, biomass and growth) decreased in the presence of high concentrations of hydrocarbon in the soil, showing a general reduction in all the studied parameters and in all plant species with respect to the non-polluted plants.26On the other hand, the presence of lower hydrocarbon concentrations (0.5 g/kg and 5 g/kg) revealed an increase in chlorophyll concentration, biomass of the entire plant (even in roots) and the growth rate, with respect to the non-polluted plants. To analyse the effect of different hydrocarbon concentrations on vegetation, changes in spectral response were analysed using continuum removal analysis and vegetation indices. Absorption features were identified related to pigment concentration (chlorophyll, carotenoids and anthocyanin) and biomass (starch, cellulose, lignin and water). Variations in absorption feature characteristics (band depth, band area and band width) depended on the hydrocarbon concentration in the soil, with increases in band depth and band area for low polluted treatments and decreases in the same characteristics for high polluted treatments. Vegetation indices in both plant and canopy scale experiments were able to discriminate between high pollution and low pollution in soil, as did the red edge. The red edge position showed movements towards longer wavelengths (improvements of health status of the plant) with the presence of low pollution in the soil and towards shorter wavelengths (reduction of health status) in high polluted treatments. At canopy scale a greener 'halo' surrounding a high polluted zone was seen, creating a spatial pattern previously observed in field campaigns in natural oil seep areas. To evaluate these outcomes at landscape scale using satellite imagery, reflectance data were convolved to different spectral resolutions related to three different sensors (WorldView- 2, Sentinel-2 and EnMap). The simulations showed that at the moment efforts need to continue to improve the sensor resolutions in order to monitor hydrocarbon polluted areas, or that a combination of sensors with varying resolutions may be required. In conclusion, the results of this study demonstrated biphasic behaviour of plants in hydrocarbon polluted environments and the potential of remote sensing in environmental monitoring and exploration of these areas.

The impacts of climate change are set to increase in the foreseeable future posing a great challenge for livelihoods in most rural areas in the developing countries. Drought is one of the main long-term stresses that impacts livelihoods dependent on agriculture and is set to increase in intensity and severity as a result of climate change. Building social-ecological resilience is therefore increasingly recognised as a necessary pathway to sustainable development within dryland communities. However, there are challenges with the sustainability of resilience interventions in communities where the need for poverty reduction and enhancement of livelihood systems is urgent. While the influence of ecological factors is widely documented, little is known about the role of deep-seated socio-cultural factors that can potentially mediate resilience building processes. To address this knowledge gap, this thesis explores the role of resilience building principles by way of literature review and an empirical case-study. The current evidence suggests there are key principles that should be considered when designing strategies to respond to climate change and build resilience in communities that are most impacted. This research therefore draws on 120 surveys, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions covering six villages of the Daffiama-Bussie-Issa district in the Upper West Region of Northern Ghana for the empirical study. The findings of the study revealed the significant role that principles such as intent-driven trust, attachment to cultural identity and traditional values play in the processes of building community resilience to climate and environmental change. These principles, working together or individually, can significantly determine the successful adaptation of resilience strategies in communities and therefore should be understood and embraced. Trust for example was shown to mediate acceptance and therefore can ensure the successful implementation and long-term engagement of strategies that are designed to improve and build resilience in the face of deleterious climate change impacts. Additionally, addressing community and family cultural identity attachments was identified as a significant consideration to ensure that people are not alienated from their cultural alignment, which has the potential of leading to the rejection of viable resilience strategies. Finally, adherence to traditional values and practices was highlighted in the research to influence how people respond to, and conduct their daily living activities. Consequently, resilience building strategies should be designed in a way to incorporate significant traditional values. The major conclusion of the study is that individuals and communities may not necessarily accept and ensure the success of projects merely based on anticipated benefits to them. But, rather, they may consider what they determine to be socially and culturally acceptable principles they can work with and are accustomed to. The implication of this is that resilience building policies and strategies should be designed with context-specific socio-cultural principles at the core, and from the outset, in order to secure community buy-ins required for effective and successful implementation of climate adaptation projects.

The diminishing ice cover has accelerated the ability for commercial shipping through the navigable routes of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian High Arctic. Shipping movement through ecologically fragile marine areas represents new environmental risks that could result from oil spills in these northern waters. Yet, existing preparedness and response systems have not been tested, as no response has been required to a large-scale spill in this region. The empirical research undertaken reveals that the Government of Canada is under mounting pressure to demonstrate how damage to marine ecosystems and northern peoples' lifestyles would be mitigated. Broad actor consensus is that systems are not in place to reduce the risks of detrimental environmental impacts that could dramatically change the community livelihoods and lifestyles. Compounding pressure on the government, research findings indicate conflicting perspectives within indigenous northern communities concerning commercial development of the Canadian Arctic. In confronting this challenge, this thesis introduces a new governance paradigm to the field of Arctic stewardship that applies pre-emption and precautionary logic to protect this vulnerable environment from problems associated with commercial development and the emergence of environmental risks. Existing frameworks for managing unintended impacts are disrupted by repositioning new and existing actors into new constructs of shared knowledge, power over decision-making, responsibility for resource management and wellbeing. The prevailing 'top-down' and rigid hierarchical structure dominated by the federal branch of the Government of Canada is disrupted by a shift towards an emergent arrangement to allow actors to facilitate interactions to operationalise agreed upon measures. This innovative form of governance can enable debate on the merits of reconstructing epistemological scales to conceptualise environmental protection measures in the context of global environmental change and the potential impact to local communities.

This thesis focuses on the analysis of "personal environmental action", by which I mean practices where individuals take, or are encouraged to take, measures to enact environmental change in their personal lives, such as their consumption, household and lifestyle choices. Academic literature presents varied understandings of such practices. While some develop frameworks that advocate forms of "green citizenship" that embody personal environmental action, others criticise such practices as "governmental" forms of individualisation and responsibilisation. This thesis argues that existing understandings would benefit from further empirical analysis, and in particular require a stronger focus on intersectional power relations involved in structuring personal environmental action. To provide such an analysis this thesis adopts a feminist political ecology framework to explore personal environmental action empirically through the perspectives of environmental activists and organisers engaged through multi-sited fieldwork undertaken at three transnational events. Engagement with activists' perspectives garners insights into how personal environmental action is perceived "on the ground" and how activists negotiate the potential and limitations of such practices. The empirical analysis of activist perspectives is then used to propose a more nuanced relational approach to conceiving of and practicing personal environmental action. Through an empirical analysis and a theoretical reformulation arising from that analysis the thesis seeks to make three contributions to knowledge. First, it explores the lacunas in existing accounts of personal environmental action, in particular the limitations in how existing literatures understand the nature and role of individual responsibility on the one hand and dynamics of power on the other. Second, it highlights empirically how individual responsibility and power dynamics play out in the practice of personal environmental action as conceived by environmental activists on the ground. Third, the thesis offers a relational conceptual reframing of personal environmental action, which allows us to both better understand empirical dynamics and to reconceptualise the practice.

A growing body of literature suggests that pharmaceuticals used in human medicine pose an increasing contamination risk to non-target organisms and indeed to the overall health of marine ecosystems. However, data concerning the level and nature of that risk is lacking. This is particularly true for developing countries such as Indonesia, where the precarious service of wastewater treatment, especially domestic wastewater is threatening the coastal marine environment. The present research investigates the biological responses and potential ecotoxicological effects of acetaminophen and metformin, two of the most commonly used human pharmaceuticals, on the marine bivalve Mytilus edulis. This is the first study to record the contamination of Indonesian marine waters (Jakarta Bay) with acetaminophen. Among the studied effects, this research focuses on biological responses recorded both in adults and at the early life stage, in mussels exposed to pharmaceuticals under laboratory conditions. Special emphasis was placed on histological and cytological effects, as well as the impact on molecular pathways, with several reproduction related genes such as vitellogenin and estrogen receptor-2 being strongly modulated by the selected contaminants. The variation in mRNA expression of four other genes involved in apoptosis: heat shock protein-70, caspase-8, B-cell lymphoma-2 and Fas cell surface death receptor was also investigated. In summary, this study provides the first record to date of acetaminophen presence in Indonesian seawater, with one of the highest contamination levels published so far globally. Furthermore, it provides a comprehensive and integrative assessment of the short- and long-term effects of acetaminophen and metformin in marine mussels Mytilus edulis. Indeed, to date this is the first study recording the effects of acetaminophen in Mytilus edulis, and is also the first study recording the effects of both acetaminophen and metformin specifically on the early life stage of Mytilus edulis. Finally, it discusses the significance of these two most highly consumed pharmaceuticals in the context of marine pollution and the possible consequences for survival of coastal marine species.

This thesis explores the narrated social and environmental transformations on two distinct European coasts, the Yorkshire North Sea and the Bulgarian Black Sea. It situates each shoreline’s contemporary crises or contestations in the wider context of its ongoing environmental and political transformations. On the Yorkshire coast, it connects the clash between different marine governance visions surrounding the 2016 Referendum on Leaving the European Union to the advancement of a new oceanic legal paradigm since the Cod Wars. On the Bulgarian shore, it links contemporary conflicts over tourism (over)construction, conservation efforts, and corruption to the changing economic and knowledge politics from the establishment of the first coastal resorts during socialism to the present. To do so, the thesis analyses a range of spoken and textual narratives derived from interviews conducted during 2017-2018 fieldwork alongside literature, historical documents, media pieces, and political and legal documents. Combining theoretical work in environmental humanities with the empirical focus of critical policy studies, the thesis positions the coast as the ideal point of departure from which to understand how communities narrate and navigate the kinds of change that increasingly characterize the Anthropocene. Arguing that awareness of what we now call the Anthropocene made an early arrival on the coast, the thesis demonstrates how the coastal communities specifically on the Yorkshire North Sea and Bulgarian Black Sea shores each draw on varying meanings of environment in order to define and uphold their place in that landscape. Through the comparison between these two shorelines, the thesis offers a contribution toward strengthening the reciprocal relationship between environmental humanities and policy for a world increasingly defined by environmental change.

Excavations at the Catholic Third Street Cemetery in Dubuque, Iowa (2007-2011), uncovered 939 unmarked graves dating to the period between 1833 and 1880. Skeletal analysis identified 43 individuals whose age estimate ranges overlapped with osteological (12 to 20 years) and social (13 to 19 years) adolescence, as defined for this cultural context. The current research design focused on mortality patterns and mortuary preparations of these individuals and highlights differences between teenagers and the rest of the cemetery population. This interdisciplinary project utilised data from osteological analyses and archival research to explore health and mortality among adolescent non-survivors. Palaeopathological observations reflecting early life health insults (linear enamel hypoplasias, cribra orbitalia, porotic hyperostosis) and later illness (labyrinthine endocranial lesions, periosteal new bone formation, tubercular lesions) were studied to explore the potential vulnerability of adolescents with frailty acquired through earlier health stresses. Perimortem trauma and local death records were examined to determine the proportion of teenage mortality due to external causes such as accidents, homicide, and suicide. The lack of perimortem trauma observed in the Third Street adolescent sample was explained to some extent by the number of teenagers who perished from, but were unmarked by, a single accidental cause – drowning. The investigation of mortuary treatment examined combinations of burial attributes – including coffin hardware, burial clothing, religious objects, and nonreligious grave goods – and demonstrated how age-related patterns reflect an increase in socially acceptable sentimentality and changing views of the afterlife, with preferential treatment afforded to some adolescents. Comparative pathological marker and burial attribute data were gathered from publications on nine additional nineteenth-century burial populations, and death records from a tenth were consulted. Despite issues with inconsistent data collection procedures for parts of the comparative sample, results tentatively support the observations from Third Street. The proportion of adolescents with both early-life stress markers and later pathological manifestations is higher than that of other age classes, suggesting that survival of health insults in infancy or early childhood left teenagers more susceptible to fatal disease, particularly when their immune systems were vulnerable due to competing pubertal energy investments. Observed regional differences in skeletal marker rates suggest that this “double signal” may be more pronounced in populations with a high prevalence of TB. Perimortem trauma levels are equal to those of adults, though greater evidence of violence in the South and Southwest reflects the unstable social conditions in those areas. Regional, as well as temporal, trends were also identified in adolescent funerary preparations. Mid-nineteenth-century adolescents received preferential treatment, though general increases in mortuary elaboration overshadow this distinction in some later cemetery populations. Parental grief at the loss of near-adult offspring was expressed in the tendency to employ the metaphor of death as a journey when preparing adolescents for the grave, instead of the metaphor of sleep applied to younger children. Meanwhile, in frontier areas, independently living teenagers were often interred without familial involvement in the equivalent of paupers’ graves.

The work presented in this thesis involved a study of the effects of atmospheric pollution aerosol particulates on the degradation of building materials used to construct the declared UNESCO world heritage site located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The novelties of this work were to identify the type of atmospheric aerosol pollutants deposited on building surfaces at the historical site and its environmental impacts on the degradation of the building materials. Stone, mortar and plaster specimens were collected from six historic houses as well as fresh stone sample from the quarry where the stone blocks were produced. The composition and alteration characteristics of the stone, mortar, plaster and quarry materials were determined to provide information about the chemical compositions and their decay mechanisms. Light Optical Microscopy (OM), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Laser Raman Spectroscopy (LRS) and Scanning Electron Microscopy combined with Energy-Dispersion X-ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) were the analytical techniques used for this purpose. The results revealed that the stone used throughout the historic buildings comprised of calcareous limestone. Calcite, (CaCO3), Aragonite, (CaCO3), Gypsum, (CaSO4.2H2O), Quartz, (SiO2) and Halite, (NaCl), were the primary phases identified in the stone samples. The mortar mixture that was used to bind the stones consisted of lime, local sand and crushed seashells. The chemical binding agent used to produce the mortar was non-hydraulic lime. Calcite, (CaCO3), Gypsum, (CaSO4.2H2O), Orthoclase Feldspar, (KAlSi3O8), Quartz, (SiO2) and Halite, (NaCl) were the main phases identified. The binding plaster was determined to be a mixture of lime, gypsum, local sand and crushed seashells, again with non-hydraulic lime as the active binding agent. The decorative facade samples consisted of the phase gypsum (CaSO4.2H2O). Calcite, (CaCO3), Aragonite, (CaCO3), Gypsum, (CaSO4.2H2O), Quartz, (SiO2) and Halite, (NaCl), were the main phases identified. On plaster surfaces, anthropogenic particulate matter (PM) and, sea salt was detected. During the investigation, the anthropogenic particles detected were microscale metallic particles determined to comprise of Fe, Zn and Cu. Other contaminant elements identified included sodium, chloride, sulphur and phosphorus. The observation of metallic particles was unusual and not to our knowledge, previously reported in any aerosol pollution survey in Jeddah. Atmospheric pollution play an important role in the degradation of historical buildings. The observed aerosol PM’s on the samples collected from both building surfaces in the historical quarter and air filter samples were rich in spherical and irregularly structured metallic particles. There was good agreement between air and solid samples, indicating that particles were relatable and had a similar provenance. Metallic particles were distinct in their composition, being comprised of Fe, Zn, and Cu with lesser amounts of C, Mn, Ca, K, Ti and S. Laboratory studies carried out on calcite single crystals and stone substrates illustrated that during environmental corrosion of these particles on building surface, the associated volume expansion from metal oxidation would be sufficient to cause brittle failure (micro-cracking) of the surface layers of building material. Furthermore, a higher frequency of cracking was observed in calcite single crystal than seen in limestone substrates. This would further exacerbate the increase degradation rates that are already expected to be occurring from increased level of atmospheric CO2.

Cities around the world have taken up the challenge to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by designing policies to bring about low carbon futures. Research on climate change suggests that we are not only facing an issue of increased emissions but in fact, an array of interconnected planetary crises. Extreme weather events, resource scarcity, environmental deterioration and social inequalities could potentially reinforce each other and lead to an undesirable future. Both academics and practitioners argue that we need to attend to interactions, trade-offs and unforeseen consequences. As a result, “Water-Energy-Food Nexus” has recently risen in popularity echoing this sentiment. The concept promises a low carbon future while ensuring water, energy and food security for all. Although the term has been increasingly prominent in the international policy circles, it has also been subject to a critique from the social sciences. Furthermore, it is not clear whether the lens of Water-Energy-Food Nexus would be applicable to urban scale challenges. This research seeks to learn how urban sustainability practitioners discuss complexity and interconnections in sustainability issues. By illuminating the links between nexus-type considerations, climate justice and specific sustainability policy issues, the research aims to co-design policy recommendations for a just and low carbon future of Bristol. Using action research methodology, the research engaged local sustainability practitioners to collaborate on the research design, preliminary results and dissemination. The thesis applied an innovative mix of methods (discourse analysis, focus groups, qualitative survey, spatial analysis and self-reflection) to co-create policy recommendations in the themes of food waste management and energy/water metering. The main practical contribution of this thesis lies in creating space for transdisciplinary research where the stakeholders from the public, private, charity and academic sectors are participating not only in theory formation but also in improving their practice. Meanwhile, the main theoretical contribution of the thesis is highlighting the relevance of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus and climate justice at the urban scale.

The failure to include greenhouse gas emissions embodied in trade is one of the biggest stumbling blocks on the road to more effective global climate governance. The thesis traces how the combined informational effects of a diverse set of environmental policies and initiatives have enabled the emergence of institutions facilitating the production of reasoned estimates on the carbon embodied in products and services. The availability of information on the emissions embodied in products allows novel actor coalitions to emerge and advocate for a variety of different policies utilising such information in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The thesis analyses how differences in policy design lead to variation in business support. Embodied emissions policies can be seen as a way of imposing decentralised graduated sanctions on non-cooperative actors which promises to profoundly improve the prospects of polycentric climate governance. The thesis provides an original contribution to scholarship on global environmental governance and environmental policy by analysing the institutional and political dynamics of the emerging ensemble of institutions that provide the informational basis for governing the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in trade. It demonstrates that complex informational and political effects need to be taken into consideration in the valuation of individual policies. It concludes with concrete policy advice for decision-makers.

The study of burial archaeology has the potential to uncover new knowledge about burial practice, treatment of the dead and past populations. In the past, excavations of 18th and 19th century burial grounds have not been fully published, with many excavation results not accessible in full. The recent rise in historical burial ground excavations, particularly in London, by commercial archaeological companies has highlighted the strengths of multidisciplinary analysis. Despite this, there is still a large gap in knowledge in relation to institutional burial grounds, burial practice and treatment of the dead, with many reports focusing heavily on osteological analysis. Furthermore, most excavations of burial grounds are London centric, leading to a lack of information about burial in other geographical areas. This research aims to characterise burial practice and treatment of the dead at the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar Burial Ground, utilising a multidisciplinary approach. The research will be the first to consult all available data to present a synthesised appraisal of the burial process at Haslar Hospital, placing it into the wider context of institutional burial landscapes. The site itself presents an interesting opportunity to study a Naval burial ground with a known date range of 1753-1826, a period of just 73 years. The Hospital is an example of an institutional burial space located outside of London, with the opportunity to add significant knowledge to burial practice outside of the capital. The utilisation of documentary and cartographic sources has strengthened the interpretations offered as part of this research and highlights the benefits of a multidisciplinary approach to archaeological analysis. Overall, this research has identified, discussed and characterised the key aspects of burial archaeology at Haslar Hospital, uncovering a highlevel of attention to detail in terms of treatment of the dead. The simple and utilitarian method of burial encountered at Haslar is synonymous with expectation for institutional burial practice. This research has utilised the documentary sources relating to the hospital to aid in the understanding of numbers of burials, administration and approaches to death at the Hospital. This research has also identified the normative and differential burials at the site with a notable burial made with anti-slave trade tokens around the cranium. Overall, this PhD thesis presents the first multidisciplinary study of burial practice at a Royal Naval Hospital, using the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar as a focus for the research.

This thesis examines the relationship between carbon accounting and 'the political'. There are numerous methodologies by which a given territory can calculate its carbon footprint, each corresponding to a perspective on its share of planetary emissions. However, standardisation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) means that governments of all scales primarily draw upon a production-based approach, considering point-source emissions over their role in emissions released beyond territorial bounds. As planetary emissions increasingly spiral beyond dangerous levels, this thesis responds to an urgent need to consider how this accounting shapes what (in)action is seen as legitimate. Theoretically, this thesis observes that literature considering the relation between society, democracy, accounting and calculation draws heavily on both a Foucauldian understanding of statistics as a form of power-knowledge and deliberative models of democracy. Building upon critiques that such approaches insufficiently attend to the uncounted, it develops the political thinking of Jacques Ranciere to argue that present accounting practices and standards are depoliticising, limiting the parameters of what perspectives can count. In doing so, it takes seriously the post-democracy critique - wherein current consensual, technocratic modes of policy-making evacuate opportunities for the political - and, in turn, considers how accounting might be repoliticised. Furthermore, in uniting Ranciere's notion of the 'distribution of the sensible' with scale it attends to ambiguities within Ranciere's schema and offers a way forward for Human Geography's scale debate. Empirically, this thesis draws upon research conducted between 2016 and 2018 on the carbon accounting practices in the City of Manchester, England. It draws upon a series of interviews with policy-makers, accountants and climate change activists across the United Kingdom and an analysis of grey literature. Moreover, this is the first study to explicitly adopt an autoethnography of accounting, participating with the Manchester CO2 Monitoring Group and completing a series of carbon inventories for the city. In this regard, this study can also be considered a piece of scholar-activism concerned with preserving the possibility for the political. Whilst there is no ideal way to account for a carbon footprint, it is argued that conducting multiple accounts and making accounting decisions visible can increase the opportunities for disagreement.

Airborne aldehydes are measured by drawing a volume of air through a cartridge containing silica coated with 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine (DNPH), which is eluted with a solvent and analysed using high performance liquid chromatography with UV detection. The method cannot measure acrolein, and suffers from interferences from ozone and nitrogen dioxide, making sampling difficult in polluted environments. Using this method to measure the aldehydes in the London Underground maintenance sites, where the exhaust emissions are high, the method failed to deliver results. The aim of the thesis was to fully understand the limitations of using the DNPH method in a polluted environment, and to develop an improved measurement method. It was found that the DNPH not only suffers from interference from ozone and nitrogen dioxide, but carbon monoxide also causes interference and destroys the DNPH. The destruction of the DNPH by NO2, CO and ozone was quantified and an equation for the calculation of the amount of DNPH required for sampling of aldehydes in a polluted environment was proposed. Based on these findings, several other derivatisation reagents (3-methoxybenzothiazolin-2-one hydrazine (MBTH), 2,3,4,5,6-pentafluorophenyl hydrazine (PFPH), O-(2,3,4,5,6-pentafluorobenzyl)hydroxylamine (PFBHA), 2-diphenylacetyl-1,3-indandioine-1-hydrazine (DAIH), 4-hydrazinobenzoic acid (HBA)), were evaluated in the presence of NO, NO2 and CO. The evaluation of alternative derivatisation reagents resulted in the identification of PFBHA to be the superior alternative to DNPH due to its low reactivity towards NO2, NO and CO. A method using PFBHA as the derivatisation reagent was developed, using silica gel coated with hydroquinone as the sorbent material. The new method has a 100 % method recovery as well as collection efficiencies above 90 % for all three of the aldehydes. The LOD for formaldehyde, acetaldehyde and acrolein were determined to be 2.40, 6.49, and 2.70 g/m3, respectively, when sampling at 1.0 L/min for 8 hours. The concentrations of these aldehydes were measured at a train maintenance depot. The results were compared to those obtained using the DNPH method. The DNPH method underestimated the aldehyde concentrations by between 18 – 93 %, depending on the concentration of NO2, and CO present. A reliable method for the measurement of airborne aldehydes in polluted environments was developed.

Rooted in the core injustices of climate change, climate finance is central to ongoing North- South political contestation in the global governance of climate change and UNFCCC policy output, but has been given considerably less attention by scholars than mitigation and adaptation. This thesis uses a historical institutionalist approach to add to existing international relations and international political economy research into global environmental governance and justice, extending the application of historical institutionalism at the international level. With an emphasis on North-South political and justice divisions, the project examines the original institutional design of the UNFCCC in 1992 and the subsequent development of four contested areas of the climate finance policy process until 2015, identifying evidence of coalition building, incremental change, path dependence, policy paradigms and other mechanisms whereby institutional rule structures rooted in the initial institutional design have affected actors' power, interests, ideas and behaviour. The thesis finds that in all four policy areas the UNFCCC’s initial policies and, in some cases, policy ambiguities, were shaped by developed countries’ material interests and normative perspectives. This gave advantages to developed countries that enhanced their political power within negotiations and affected the policy process in such a way that developing countries usually had to seek institutional change, while developed countries could reinforce existing rule structures. Examples of institutional change in the four areas are limited, and in most cases were in line with developed countries’ shifting objectives rather than indicating developing countries genuinely overcoming disadvantageous structures. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that institutional design and development are important factors perpetuating North-South contestation in the UNFCCC climate finance policy process and limiting the realisation of developing countries’ interests and priorities, and shows that historical institutionalism can offer useful new insight into global environmental governance institutions and the justice of their outcomes.

Given the limitations of current governmental approaches in influencing people to take pro-environmental action, especially in the longer term, this thesis explores whether a shared morality towards nature can be developed. Focusing on one community in the UK, the thesis investigates the potential of this alternative approach, the means by which it can be developed and implemented, and its effectiveness. Through an exercise in practical philosophy which uses a variety of methods (a focus group, a questionnaire, multiple interviews, and a debriefing session), the research finds considerable public appetite for such an approach, and works with participants to first construct and then deploy a 'moral code' for environmental protection. The development and implementation of the approach prove effective amongst both 'green' and 'non-green' participants. It raises people's awareness of the consequences of their unsustainable actions and motivates them to be more environmentally conscious. It also brings wider, collective benefits such as community well-being and mutual support. These findings indicate that a shared morality strategy to fostering respect for nature has significant potential. It could be rolled out in other settings and could usefully inform future policy-making aimed at environmental protection as well as wider active models of citizenship.

This thesis highlights the ways in which economic conditions affect support for environmental protection. The coincidence of a decrease in environmental attitudes and increase in climate scepticism with the Great Recession of 2008 had suggested that deteriorating economic conditions could have a negative effect on environmental attitudes. While previous literature has largely supported this, it has been limited in its ability to firmly establish the causal mechanisms at work. The analysis contained in this thesis makes a number of important advances. Using cross-national data from before and after the onset of the economic crisis, I demonstrate that changing prioritisation of environmental protection is particularly sensitive to changes in unemployment rates and that its connection with changing economic growth would appear to be spurious. Through an innovative online survey experiment, I show that the salience of individuals' economic perceptions has an independent effect on their prioritisation of taking urgent action to tackle climate change - with those who are reminded of their positive economic perceptions being more likely to prioritise such action and vice versa for those who are reminded of their negative economic perceptions - but that it has no such effect on their belief in anthropogenic climate change. However, analysis of New Zealand panel data suggests that changes in economic perceptions and individuals' household financial situation cannot explain the decline in environmental attitudes witnessed in 2008. I make a substantive methodological contribution by establishing that environmental-economic trade-off questions primarily capture environmental rather than economic attitudes. Finally, I demonstrate that environmental attitudes can have tangible effects on support for policies that are environmentally beneficial when such policies are not being primarily framed through an environmental lens using the case study of support for water charges in Ireland in 2011.

This thesis is a discourse study of environmentalism in the UK. The research indicates how reframing environmental issues using religious concepts and language can deepen our understanding of people's relationship to the environment and environmentalism. The thesis suggests that this process of reframing may be important for the social sciences, by illuminating new ways to engage with and understand the controversies and debates at hand. The data supporting this reframing analysis was obtained through in-depth, semi-structured one-on-one interviews with individuals identified as being 'environmentally concerned' and was analysed first thematically, and then using the researcher's 'discourse toolkit'. Nuclear power is treated as an emblematic issue to provide a concrete focus for a topic prone to abstraction; viewing environmentalism as a form of religion encouraged interdisciplinary working. By developing ideas from Bailey's implicit religion (Bailey, 1997) I provide a language for environmentalism-as-religion, wherein pro-nuclear heretics challenge an anti-nuclear orthodoxy. Linking environmental discourses to enduring cosmologies shows that 'superficial' conflict over climate change mitigation is acrimonious precisely because it deals with manifestations of deeper convictions on the human-nature relationship. Updated versions of existing 'nuclear discourses' are analysed in combination with environmental-religious discourses, showing that ideas about public understanding and acceptance of nuclear power, even when rebranded as 'sustainable', are still best understood in terms of ancient cosmological ideas about the 'natural' or 'proper' way for humanity to approach and interact with the environment. Key environmental discourses were overtly religious and or even direct reformulations of Christian mythoi, with important implications for the movement's stagnation and inherent contradictions. This thesis argues for the social sciences to take religion seriously, as the religious impulse - both implicit and explicit - is an important social phenomenon which shows no sign of fading and remains an important factor in modern society.

Environmental Health Services in the UK have been subject to significant resource reduction from 2010 to 2018. It is suggested that services risk becoming unsustainable unless efficient and effective ways of working are employed. This research explored the experience of practitioners who are developing and delivering evolving Environmental Health Services in English local authorities in the context of deep cutting budget reductions. A range of 'non-traditional' service delivery models has been examined including outsourcing, shared services, regional delivery models and mutualisation arrangements. The models were at various stages of development from planning through to full transformation. Interviews were carried out with the participants involved in the change process to capture their experience of change and the impact on service delivery. Fieldwork was undertaken between 2014 and 2016. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts identified six central themes of the experience of change: 'Managing changes effectively'; 'Understanding the reasons for change'; 'Understanding the nature of Environmental Health'; 'Meaningful consultation'; 'Viability of the proposal'; And 'Planning and timeliness'. Further analysis of the data developed seven overarching themes: 'Ethos of public services', 'Getting it right', 'Emerging service demands', 'Resilience', 'Trust', 'Skills development' and 'Risk'. A framework for future change programmes in Environmental Health Services has been developed which takes into account the lessons learnt by organisations that have previously undergone significant change in their response to the risk of a reducing resource. Environmental Health Services undergoing transformation will benefit from using this framework to examine their own organisation when they are establishing the need for change, making decisions, planning and transition. Use of this framework can mitigate against risks of unsustainable or undeliverable Environmental Health Services.

Arnos Vale Cemetery has been, until recently, a relatively little-known but unique cemetery amongst the West Country cemeteries. Located on the outskirts of Bristol, which is often referred to as the 'second' or 'third' city in Britain historically, the cemetery has remained largely undiscovered and unexplored in terms of its history and archaeology. Established by an Act of Parliament in 1837, it continues to be an active site of burial and memorial today, and transcends a 175-year time period, through the Industrial Revolution and two world wars. The aim of this study is to provide detailed analysis and insight into the complexities of developing and maintaining a provincial Victorian garden cemetery. It aims to highlight the important role that this particular site had in terms of exploring cemetery development of those cemeteries that were being designed and constructed during the 1830s. Furthermore, how a surrounding network of local endeavour and activity enabled this and how complex relationships emerge regarding both development of the site and its maintenance over time. To achieve this, this thesis implements innovative theory and methodology that has yet to be applied to cemetery research in any depth of detail through the application of both network theory and necrogeography combined to explore the purpose, intended functions, phenomenology of landscape, and the realities of maintenance.

This research explains what and how contextual wealth factors condition the influence of individual wealth factors on environmental attitudes in developing countries compared to developed ones. This work considers aspects of two types of attitudes, ecocentrism and anthropocentrism. The first type deems environmental protection important because nature is intrinsically valuable, while the second considers nature valuable for its utilitarian function to humans. Given that the physical proximity of human residence to environmental issues is one aspect that determines the type of attitude, and that certain national contexts are more likely to be plagued with immediate environmental problems (e.g., poor sewage and sanitation quality), individual attitudes of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism will prevail differently according to the individual’s national context. Explicitly, I argue that individual wealth positively predicts ecocentrist attitudes, and that this effect is stronger among developed-country residents, relative to residents in developing countries. On the other hand, individual wealth has a negative effect on anthropocentrist attitudes; thus, this effect is expected to be stronger among developing-country residents, relative to developed-country residents. To examine these theoretical expectations, this study uses survey data, in over thirty countries, from the World Value survey 2005-2009. The empirical analyses use standard and multilevel logistic regression modelling to assess the theoretical arguments just mentioned.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate efforts to transform global environmental change research through co-design and co-production (involving non-academic actors in research governance and conduct). Social scientific work to date on this topic has largely taken an evaluative perspective, outlining challenges of and guidelines for co-production on the ground. By contrast, there is little work on how co-production is conceptualised and put into practice through (international) research governance. Yet institutions aiming to govern research are significant arbiters of meaning and power; their efforts to change research are worthy of investigation. The thesis is based on a qualitative case study of Future Earth, a major international research initiative on global environmental change (GEC) and sustainability. Future Earth is unique in its ambition to internationally coordinate and co-design/co-produce new GEC/sustainability research at a global scale. The study is grounded in co-productionist, interpretive science and technology studies, drawing on ideas about political imaginaries of science and experimental approaches to engagement. It is based on thematic analysis of data from documents, interviews, focus groups and observation of Future Earth’s emergence and development between 2010 and 2015. The analysis suggests that visions of Future Earth were ambitious, diverse and sometimes ambiguous, evoking two potential institutional forms: a unified, cohesive ‘flagship’, or a ‘rich tapestry’ of varied initiatives. Ambiguity persisted in how co-production and related concepts were understood, with varying definitions motivated by different rationales for increased (or limited) involvement of non-academic stakeholders, from ensuring relevance to democratising expertise to preserving the objectivity or independence of science. These notions of appropriate engagement were underpinned by disparate conceptions of the value of research (as a service to society, site of democratic deliberation, or public good), reproducing (and challenging) established models of science and democracy. The thesis argues that, from an experimental perspective, this ambiguity in visions of (co-production in) Future Earth can be seen to enable flexibility and allow differences to co-exist. This might require new, perhaps radical, thinking about how to organise, conduct and value research and its outcomes, with an increased emphasis on fostering, appreciating and productively working with diversity and institutional indeterminacy.

This study examines the relationship between climate impacts and existing vulnerabilities amongst coastal dwellers in Ghana. The study analyses how social relations of power affects access to resources and decision making and their implications for vulnerability and adaptive capacity under changing climatic conditions. It also examines the role that policy plays in addressing vulnerabilities to climate impacts in the study communities. Using a perspective that is important but often overlooked in the study of vulnerability and adaptation to climate impacts in Ghana, the thesis examines the root causes i.e. the structural and relational drivers of vulnerability and the extent to which adaptation policies address these root causes. This thesis contributes to the ongoing debate on the politics of adaptation, the need for adaptation policies to address the underlying causes of vulnerability specifically the social relations of power that produce inequalities. A qualitative mixed-methods approach consisting of participatory tools, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews were used in collecting data at the household, community and institutional level. Results from the study show that existing vulnerabilities created from development trajectories pursued in the past interact with climatic impacts to further exacerbate vulnerabilities and decrease adaptive capacities of households in the study communities. It also shows that unequal social relations of power drive differential vulnerability patterns among households in the study communities. The results show that the access profile of a household influences the strategies used in responding to climatic impacts. Also, climate change related adaptation policies by government and other actors do not adequately address the underlying causes of vulnerability consequently perpetuating vulnerabilities and reducing the adaptive capacities of households in the study communities. The study concludes that for adaptation policies to be more effective they need to address the underlying causes of vulnerability or the existing inequalities that reproduce and sustain vulnerability to climate impacts and which undermine adaptive capacities.

Participatory scenario planning (PSP) is a method in which diverse groups of participants imagine alternative narratives of plausible future events, conditions and trajectories. Researchers and practitioners commonly regard PSP as a useful method for tackling social-ecological problems (SEPs) by incorporating the knowledges of different stakeholders in dialogue to help build a holistic understanding of them. However, within PSP practice in the field of social-ecological resilience the literature is imprecise on the benefits it may have for those whose knowledge it incorporates. Seminal critiques of participation indicate that the outcomes of participatory processes typically reflect the interests of those who initiate them. This doctoral research therefore investigated the benefits PSP may have for those whose knowledge it incorporates. My analysis focused on learning, given the emphasis in the literature on using PSP to facilitate dialogue between participants with different knowledges. I collected data from: a critical review of 23 cases of PSP described in the peer-reviewed literature, semi-structured interviews with PSP practitioners, and two case studies of PSP processes. I analysed this data to explore: 1) the expected and reported benefits of PSP; 2) how and under what conditions learning occurs; and 3) how and why learning varies. To understand learning in PSP, I developed an innovative conceptual framework, built on a seminal learning theory, the ‘Zone of Proximal Development’. This postulates that learning occurs through interactions between different participants, which enable them to push beyond their usual range of thinking. My analysis indicates that learning is the most commonly expected and reported benefit associated with PSP. I reason that PSP stimulates learning by prompting focused discussions, which expose participants to different assumptions about the future. PSP thus encourages creative, focused thinking, that can help participants to push beyond their usual range of thinking. I found that learning varies according to participants’ relative prior expertise in specific topics, social and economic backgrounds, previous experience (if any) of PSP, and the design of specific PSP processes. I reason that learning varies because of the relative extent to which different participants consider the knowledge encountered in PSP to be relevant to their interests, as well as developed through a fair and unbiased process. This perception is strongly influenced both by facilitators and the objectives of wider projects in which specific PSP processes are embedded. I conclude that, although PSP can be a useful method for learning, there is a need for more robust governance to ensure critical reflection and evaluation of the use of PSP in this context.

Environmental issues from oil production have left inestimable environmental degradation and impacts to the lives of people in the Nigerian oil-producing region (NOPR). Research to date has suggested the importance of stakeholders’ collaboration in managing environmental issues. However, little research has been conducted to understand roles of stakeholders in developing a framework for stakeholders’ collaboration in the NOPR. This research produces a framework for stakeholders’ collaboration to expand knowledge in the development of a collaborative environmental management in the NOPR. The research aim was achieved based on four objectives; 1) identified recommended practices for stakeholders’ collaboration in managing environmental issues and established how they could be applied in the NOPR; 2) investigated stakeholders’ perception of collaborative roles in managing environmental issues in the NOPR; 3) designed a framework for stakeholders’ collaboration for managing environmental issues in the NOPR through the synthesis of outcomes of 1) and 2); and 4) validated the designed framework by identifying the critical success factors for its application. In achieving these objectives, interpretive research was applied, and it was underpinned by stakeholder analysis methodology to provide a coherent research design. Furthermore, the Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework and the theory of common pool resource were extended to inform the interpretation of collaborative roles of stakeholders in managing environmental issues in the NOPR. Adhering to the theoretical suggestions of stakeholder analysis / IAD framework and to allow a robust investigation of stakeholders’ collaboration, this research focused on the qualitative investigation of roles of the key stakeholders–i.e., Nigerian government agencies, multinational oil companies and host communities. While analysis of selected documents of the key stakeholders was conducted to explore the roles of stakeholders, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a select heads of departments and managers to examine their perception regarding their collaborative roles and critical success factor for stakeholders’ collaboration. While selective manual coding was used for the document analysis, narrative analysis assisted with NVivo 11 was used for the semi-structured interview analysis. The findings from both the document analysis and the review of recommended environmental management practices were synthesized to develop the framework for stakeholders’ collaboration. Policy review and development; strategic environmental management, systematic implementation of environmental management strategies and periodic review of management practices and policies were identified as key components of the framework for stakeholders’ collaboration. Findings from the framework validation derived from the semi-structured interviews show that critical success factors of stakeholders’ collaboration in managing environmental issues in the NOPR are primarily driven by socio-economic interests and political will as well as compliance to environmental management policies. Furthermore, it was found that ignorance and lack of commitment, among other barriers, can hinder stakeholders’ collaboration in managing environmental issues in the NOPR. This research suggests that due to the diversity of stakeholders’ roles regarding their institutional interests and complexity of environmental issues in the NOPR, successful stakeholders’ collaboration would depend on the concerted commitment and genuine collaboration across stakeholders.

Climate change and a growing human population are instigating major changes on the Earth's surface. Monitoring and understanding these changes as they unfold is critical for society and the environment. Satellite remote sensing provides the only means of achieving this over large spatial and temporal scales, and major progress in the application of Earth-observation imagery has been made since the beginning of the space age in the mid-20th century. However, savannahs - dynamic systems comprised of shrubs, trees, and grass species - have proved challenging for EO-based monitoring. Yet, these ecosystems cover almost 25% of the Earth's surface and are home to some of the poorest people on the planet. This thesis investigates the use of EO for monitoring ecosystem dynamics in African savannahs, focusing specially on woody cover and biomass provision. One of the most common Earth-observation (EO) based tools for monitoring vegetation is the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). A detailed review of the application of NDVI for monitoring land degradation was undertaken. This covered the historical context and ongoing debates around NDVI analyses, and highlighted key research gaps. NDVI was then used to map grass biomass for the Kruger National Park in South Africa, by combining in situ data with a downscaled NDVI dataset in a machine-learning framework. These predictions highlighted that the NDVI-biomass relationship is vulnerable to overfi�tting in space and time, due to spatial autocorrelation and a variable species composition, respectively. The NDVI was further explored at the continental scale using multiple time-series analyses. These revealed that a majority of African savannahs have only experienced vegetation greening in the 1982-2016 period. Areas of declining vegetation, or changes in the trend direction, were associated with phenological changes (i.e. a shrinking growth season), woodland degradation, or population increases. Finally, fractional woody vegetation cover was mapped for the Limpopo province of South Africa using Landsat spectral metrics and ALOS PALSAR radar imagery and a series of Random Forest regression models. The most accurate models combined multi-seasonal Landsat data and the radar layers. However, this was only marginally more accurate than just using dry and wet season metrics alone. When using a single season of imagery, the dry season preformed best. These results were reaffirmed for categorical savannah land-cover classifications, highlighting the importance of multi-sensor and multi-temporal data. The thesis contributes new insights for monitoring savannahs using EO imagery. By combining EO data with modern statistics and machine-learning methods novel insights to ecological and environmental issues can be gained. In the coming years, the increasing number of operational sensors and the volume of data collected will be of great benefit for environmental monitoring, especially in savannahs.

Working at the nexus of conservation and development is challenging. Participatory environmental monitoring (PEM) is, on paper, a win-win for conservation and development, but there has been limited evaluation of its effectiveness in improving the lives of local people while also supporting improved management of species of conservation concern. In this thesis, I use a multidisciplinary approach to gain a better understanding of the role and implications of PEM for conservation and development, using a project in Madagascar as a case study. I conducted a systematic literature review and online survey to describe approaches to PEM. I found that PEM schemes are variable, widespread and growing in number, but local participation is still limited and opportunities exist to improve use of modern technologies. Using occupancy modelling, I found that the case study lacks power to detect trends at the landscape level, but could provide useful presence-absence information on species and threats at the village level. However, the biggest issue highlighted by this research relates to inadequate data management that prevents most data being available for analyses and ‘learning-by-doing’ feedback loops. Using semi-structured interviews, I gathered local peoples’ perspectives of the project operating in their village and found that the project was widely known within the villages, but that not everyone benefits. Based on these findings and with my own first-hand experience of the case study project, I designed a tool for practitioners to use during the design and implementation of a PEM scheme. This thesis highlights the need to carefully consider all aspects of a PEM project, from the ecological knowledge gleaned from the data to the social impact across all sectors of the community. In doing so, this research demonstrates that PEM is challenging, complex and by no means a silver bullet for meeting dual conservation and development goals.

This research mainly focuses on how sustainability technologies can help corporations to reduce their environmental impacts. It then presents a critical assessment of some of the most well-known economic, social and environmental indicators and offers a set of solutions to make such indicators more comprehensive and practical. Two case studies on the effects of water treatment technologies in the mining sector, in particular the Chilean mining industry, is presented in this research to assess their efficacy in reducing water contamination and other environmental externalities. All the evaluations are done based on existing environmental assessment tools, however some of the models have been modified so that they become adequate for the purpose of this research. This research analysed and compared the sustainability performance of three deionisation technologies used by a global company within the water sector. The three pillars of sustainability were used to assess their performance. It was concluded the SDI technology was suitable for relatively small applications, while the combined SDI and RO system was the most appropriate tool for medium applications; and finally, the DI plant was the best for applications of a larger scale. The study also identified the need to for an integrated framework for assessment of product sustainability. The project also looked into the sustainability of the Chilean mining sector and the potential of entry for Veolia into the market to promote sustainable technologies, to improve the efficiency of the mining sector while alleviating the pressure exerted on water resources by the mining operations.

This research focused on the relationship between economic and environmental policy, identifying fault lines and investigating solutions. The research included both theoretical and empirical components, with the theoretical analysis informing the empirical research and vice versa. The theoretical component commenced with an examination at the interface between economic globalization and sustainability leading to reframing economic policy towards sustainability. This foundation was used to launch a vision for a sustainable world economy and a tentative policy framework capable of facilitating it. This proposed framework is termed ‘Proximization’ and relies on acceptance that sustainability should be overarching policy. For the empirical research, aviation was chosen as the particular sector because views are highly polarized making progress towards sustainable solutions particularly challenging. The methodology developed within the research was a novel approach combining the ethos of Action Research with case study analysis. It comprised 28 in-depth stakeholder interviews across a wide range from passengers and environmentalists to people in the aviation industry and government. The case study showed that applying the different mind-set developed in the conceptual analysis leads to identifying a solution even in this most difficult sector. The key finding of the research is that setting sustainability as the overarching policy objective facilitates the emergence of transformational solutions. This proved to be applicable in aviation and has considerable potential to be applied to other sectors. For ‘proximization’ to develop from an emerging concept to reality as an alternative framework for macroeconomic policy, would require pushing back against the policies that currently enable economic globalization, so might be contentious. More research is needed to apply the Action Research Case Study approach to other areas as well as to investigate further the merits of proximization to facilitate communities, countries and regions to find pathways to sustainability that suit their geography, culture and resources.

Since the EU-ETS was placed at the centre of EU climate governance in 2003,its influence has not been restricted to environmental policy but has spread to theeconomic and political domains. But its implementation remains blocked even after the EU revised it by the Climate and Energy Package (CEP). The larger problem is, the ‘East-West’ split toward the revised EU-ETS triggered by the ambitious but ‘missions complicated’ CEP and diffused to energy governance, which put EU's climate governance into the deadlock (Wettestad, 2014). Skjærseth and Wettestad (2009, 2010) argued that the revised EU-ETS could be the result of the changing MS’ preferences, but they did not unpack these preferences formulated during the EU-ETS implementation. This thesis fills the gap by reinvestigating the EU-ETS implementation to identify what the domestic contextual factors are and how they affect and reshape MS’ preferences to the EU-ETS. By applying the five stage policy-making cycle andthe multilevel governance (MLG) in this study, it is concluded that the difficulty offixing the EU-ETS is not merely limited to the revised climate governance structure, but also the need to reconcile MS’ energy-economic structures and coordinate with their climate and energy policy. To solve the MS’ problem of ‘asymmetrical energy-economic interests’, it is vital for the EU to improve the cross-level reconciliation between the EU-ETS and national energy policies and to increase the coordination between policy instruments when reforming the EU’s climate governance structure. The EU-ETS development encourages both national and EU’s climate governance structures to fall in line with MLG concepts (flexible design and more jurisdictional levels involved in the policy network). Therefore, it has become the turning point of European integration, by which the traditional dichotomy between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ integration starts transitioning to the ‘two-way reconciliation.’

The purpose of this study is to develop an understanding of issues related to personal, professional and management development of a small number of people working in London's Public Parks and Green Spaces sector. The study takes a dialogic perspective (Deetz, 1996), using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, Flowers and Larkin, 2009), which is in contrast to a positivist, HRD/sector/organisational research perspective. IPA is concerned with exploring people's 'lived experience' of a phenomenon from the perspectives of the participants, rather than studying the phenomenon through the use of a predetermined or abstract theoretical framework. Through the IPA analysis, a number of Master Themes are developed. Most participants report having found themselves working in the sector by chance. Once in office based, supervisory or management roles, some participants found their line managers to be at best unsupportive, and found exposure to micro and office politics to be a challenge. The study identifies that for the participants who participated in the research, working in the sector is certainly not a 'walk in the park'. The study also highlights a disconnect between some participants and their line managers on development issues, which is in contrast to the expectations of mainstream HRD practice. Possible causes for the disconnect are explored in the discussion, including line managers' concerns for their own job security. Based on the findings from this study, a substantive model 'Managing under Pressure in London's Public Parks sector' is offered, which contrasts with Mintzberg's (1997) model of 'Managing on the Edges' at Banff National Park, Canada. The study concludes by offering a range of potential implications and possible interventions for parks and green space practitioners, their managers and HRD practitioners working in London's public parks sector. These include recognition that Green Flag Judging can contribute to professional development, coaching at a sector level and provision of confidential support for public sector parks managers who are faced with learning how to handle organisational and party politics.

This thesis examines the relationship between sovereignty and the problem of environmental degradation. The thesis argues that modern sovereignty, particularly as it is expressed through the sovereign state, is both a significant contributor to the problem of environmental degradation as well as a barrier to effectively addressing that problem. By thinking about sovereignty as a political orientation that shapes understandings of temporality, spatiality, identity and political community we can begin to develop the theoretical resources needed to reorient thinking and action. Furthermore, the thesis argues that environmental degradation, while a manifestation of problems with the orientation(s) of sovereignty, can also serve as a catalyst for political reorientation.

Rapid screening technique is important and efficient for routine monitoring of chemical pollutants, risk assessment and decision making in dealing with contaminants in waters and soils. The focus of this thesis is on developing simple and rapid screening methods based on the diffusive gradients in thin films (DGT) technique to assess the concentration of phosphorus and metals qualitatively and quantitatively. Firstly, a rapid detection technique for phosphorus based on Metsorb DGT devices and a colour imaging method using the conventional molybdenum blue were developed and fully tested under different conditions. The fully quantitative interpretation of the P concentration can be assessed in the linear range of 0.1 to 1.02 μg cm-2 device that corresponds to the concentration range of 9 to 98 μg L-1 if the deployment time is 24 hours and the water temperature is 20oC. Secondly, digital colorimetric analysis using a flat-bed scanner was utilised to quantify the Cu, Ni, and Co in water following the DGT uptake of metals by Chelex resin gel without involving further reactive reagents. The fully quantitative interpretation of the Cu, Ni, and Co concentration can be assessed in the linear range of 1.5 to 165 μg cm-2 , 2.7 to 153 μg cm-2 , and 1.6 to 159.2 μg cm-2 , respectively, which correspond to the concentration range of 0.05 to 5 mg L-1 for all three metals if the deployment time is 24 hours and the water temperature is 20oC. Thirdly, a rapid screening technique for Cr(VI) using DGT and a high-resolution CID base on the surface colouration of the N-Methyl-D-glucamine (NMDG) binding gel has been developed. The relationship between the accumulation of Cr(VI) in NMDG gels and the corresponding change in grayscale intensity was well fitted using a quintic polynomial. The fully quantitative interpretation of the Cr(VI) concentration can be assessed in the linear range of 0.31 to 2.47 μg cm-2 which correspond to the concentration range of 12.5 to 150 μg L-1 if the deployment time is 24 hours and the water temperature is 20oC. This study has formulated a DGT deployment guide list to determine whether the concentration of metals has exceeded the maximum contaminant level allowed based on the regulation standards in different countries and regions. The use of both a simple visual inspection and a scanner for DGT devices at different deployment times and different temperatures will be considered for this list. Moreover, the rapid screening technique has been evaluated in water and soil from five regions in China. Furthermore, a novel approach with biological material incorporated in the DGT (Bio-DGT) was developed to measure the concentrations and toxicity of metals at the same time in water and soil. The new method immobilised a whole-cell toxicity bioreporter, ADPWH_recA, into a thin layer of agarose gel to replace the polyacrylamide gel that is commonly used in DGT. The test results indicated that the concentrations of metals measured by Bio-DGT and the cell free DGT have no significant differences during a 7-day deployment in synthetic water. A positive metal exposure relationship was shown between Bio-DGT accumulation and biological response. Bio-DGT showed a stable response to heavy metals under a wide range of pH and ionic strength. The bioluminescent signal of Bio-DGT was maintained at a high level during up to 30 days of storage. The deployment of Bio-DGT devices in field soils collected from China allowed the measurement of both the available concentration and the toxicity of metals. It indicated that the new Bio-DGT can assess the bioavailability and toxicity of metals at the same time. The newly developed rapid screening technique for P and metals were applied in waters and soils in situ in 5 different regions of China. It showed the concentrations of P in most of the monitored waters in Beijing were low and the quality of the waters has reached the Chinese water quality standards for surface water. The concentration of DGT-measured P in the two main rivers run through Tianjing were higher than the national water standard in China. The concentrations of Cu in monitored aquatic systems of all field areas have also reached the Chinese water quality standards for surface water.

It is increasingly common for complex social, economic and environmental policy concerns to be delivered via funded community-based projects. A project’s contribution is typically monitored and evaluated relative to pre-defined outcomes, supported by a set of indicators. Available research suggests that when judged against such criteria, the performance of many funded international developmental and community-based sustainability (CBS) projects are variable, with evidence suggesting that changes elicited are negligible in duration, type, and scale. However, evaluating project performance relative to pre-defined outcomes may overlook the practical learning accumulated by actors in realising key objectives under conditions afforded by the operational context. To address this gap, developmental evaluation (DE) foregrounds and supports project practitioner learning and innovation under dynamic, complex, and uncertain operating conditions. Applying the DE focus on project actor learning and innovation, the present research thematically analyses how practitioners in a funded CBS case study project make sense of their practice. Despite its explicit focus on learning however, DE has not articulated a coherent cognitive paradigm, and a contribution of the present study is to equip DE with a conceptual architecture drawn from the enactive cognitive science paradigm, rooted in an explicit accounting of complexity. Using this base, a prototype DE framework was designed and provisionally field-tested in the form of a set of prompts to be used with CBS practitioners to augment traditional monitoring and evaluation activities. This framework is intended to support practitioners in surfacing and capturing second-order learning about their practices and to explore opportunities for innovative responses to dynamic complex operational conditions. Recommendations are offered for further research and how these findings might be incorporated into future CBS design and funding considerations.

After decades of pushing for deregulation and regulatory reform in its Member States, has the European Union itself become a locus for policy dismantling – i.e. leading to a weakening of its policies? This thesis offers a first systematic study of policy dismantling at EU level. It focuses on environmental policies, an area in which EU action has repeatedly been criticised by politicians for harming competitiveness and not respecting national sovereignty. It combines for the first time insights from comparative politics studies of dismantling with EU governance literature, to offer a theoretical framework specially configured to explaining dismantling at EU level. It investigates which EU environmental policies have been targeted for policy dismantling, by whom, why and how, from the early 1990s to the end of the second Barroso Commission in 2014. It reveals how the EU has changed, from a driver of policy dismantling in its Member States to a locus of dismantling in its own right. Dismantling attempts (from the reduction of administrative burdens to the repatriation of competences) have been made by key EU actors – which for some, such as the European Commission, goes against the conventional wisdom in EU studies. These attempts have been justified in terms of criticisms of the EU’s legislative outputs – subsidiarity and proportionality – and of European integration itself. But they have not resulted in significant policy dismantling. Dismantling has been the least frequent outcome of legislative reform amongst the many pieces of legislation earmarked for dismantling. This pattern indicates the resilience – until now – of the EU’s “green state” (Klyza and Sousa, 2013), but dismantling attempts have markedly changed the way the EU legislates on environmental issues and further hindered policy expansion. This thesis contributes to the renaissance of dismantling studies in comparative politics by revealing how dismantling strategies and effects at EU level differ from the existing literature which focuses almost exclusively on nation states. Looking at the EU from a policy dismantling perspective, this thesis also questions foundational assumptions in EU studies – on what drives EU actors, on where the EU is headed. Finally it offers a different reading of the history of EU environmental policy, stressing the role that contestation in general, and dismantling in particular, have played in shaping the environmental acquis.

The twelve refereed publications (drawn from over eighty-five journal articles and a number of books and books chapters) which form the basis of this PhD each deal with an environmental and social problem that poses some regulatory or competition issues. They may be contended to have arisen due to a range of market failures that can warrant intervention. In some cases they are argued to challenge market conduct and/or regulatory practice. The selection of papers is in my judgement broadly reflective of the range of topics investigated throughout my research career and also chosen to include early work as well as some of my most recent and ongoing work. A wide range of research methods are used and all of the publications are to varying degrees considered to be policy relevant. The submitted work includes primarily theoretical or conceptual studies, critical policy assessments, as well as studies reporting empirical work drawing either on quantitative or qualitative modes of analysis, or some combination of the two. Most of the research has been undertaken in a UK setting though some took place in a South African setting and all are explored within the framework of the available international literature. The first part of the thesis commentary provides an introduction with personal background, an explanation of the thesis structure and a review of the relevant literature, highlighting the key work informing the selected articles and explaining the research context in which they evolved and developed. Then the commentary presents a reflective critical analysis of the selected articles. Finally the commentary unfolds a critical appraisal of the contribution of the published works to the field of study (including citation analysis) and in relation to some of the articles a more qualitative discussion is presented.

It is widely acknowledged that existing low carbon technologies offer substantial means to reduce the carbon intensity of existing lifestyles. Yet the problem is not simply one of diffusion: commercially developed technologies need to be made to work in diverse local contexts of use. They need to be locally embedded. I approach the study of ‘local embedding' through a particular actor, community-led energy initiatives and the broad research question: how are community-led energy initiatives seeking to integrate sustainable technologies into local contexts of use? I explore the agency of community activists to locally embed technologies and the context dynamics influencing how their projects develop. In doing so, I identify a gap in current knowledge between the social embedding of technology by wider society (as conceptualised by sustainability transitions research) and the appropriation of technology by users (as conceptualised by domestication studies) and develop the concept of local embedding as a distinct conceptual contribution. Having identified community initiatives as performing a largely intermediary role I draw on insights from research on innovation intermediaries to understand their agency. A framework is constructed through building blocks from these approaches, then tested and refined through four comparative case studies on community attempts at local embedding. The research contributes a novel process model on community-based intermediation for local embedding. I identify an ideal-typical sequence to key community-based intermediary processes and identify a variety of context dynamics influencing project development. As such I contribute to current discussions within (a) sustainability transitions research, about actors and their agency, and (b) innovation intermediaries research, identifying an under-studied intermediary working at the user-end of innovation processes and refine an existing framework on key intermediary processes.

Access to information, access to public participation and access to justice are recognised as the pillars of sound environmental governance, and are at the heart of environmental democracy. Collectively referred to as “environmental access rights”, they are promoted under Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and form the core pillars of a legally binding international instrument known as the Aarhus Convention. Malaysia, a developing country that has undergone rapid change, is striving to achieve its development goals through “Vision 2020”, but still struggles to balance between the economic, social, and environmental aspects of its development. By implementing transformation programmes, the Malaysian Government is displaying efforts to transition its “government-knows-best” approach into one that is more transparent, accountable, inclusive and citizen-centric. However, the findings of this empirical, exploratory research indicate that public access to environmental information and participation in environmental decision-making remain limited in Malaysia. Furthermore, the author’s investigation into two scenarios that took place in the country: 1) The Rare Earth Controversy in Kuantan, and 2) The Major Floods of 2014/2015, identified examples of how deficits in access to environmental information and public participation in Malaysia’s current system of environmental governance could arguably exacerbate such situations, and may contribute to social unrest as well as lack of confidence in the Government. Drawing from evidence of the research findings, the author suggests that Malaysia could benefit from enhanced access to environmental information as well as public participation in environmental decision-making, and thus proposes a framework to help the country progress towards achieving this objective. This research breaks new ground as it reports on recent events and developments (or lack thereof) in an area of study that has been sparsely explored in Malaysia. It is also timely as the country still faces environmental deterioration and increasing public demands for improved Government transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement. It is hoped that the research work contained in this thesis will enrich the existing knowledge on the subject area of environmental governance, specifically environmental access rights, and contribute towards promoting good environmental governance and democracy in Malaysia, the ASEAN region, and across the world.

This thesis explores the role of the catastrophic imaginary in shaping environmental praxis in the UK. Confronted by the threat of a looming climate change catastrophe, environmentalism in the global North is caught in a state of impasse. Despite numerous organising attempts no mass climate change movement has emerged to confront the threat. This absence of a political movement is compounded by the failure of legislative campaigns and the inadequacy of government responses. Environmental praxis appears caught between ineffective practices and a catastrophic imaginary. It is this state of impasse, one as yet to be critically analysed, that this thesis sets out to explore. The thesis argues that the impasse in environmental praxis emerges from the intersection of the catastrophic imaginary and the limits of activism as a mode of liberal politics that I term liberal utopianism. Exploring a number of specific environmental organisations through a nomadic methodology framed by the practices of multi-sited ethnography, this thesis contends that the failure of liberal utopianism to adequately engage with climate change is in part due to the form climate change takes as a sociotechnical problem and not only an outcome of political practice itself. Exploration of responses to this state of impasse suggests that it is possible to break from the impasse by transforming the material grounds of the imaginary and envisioning catastrophe as a process of slow violence, and thus amenable to situated political action. This thesis explores the potential recent moves towards a politics of collapse, one I call radical fatalism, hold for environmental praxis. The thesis concludes by suggesting the need for a turn away from the politics of the event and the over-determining valuation of global scales within environmental praxis.

This thesis comprises three essays on environmental economics and deals with issues such as corruption, emissions leakage and green alliances. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between corruption and market entry. We show that corruption incentivises firms' entry in the market while an increased number of firms incentivises bureaucrats to be corrupt, in a self-reinforcing manner. Although the applicability of the model can be more general, we focus on the case of environmental regulation and show the positive relationship between corruption and pollution though market entry. In the second chapter, an additional factor which leads to emissions leakage is proposed. In a setting with two countries, when consumers in one country care only about domestic emissions, emissions leakage arises since demand for the good that is produced in that country using a greener technology is shifted abroad where production takes place with the dirtiest technology. Next, I consider the global environmental consciousness scenario i.e., consumers in that country now care about both the domestic and foreign emissions. In this case, foreign pollution is mitigated and leakage is diminished. In the last chapter, I examine green alliances, the partnerships between a firm and an environmental group. In this model, the environmentalists have two options: to either act against the firm which implies shrinking the demand that the firm faces or join forces with it by reducing the cost of implementing a greener technology. The group's decision is affected by an environmental tax set by the government and by extension it impacts firm's choices on output and emission intensity. It is shown that higher taxation makes the conflict scenario more likely to happen, implying that collaboration and a more stringent environmental policy are substitutes. This identifies a previously unexplored, possibly adverse effect of public policy on environmental quality.

This thesis employs the by-production approach to modelling pollution generating technologies to investigate production and environmental efficiencies, design consumption increasing and emission non-increasing input policy reforms, and derive a measure of marginal abatement costs in the case of China. The second chapter introduces by-production approach to modelling the pollution generating technologies. It decomposes a general pollution generating technology as classical intended production technology and nature’s residual-generation mechanism. In this chapter, some production and environmental efficiency indexes will be extended and applied under by-production approach to study China’s regional technical efficiency incorporated emission generation. According to our estimation results, some reasons analysis and policy implementation suggestions are given. The third chapter co-authored with Professor Sushama Murty proposes a model that gives a key role to the energy sector, and gives a theoretical characterisation for the existence of feasible, consumption-increasing, and emission-non increasing input policy reforms at the status-quo of a national or a sub-national economic unit. A methodology is developed to empirically test for the existence of such efficiency-improving reforms. Formulae to compute the optimal efficiency-increasing reform and a measure of marginal abatement cost (MAC) based on local policy reforms using data available at the status-quo are derived. The fourth chapter co-authored with Professor Sushama Murty implements the methodology developed in the third chapter to test the existence and to study the structure of efficiency-improving reforms using data on thirty provinces in China. A new class of limitational variable elasticity of substitution (LVES) production functions for specifying technologies of the energy-using and energy-generating sectors is introduced and two such production functions are estimated along with the conventional Cobb Douglas and CES production functions. MACs and the optimal efficiency-improving reforms are found to be sensitive to the choice of the production functions employed. There is a huge variation in MACs across provinces. The optimal efficiency-improving reform encourages a substitution from coal-fired electricity generation to gas-fired electricity and renewable energy generation for all provinces. The fifth chapter reviews China’s regional variations in electricity generation, primary energy usage, and forest cover. To better understand the China’s carbon emission control policies, we also briefly introduce the carbon emission scheme implementation. Based on these information, we incorporate the efficiency-improving reforms and MACs estimated in the fourth chapter to analyse the direction of input resources reallocation and give further recommendations for each province.

The Aral Sea regression is globally famous as a devastating ecological disaster, though recently a dam has led to the partial restoration of the North Aral. These ecological changes have overlapped with the collapse of the USSR and resultant political-economic transformations. From ethnographic fieldwork in Aral’sk and fishing villages, and archival research, I argue that the sea’s regression and partial return cannot be analytically separated from political-economic processes of socialism and postsocialism. This study of the entanglements of environmental and political-economic change has, I suggest, implications for anthropological engagements with climate change. Chapter 1 offers narratives of Soviet irrigation policies (which caused the regression) and of the construction of a socialist fishery, arguing that similar political-economic processes drove both. Chapter 2 explores official responses to the regression, especially importing ocean fish for processing in Aral’sk, and sending fishermen to fish elsewhere in Kazakhstan. Chapters 3 and 4 explore how these practices, and their cessation after the collapse of the USSR, shape local understandings of the regression. I thus decentre the environmental disaster narrative. Part 2 examines post-Soviet projects in the region, arguing that the disaster narrative, though partial, rallied actors and mobilised projects, including the dam, which have to some extent reshaped the region. Part 3 analyses the divergent outcomes of the sea’s return today. No longer embedded in the command economy, the sea is enmeshed in new sets of relations connecting fishermen, private actors, state and markets extending as far as Germany. Catch is limited, but over-quota fishing is widespread. For some fishing villages, this has led to new-found prosperity, with extensive ritual expenditure. However, because over-quota fish cannot be sold openly, they do not reach newly-opened factories in Aral’sk, where the sea is felt to be marginal and the fishing industry figures as a symbol of corruption.

Changes in both the biotic and abiotic environment influence individuals’ physiology, morphology and behaviour and influence key ecological rates underpinning population dynamics. Environmental change is ubiquitous in natural systems and is often multifaceted, as multiple aspects of the climate often change simultaneously and the abundance and traits of species in the community are constantly fluctuating. In this thesis, we study the ecological consequences of environmental changes. We identify fundamental factors complicating our understanding of population dynamics and develop analytical tools to reliably infer, from data, the impacts of environmental change on key biological processes. We present evidence that the impacts of environmental change on population dynamics can be modified by other concurrent environmental changes. Furthermore, the impacts on a focal species will likely be strongly dependent on how the performance of interacting species are affected. We then show that the addition of predators to an environment can cause prey to become more defended against predation, at a cost of reduced population growth. Such growth-defence trade-offs are expected to drive complex population dynamics. We demonstrate that our understanding of community dynamics can be improved by identifying how consumption rates vary with changes in morphological or behavioural traits. We identify feedbacks between species’ trait and abundance dynamics. We then provide evidence that environmental warming can modify the impacts of trait change on species interactions. We inferred that this likely resulted from a modified life history strategy or altered resources allocation to growth rather than defence. Finally, we use simulation studies to assess the reliability of current methods at inferring climate effects on the demography of wild populations. We demonstrate that commonly used approaches perform poorly and also identify a reliable modelling framework. The findings of this work provided quantitative insights into the impacts of environmental change on the processes driving species’ dynamics. It also highlights the role of combined environmental change, trait change and species interaction in complicating the prediction of population dynamics.

Incentive-based measures are increasingly being employed as a strong motive to encourage conservation yet the evidence that they are generating sustainable resource-use, improving rural livelihoods or aiding biodiversity protection remains inconclusive. To provide empirical evidence to this discourse, in this study the McDermott et al (2013) equity framework is used to explore how different benefit-sharing arrangements have shaped twenty-five years of Integrated Conservation and Development projects (ICDP) neighbouring the Mt. Elgon National Park, Uganda. Applying a self-reported, post-hoc, quasi-experimental design, a time-series of participatory mapping activities revealed that despite the willingness of targeted groups to adopt ‘green’ technologies (distributional equity), maintaining and up-scaling these activities remained limited at the landscape level. Social network analysis uncovered that limited knowledge, restricted access (contextual equity) and the lack of inclusion in decision-making (procedural equity) impeded this development. Tracking the Mt. Elgon Regional Eco-System Conservation Programme (MERECP) as a specific case study, the analyses then showed that wealthier members of society and the political elite were the principle beneficiaries of conservation inputs. In the cases where these institutionalised hierarchies were purposely sidestepped (a measure to ensure marginalised stakeholders gained funds), cases of conflict and resentment arose. Overall, communities that had loose, expansive conservation networks adopted the greatest number of simple technologies. Nevertheless, those that have built a high level of trust both amongst one another and with supporting organisations resulted in the most socially equitable and biologically efficient outcomes. Portraying a future rich in sustainable land-use practises, communities do aspire to protecting their natural resources. Whilst this may be a time-consuming, expensive process, building sound adaptive ‘co-management’ relationships that respect cultural norms, provide suitable alternatives and maximises local knowledge is the key to implementing incentive-based conservation measures across Mt. Elgon.

This thesis contributes to the scholarship on policy diffusion in general, and on environmental policy diffusion in particular, by unpicking the drivers of different diffusion mechanisms. Its overarching aim is to investigate the motivational dynamics influencing environmental policymaking at the fuzzy, understudied, pre-legislative stage. The thesis comprises four standalone papers: The first paper (Chapter 2) examines policymakers’ motivations to engage with the climate change mitigation agenda based on a case study of Israeli climate change mitigation policy. It suggests that Israel’s engagement with the climate change mitigation agenda, displaying an evident pattern of diffusion by emulating developed countries, is significantly motivated by considerations of internal, rather than external, legitimacy, contrary to expectations. The second paper (Chapter 3) makes theoretical advancements in recognising issue attributes as explanatory factors for the different mechanisms of policy diffusion, addressing an acknowledged gap in the literature. The third paper (Chapter 4) is an empirical application of the issue attributes model introduced in Chapter 3; the concept is applied to three diffusion processes of environmental issues in Israel: climate change, air pollution, and waste, analysing the differences in the attributes of these three issues, and subsequently, the differences in diffusion mechanisms in practice. The fourth paper (Chapter 5) investigates GLOBE International, a previously unstudied network of legislators committed to advancing climate change legislation. Its main findings show that GLOBE facilitates a mechanism of policy and political learning, but perhaps more interestingly, generates network-enabled emotional energy and esprit de corps among its members, which has helped to motivate and sustain climate action by legislators. The thesis takes a qualitative, microlevel approach, utilising data from 64 interviews with policy actors from 21 countries, as well supporting textual sources, thus contributing to the qualitative knowledge base needed to support analytical aggregations on policy diffusion processes.

In Hong Kong, 'green living' (luksik saangwut) is promoted as a way of living that is kind to the Earth and good to the people. It is a grassroots movement that encourages people to take personal responsibility for the environment and the society at large. While most studies of Asia's environmental movements focus on green groups' lobbying tactics and mobilisation strategies, this thesis pays serious attention to individuals' experience of living a green life. Although Hong Kong's green culture is highly influenced by the global appeal to sustainability and environmental protection, its specificities are shaped by the city's social and political climate in a unique historical conjuncture. By focusing on individual experience and their practices of green living in the everyday, I argue that green living in Hong Kong is best understood as 'technologies of the self' wherein new environmental, social, and political subjectivities are formed among the ordinary people. The perceived reciprocity between the act of healing nature and the healing power of nature is an essential element in the formation of green subjectivity in Hong Kong. Not only does green living help people heal and transform themselves, it has also given rise to an embodied politics (santai likhang) that enables people to reimagine a social and political 'otherwise'. Such embodied politics has come to represent a politics of hope that empowers people to confront with the politics of fear that has been looming over Hong Kong since the former British colony was returned to China in 1997. In light of this background, I argue that what the Hong Kong people want to sustain is not just the natural environment, but also the social norms and the ways of living that are thought to distinguish themselves from their counterparts in mainland China.

Environmental Justice (EJ) is the name of both a concept and a social movement that originated in the United States (US) in the early 1980s. Broadly, EJ describes attempts to ameliorate and rectify an intimate relationship between environmental and social inequality, where environmental ills are disproportionately suffered by certain members of society, usually the marginalised and the poor. EJ is shown to be a discourse that is capable of possessing both democratic and political potential, however, in its various manifestations, this potential is frequently not realised. This study engages in recent critiques of the nature of politics itself and the argument that the current context has become post-political, exploring the emergence of the concept of EJ and nature of environmental injustice (EiJ) within this context in England. To do this, this research examines the emergence and development of EJ in English civil society through the account of key actors, and the Non-Government Organisation of Friends of the Earth (FoE) in particular, and investigates a case study of a mobilisation against a stereotypical instance of EiJ. The concept of EJ is seen to emerge at an elite civil society level around the turn of the millennium, most noticeably with FoE, where in a discourse coalition, a version of EJ was produced that aimed to overcome a technocratic deficit within sustainable development. At the grassroots level, however, EJ discourses and the explicit EJ frame has little presence, and a number of barriers relating to both the nature of the organisations trying to push the concept, and the nature of the EiJs themselves are explored. The analysis of the case study provides valuable insight into the types of discourses that are present in an EiJ mobilisation against an incinerator and the way in which these discourses play out in a post-political context.

Climate change and global warming have received heightened attention over the last few decades across different societies. As one of the biggest polluters of CO2e, companies can play an important role in tackling climate change and global warming. Despite such an important role, a limited numbers of studies have been conducted in the carbon accounting discipline. The major concern that this study addresses is whether voluntary carbon disclosure, and especially self-serving (symbolic) information, may actually hinder future improvements in corporate carbon performance. This study investigates this concern by proposing a model that investigates the interrelationships between carbon performance, carbon disclosure, carbon reputation and a firm‟s economic performance within a single inclusive model. Following previous studies suggesting that the relationship between corporate environmental behaviour and a firm‟s environmental reputation may vary across environmental sensitive and non-sensitive industries, and in line with the aim and objectives of this study, separate path analysis models have been run for carbon intensive and non-intensive industry sectors. Therefore, a comparative study was employed to understand the similarities and differences between these two different industry sectors. Based on the pooled cross-sectional time series data of 95 UK firms (40 carbon intensive companies and 55 non-intensive companies) over the period 2009 to 2014 and by employing a time sequence design, this study found that poor carbon performers disclose more carbon information in non-intensive industries. The results showed that corporate carbon performance is not reflected in corporate carbon reputation and, more interestingly, the worst performers in carbon non-intensive industries have a better carbon reputation. The results also showed that, unlike carbon non-intensive companies where only the quality of carbon disclosure improves carbon reputation, the quantity of such disclosure (irrespective of its quality) enhances the carbon reputation of the firms with greater carbon exposure (i.e. carbon intensive companies). No direct and indirect (through carbon reputation) relationship was found between carbon performance, as well as carbon disclosure and a firm‟s economic performance, plus carbon reputation as an intangible asset only improves economic performance of carbon intensive companies. Finally, the bootstrapping method indicated that carbon reputation fully mediates the impact of the quantity of carbon disclosure in carbon intensive companies on corporate economic performance. In other words, by disclosing more carbon information (irrespective of its quality), carbon intensive companies can improve their carbon reputation and subsequently enjoy better economic performance. This study has several implications for corporate managers, investors, media and policy makers. The results showed that carbon reputation appears to be an important factor in the decision making of investors who invest in carbon intensive companies. Since carbon reputation of these companies is not based on either real carbon performance or quality of carbon disclosure, investors need to be cautious when making a decision. The results also showed a certain degree of naivety on the part of the media in evaluating corporate carbon behaviour. Such investors and media behaviour can actually reduce management‟s incentive to improve their real carbon performance in the future. The results send a clear message to regulatory bodies whose current policy for voluntary carbon disclosure is not sufficient enough to address the heart of climate change and global warming. Finally, the results also send a massage to corporate managements that improving corporate carbon performance does not come out of shareholders' pockets.