South-South trade and sustainability:The case of Ceylon tea

While there is a substantial body of research focused on the links between North-South trade and sustainable development, research on South-South trade and sustainable development is still in its infancy. Given current understandings of the drivers of sustainable development, one might expect increasing trade in agricultural commodities within the global South to have a negative impact on sustainable development opportunities. In this sense, the Ceylon tea industry presents a puzzle. Despite exporting most of its tea to Southern markets, it has been among the top performers in terms of economic, social, and environmental practices. As such, the case raises a number of questions around shifting trade patterns and their implications for sustainability outcomes. I address these questions through four propositions – three mechanisms and one condition – through which South-South trade can expand the opportunities for sustainable development. While the exact nature of sustainable development outcomes will ultimately be decided through domestic political struggles, shifts toward more equal trade can make sustainable production more likely. Overall, the analysis draws attention to nuanced ways in which end markets shape their respective supply chains and how these dynamics impact the potential for actors operating at the bottom of supply chains to shape sustainability outcomes.</p

Dopaminergic mechanisms underlying psychosis

Schizophrenia is a potentially devastating mental illness with a complex aetiology, in which the odds ratios for environmental risk factors for the disorder are greater than the odds ratios of any single gene hitherto identified. Within schizophrenia, striatal dopamine dysfunction has been proposed to underlie the development of psychosis. The Aberrant Salience hypothesis provides an explanatory model based on empirical findings to explain how psychotic symptoms may arise from striatal hyperdopaminergia, whereby multiple risk factors converge to elevate striatal dopamine synthesis capacity as the Final Common Pathway to psychosis. Two important epidemiological risk factors for the disorder are chronic cannabis use and longterm psychosocial stress, both of which have evidence supporting effects on the dopamine system. Environmental risk factors are by their very nature modifiable, and so this thesis examined whether these environmental risk factors were associated with the same dopaminergic abnormalities that have been observed in schizophrenia with 3,4-dihydroxy-6- [18F]-fluoro-l-phenylalanine Positron Emission Tomography. This thesis also examined whether cannabis users exhibit aberrant salience processing using a behavioural task, the Salience Attribution Task. This thesis found that long-term cannabis use was associated with reduced dopamine synthesis capacity and no relationship was found between striatal dopamine synthesis capacity and cannabis-induced psychotic-like symptoms. Whilst cannabis use was not associated with increased aberrant salience processing, there was a relationship between cannabis-induced psychotic-like symptoms and aberrant salience processing. This thesis found that long-term psychosocial stress is associated with reduced dopamine synthesis capacity, although this finding may be due confounding factors. However, a positive relationship was observed between childhood and recent adult stressors and dopamine synthesis capacity. These findings call into question the hypothesis that cannabis increases the risk of psychosis by inducing the same changes observed in schizophrenia, although there some evidence to support the hypothesis that psychosocial stressors do increase risk via this mechanism.Open Acces

Developmental variables of undergraduate resident assistants when negotiating conflict with peers.

The role of the Resident Assistant (RA) has assumed special prominence during the last thirty years, as theories of student development have promoted the practice of peer education, particularly in residence halls. RAs have been given a long list of tasks and job expectations that can be generally categorized within peer counseling and policy enforcing functions. Some researchers and writers in the field of student development and residence hall ecology have argued that with proper training and supervision, RAs can adequately fulfill their assigned duties while simultaneously matriculate, fulfilling their own personal undergraduate academic and social needs. This assumption is presently under scrutiny, as information from cognitive development regarding late adolescent epistemology questions the readiness of these students to be able to perform simultaneously in all of their roles. In particular, the role of enforcing university rules and regulations with many floormates who are also peers and friends presents RAs with levels of conflict that may stem from their current cognitive developmental level, thus limiting the ways they negotiate conflict during enforcement activities. The result may be a mis-match of person to task. Some undergraduate RAs may not be ready to carry out their most developmentally challenging task of enforcing campus policy with peers to whom they have ties of support and friendship. The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility of certain behavioral trends in the ways RAs negotiate conflict with their peers while enforcing university policy based on their tested cognitive developmental level. By administering two production-type developmental assessments and one preference-type conflict mode inventory, as well as performing individual interviews of selected RAs, I examine possible mis-matches and matches of RAs with their roles, particularly that of policy enforcement with peers

Business-to-business conflicts and environmental governance in global supply chains

The ways in which conflicts, especially business-to-business conflicts, can contribute to positive environmental practices in global supply chains is underexplored. Drawing on an ethnographic study in South India, we explore the pollution of the Noyyal River by textile dyeing factories and the key role that the conflict between mutually dependent garment exporters and dyers at the bottom of the supply chain played in its gradual recovery. Our data show that the conflict contributed to better environmental practices by a) creating an opportunity space for external intervention b) strengthening state and private investments and innovations aimed at improving environmental practices; and c) establishing bottom-up accountability and compliance. Our data also show that a) external industrial shock, b) vulnerability of business actors to various factors, c) mutual dependence, and d) institutions to overcome collective action problems enabled the conflict’s contribution to improvements in environmental practices

Business, power, and private regulatory governance: shaping subjectivities and limiting possibilities in the gold supply chain

To examine how private regulatory governance reproduces a market logic that always already circumscribes possibilities for radical change, we tarry with Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and his writings on power. We focus on two major initiatives created to regulate gold supply chains, subjecting their publicly released documents to a discourse analysis. This reveals subtle but tangible examples of how these initiatives discursively shape business preferences and possibilities for engaging with a social change agenda. Through a focus on how power circulating through these initiatives works to shape the identities and interests of business actors themselves, we contribute a new perspective to the literature on business, power, and private regulatory governance, one that highlights the ways through which these discourses both expand and limit business actors’ engagement in setting social agendas and the mixed and sometimes seemingly contradictory implications for the public interest

PPPs in China: Does the growth in Chinese PPPs signal a liberalising economy?

This study provides insight into the nature of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in China, a country that has invested more in PPPs than any other over the last two decades. It is puzzling that China, as a state-led economy, has turned to embrace PPPs. Pundits have taken this as evidence of a liberalising Chinese economy. However, our findings suggest that PPPs in China do not reflect a break from earlier, state-centric modes of governance; rather, the state essentially uses such partnerships as a mechanism to strengthen its own hand. We argue that the difference between how PPPs are being implemented in China compared to the West reflects differences in political economic contexts, both materially and ideologically. In both cases, the ambiguity surrounding the PPP model has been used to advance particular interests, serving as a reminder of both the ways in which power shapes the character of such policy tools and the differences in the relative power underpinning state-market relations in each context. By challenging mainstream interpretations of what PPPs are and what their proliferation means, studying the political economy of PPPs in a rising China further exposes the Western-centric nature of prevailing wisdom in political economy scholarship

The value of studying supply chains for tobacco control

Introduction: Tobacco control research and advocacy has yet to capitalise on understanding the tobacco industry supply chain. The objective of this narrative review is to expose the processes, actors and supporting industries involved in tobacco production, laying the groundwork to expand the scope of tobacco control beyond the transnational tobacco companies (TTCs). Methods: We reviewed 69 academic articles (2013 to 2019) and five tobacco industry journal issues. Results: We identify six major processes in tobacco production: farming, primary processing of the leaf, secondary processing into products such as cigarettes, packaged product, use by smokers, and decay. Supply chain actors include seed and plant retailers, farmers, leaf processors, wholesalers, brokers and middlemen, manufacturers, retailers, smokers and refuse collectors with considerable variation in intermediate actors by location. Supporting industries supply additives, machinery, packaging, logistics, marketing, and research and development (R&amp;D). Conclusions: This expanded understanding of the supply chain can enable wider appreciation of the various incentives and risks of being involved in the industry, as well as how profit and power is accrued and distributed among participants, all of which is important information to feed into tobacco control policies. Researchers and campaigners seeking to design effective policy preventing the expansion of this industry and the health harms it produces, need to look beyond the TTCs to identify under-exploited leverage points along the entire tobacco supply chain

Global production networks and activism:can activists change mining practices by targeting brands?

In this article, I mobilise a Global Production Networks (GPN) approach to study a campaign seeking to impact mining practices by targeting a key consumer market: gold jewellery. In doing so, I make two contributions. The first is empirical: documenting this exploratory campaign and mapping activist strategies and outcomes against the gold production network. The second is theoretical: evaluating whether the GPN toolkit can help explain how the nature of a commodity and its markets impact activist strategies and outcomes. Recasting industries as sites of social struggle, a GPN approach offers a more nuanced understanding of the power permeating markets than more conventional supply chain analyses. The results clarify the challenges activists face when politicising industries by targeting brands, particularly in the extractives sector. But the findings also illuminate opportunities, including the more subtle pathways of activist influence as they: i) gather and disseminate information, ii) place social and environmental issues on the industry agenda, iii) spur industry to create institutions around these issues, iv) insert themselves and their agenda into the production network, and v) form alliances with industry actors pushing for change

Shame campaigns and environmental justice: corporate shaming as activist strategy

Shame campaigns aim to change industry practices by targeting the reputational value of individual firms. They occupy a contested political space from which they leverage existing inequalities in the market to redress political inequalities on the ground. Two such campaigns – the No Dirty Gold and Global Finance campaigns – are assessed based upon their ability to overcome the limitations of relying on markets for leverage and selectively targeting firms directly. While activists connect companies’ right to profit with social and environmental responsibilities, they do not directly tackle over-consumption and have done little work to reduce economic inequality. However, campaigners work to rectify existing political inequalities through their efforts to promote transparency, supply educational information, and facilitate inclusive debate amongst stakeholders. While shame campaigns reflect many of the inherent contradictions of global civil society, activists manage to challenge unwanted industry activities by circumventing the state institutions that facilitate their imposition