Paper Series
The Paper Series aims to disseminate research findings prior to publication in order to share ideas, promote academic debate, and receive feedback on work in progress.
The Occasional Paper Series makes outstanding research by our students accessible.
Development Geography Occasional Paper 2023
Community-based water governance (CBWG) approaches aspire to alleviate multiple challenges around water. They aim to facilitate participation, promote sustainable practices, and create awareness. However, outcomes of community-based projects sometimes fall short of expectations and can even exacerbate the same power asymmetries they attempt to mitigate. In the study area of Mount Kenya West Region (Kenya), land use change, political-institutional restructuring, development inequalities, and climatic changes constitute a contested socio-environmental space. Framed by a multi-scalar Political Ecology and a hydrosocial cycle approach, this study investigates how community-based Water Resource Users Associations (WRUAs) are embedded in this region in water-related challenges and uncertainties, land use change, and transforming power relations. Specifically, the study emphasizes the multiple ways in which hydrosocial interactions shape exclusion and participation around CBWG, as well as different governance performances of two case study
WRUAs at Likii and Nanyuki river. This thesis employs an exploratory qualitative research design with semi-structured interviews, participatory observations, and subsequent qualitative content analysis. Results show that first, perceptions around the attribution of water-related challenges differ remarkably among stakeholders and affect WRUAs’ operations. Second, skyrocketing land acquisitions and intensified land use – mostly through increased small-scale farming – disadvantage specifically pastoralists and altogether overwhelm CBWG capacities. Third, (perceived) crossscalar power asymmetries around water impair governance success, albeit differently among WRUAs. Fourth, in the face of multiple pressures, some WRUAs yield important best-practices and innovations on adaptation and participation. Overall, the study illustrates the importance of scrutinizing hydrosocial processes, underlying governance visions and knowledge forms, and the resulting heterogeneous achievements of WRUAs. A clearer definition of responsibilities, awareness creation, and addressing multi-dimensional inequalities around water can crucially advance CBWG to be truly inclusive, resilient, and versatile.
Development Geography Occasional Paper 2022
Along global textile supply chains, the dark side of globalization is repeatedly revealed in the form of human rights violations and environmental damage, the costs of which are usually not borne by those who cause and consume them, but are unevenly and unfairly distributed worldwide. The aim of this master thesis is to work out the connection between social justice and textile supply chains and which role legal regulation mechanisms such as the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act play in this context. By means of interviews with experts, various actors were asked about their interests and expectations of regulatory mechanisms. The political-ecological analysis of the qualitative data shows that socially just textile supply chains depend on the interests and agency of actors. Regulatory mechanisms such as the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act continue to grant a lot of agency to the currently most powerful actors in supply chains, the transnational textile companies, and remain within the capitalist economic system. Civil society actors in particular are using scale jumping to improve the rights of those affected by human rights violations in production countries, to strengthen their agency, and thus to work towards more socially just conditions. With reference to the Politics of Scale coined by Smith (1992, 2008) and Swyngedouw (1997, 2000, 2004), this paper concludes that regulatory mechanisms should be more closely aligned with the needs of workers and that their agency should be strengthened in order to shape more socially just textile supply chains in the long term.
Development Geography Occasional Paper 2021
Re-greening the planet by planting trees and restoring forests follows the global trend of increasing environmental awareness. Various concepts have been developed to stop de-forestation and degradation as well as revive forests and forested lands. As such, Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) is a state-of-the-art approach for ecosystem restoration while simultaneously improving people’s livelihood. In this context, Ethiopia, a country particu-larly affected by the implications of climate change, shows a high commitment to various reforestation initiatives to restore its forests and forest lands. However, sustainable FLR implementation faces tremendous challenges, as the success does not solely depend on technical or ecological aspects: supportive governance architectures seem to be even more critical for successful restoration. Based on this, actors, institutions, and policies shape the governance arrangements and influence FLR outcomes in various ways. The entanglement between the three governance dimensions is expressed by conflicting interests as well as diverging power resources. Especially problems, such as overlapping responsibilities, insti-tutional capacity, land tenure and power asymmetries may endanger the success of resto-ration. By means of a case study of Ethiopia, the thesis examines the research question on how far governance influences FLR outcomes. Various facets of forest restoration are un-covered, including their reciprocal political relation, particularly noticeable on one specific scale: the landscape.
Development Geography Occasional Paper 2020
Although crucially responding to humanitarian needs in complex crises, the international humanitarian system (IHS) faces severe criticism that it perpetuates the same inequalities it is trying to alleviate. Informed by decolonial theories and practices, this research aims to investigate the impacts that coloniality as the endurance of a colonial system of power, knowledge and being has on the IHS and its problematic outcomes. This research utilized a case study design of humanitarian assistance in Jordan and employed semi-structured expert interviews. Results show that local employees, volunteers, and local NGOs face disproportionate difficulties in the competitive environment of the IHS which hinders the outcomes of humanitarian assistance. At the base of these inequalities lies a division of humanitarians into locals, volunteers, and internationals that hierarchizes these actors and their knowledges along the line of coloniality. This divide privileges mostly White/Western internationals as well as local elites in terms of access to decision-making, employment and tangible assets. Although localization is currently treated as a means to enhance the IHS and its outcomes, the case study illustrates that an uncritical view on localization that ignores the diverse understandings of and intentions behind localization, entails the danger to perpetuate these inequalities. However, it also suggests that localization as aspirations towards decoloniality has potentials to improve humanitarian assistance and to reduce inequalities and power asymmetries within the IHS. This, however, requires to fundamentally challenge the hegemonic nature of the IHS and its understanding of humanitarianism and instead move towards a pluriverse of humanitarian actors and knowledges.
In her master thesis, Melanie Deter explored different life situations of elderly people in rural Tanzania. The thesis carves out how the process of ageing impacts these elderlies’ lives, highlights the heterogeneity within Eastern Africa’s older populations and thereby calibrates the "dominant narrative of Africa’s older people as homogeneously disadvantaged” (ABODERIN 2017: 644). Importantly, the starting point of this thesis is not the interest in the elderlies’ old age security alone but it overcomes this vulnerability-oriented perspective: it is interested in what actually matters to the elderlies not only for their livelihood security but for their individual wellbeing.
By taking a relational perspective, this thesis investigates the disparities amongst the elderly people: it views their lives with regard to their life courses, in relation to intergenerational aspects as well as in interconnections with social markers, particularly class and gender.
Development Geography Occasional Paper 2017
Masterstudenten des Seminars "Politik internationaler Klimaverhandlungen" vom Geographischen Institut der Universität Bonn nahmen im Dezember 2015 an der COP 21 in Paris als Beobachter teil. Angelehnt an die Debatte zur De-Politisierung der internationalen Klimapolitik gingen die Studenten Fragestellungen bezüglich der Negation der Pluralität des Klimawandels, dem Re-Politisierungspotenzial zivilgesellschaftlicher Proteste sowie der Problematisierung der Klimawandels durch LDC-Repräsentanen nach. Diese Fragestellungen werden in den Artikeln dieses Themen-Occasional Paper behandelt.
As part of their thesis Lena Rott and Roxana Gabriel analysed the urban refugee accomondation in the city of Remscheid. Thereby they made use of a socio-geographic perspective.
Development Geography Occasional Paper 2016
As part of her Master thesis Saskia Antonia von Werder analyzes REDD+, a market-based climate mitigation instrument designed by the UNFCCC to reduce and prevent carbon dioxide emissions from tropical regions. The analysis presented hereafter aims at both understanding the preconditions for REDD+ to be implemented globally, and the examining the impacts of REDD+ on peoples' everyday lives in rural Indonesia. This thesis presents a novel approach to analyze REDD+ by using Henri Lefebvre's theory on "the production of space" as theoretical background.
As part of her bachelor thesis Florence Nick examined the dimension of post-political structures in the current international climate politic. Thereby she analyzed the work of the NGO Climate Action Network International (CAN), a parent organization of more than 950 NGO, and made use of the Grounded Theory approach.
As part of her bachelor thesis Mara Mürlebach applies Erik Swyngedouw's argument of the postpolitical condition to the case of Fairtrade. She argues that Fairtrade not only depoliticizes the strive for change in global trading practices, but also represents Southern producers of Fairtrade goods as powerless figures waiting for the white savior.
Form the 30th of July to the 7th of August 2015 the participants of an excursion to Kenya of the Geographical Institute of the University of Bonn conducted a field school in Naivasha. Focus groups worked on topics like waste management, tourism, consumption, water management or fishery and organized their own empirical study with the support of research assistants from the University of Nairobi for five days under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Detlef Müller-Mahn, Dr. Samuel Owuor and Andreas Gemählich.
Development Geography Occasional Paper 2015
As part of her master thesis Katharina Jung raised the question to the degree the volunteers programme Don Bosco Volunteers changes existing patterns of perception and action of the participating volunteers as well as their cultural affiliation and how these experiences can be transferred to the respective social environment.
Helena Inkermann's case study was conducted to investigate the rapid socio-economic and environmental transformation process, its impacts on Afar women living in Baadu, and the options and constraints of social practices of Afar women deriving from the transformation process.
Hannes Lauer, who graduated from the Department of Geography, follows in his paper the ongoing process of mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation into development strategies in The Gambia.
Development Geography Occasional Paper 2014
Supervised by Benjamin Etzold, a collective of undergraduate students engages with the transnational lives of migrants.
Luise Meyer, who graduated from the Department of Geography, interrogates in her paper the contested making of urban spaces in Rio de Janeiro in the context of mega-events and urban revitalisation strategies.
