This is an ethnographic study of the lived experiences of young activists during the last years of Mubarak s presidency in Egypt. Its general aim is to provide an understanding of what it was like to be involved in opposition politics during a period when the eventual end of Mubarak s rule in 2011 was little more than a collective aspiration. Drawing on different strands of qualitative social science, including anthropology, sociology and youth research, the study is based on 12 months of fieldwork in Cairo, conducted between 2007 and 2011. It makes use of political engagement as an open analytic that enables the examination of different activities that were oriented towards, but not exclusive to, public political processes and formal avenues to political participation. In this vein, the study explores the activities that the young activists regarded as meaningful in terms of challenging the status quo, and how being young in itself shaped their ways of participating in public political life. While it focuses on the experiences of young Cairenes who were predominantly male and aged in their 20s, it is acknowledged that important differences existed among them that conditioned their efforts to acquire new visibilities and political roles, including social differences such as class, gender and global connectedness. In order to explore the diversity of their political experiences, the study discusses four principal areas of analysis and related topics: namely, generational consciousness, tactical practice, friendship relations and ethical reflections. It is demonstrated that, firstly, the new forms of youth activism in the 2000s promoted a critical generational consciousness as a disenfranchised social location in the intergenerational order, while also providing reinvigorated meanings to youth as a subversive political category, and in some ways a privileged experiential realm, ready to conduct public political dissent on its own terms. The new youth movements, such as Youth for Change and April 6 Youth that emerged on the fringes of larger processes of contentious politics, assumed new roles in public political life and merged, at least temporarily, young Egyptians from different backgrounds and affiliations into collective actions: forging alliances, largely beyond the formal political institutions. Secondly, the young activists resorted to a number of tactical practices in order to reach out to wider publics via both offline and online avenues. Their operating preferences lay in organizing unlicensed street protests in the popular, lower-class residential areas and tapping into the subversive potential of the new information and communication technologies, including blogs and social media. Although these forms of public dissent expanded their otherwise narrow political opportunities, their adoption was not, however, equally available to everyone. Some either had the necessary social networks in place, including family support, or the available time and the economic means to do so, while those, who were less equipped for public dissent, could nonetheless acquire new combinations of practical skills, knowledge and social connections that enabled them to enact their sense of meaningful political action. At the same time, the efforts to build youth coalitions faced a number of challenges, one of which was internal factionalism, which, coupled with the growing use of social media, diversified the scope of youth activism in the run-up period to the 2011 uprisings. Thirdly, being a young activist in the late 2000s provided much more varied everyday experiences than merely the acts of public political dissent. It also involved absorbing pre-existing oppositional culture and adopting dissident lifestyles that were filled with shared moments of being and doing things with others on a daily basis. In the absence of representative political institutions, the experiences of having friends and being a friend to others offered intimate avenues to public political life that stretched beyond kin ties and formal organizations. Although oppositional youth activism was divided along lines of class, gender and political affiliation, the young could forge mutual grounds for friendship relations on the basis of their shared experiences and stories of contention, while frequenting downtown Cairo as the main hub of their everyday trajectories. Although friendship relations were at times volatile in the contested field of politics, safeguarding the bonds of trust, belonging and everyday solidarity represented highly relevant everyday activities. Fourthly, the young Cairenes were faced with a number of ethical reflections on the meaningfulness of their own dissent practices, not the least due to the personals risks that opposition politics involved in authoritarian settings. While the prospect of impoverishment did not generally motivate their political engagements, they shared a sense of injured patriotism that prevailed in the wider prodemocracy movement, and aspired to greater recognition as rightful citizens. At the same time, they operated on an ambivalent moral terrain that required positioning one s self and others in relation to normative claims to the common good; furthermore, they had to contend with popular suspicion about the impact of their public political dissent and about possible motives for their activism, such as the pursuit of social status and personal wellbeing. Despite the differences that existed among the activist youth in terms of class and gender, however, they could in part challenge these types of speculations by enacting the prevailing ideals of personhood in terms of bravery, righteousness and self-sacrifice. Meanwhile, although the young Cairenes were embedded in the moral worlds of prodemocracy mobilization, they were also compelled to balance their political engagements in terms of multiple life transitions, especially in terms of balancing their activism with the requirements of gaining a livelihood. While there were multiple ways of being or becoming an activist in the late Mubarak era, the young Cairenes political engagements were connected to their collective pursuit of playing a meaningful role in what happened in the present, while acknowledging that Egypt s future was intimately tied to their own life trajectories.

The objective of this dissertation is to study the opportunities and challenges of the Fair Trade certification system in altering conditions of coffee production in Nicaragua. The aim is to analyze the advantages as well as the constraints of Fair Trade in assisting farmers and their cooperatives, involving them in the governance of coffee value chains and improving labor conditions. The study highlights the context of increased globalization, deregulation of coffee markets, and declining and volatile coffee prices. The research methods utilized were primarily qualitative. Seven months of fieldwork was carried out in Nicaragua in 2005-2006 and 2008 to interview and observe a wide range of actors in Fair Trade and conventional coffee production and trade. Value chain analysis and convention theory were utilized as theoretical frameworks to understand if Fair Trade can improve the position of small-scale farmers and hired workers as participants in the global economy. Through the lenses of value chain analysis Fair Trade is seen as a governance mechanism where multiple actors with diverse interests influence each other in their interactions in establishing rules and norms for conditions of production. The results indicate that Fair Trade has supported certified producer organizations particularly during the extremely low coffee prices in 2000-2004. However, Fair Trade is a limited market existing parallel to conventional trade. This results in farmers and cooperatives selling a large part of their production to conventional markets and market prices having a greater importance for them than Fair Trade-regulated prices. Since 2005, market prices have frequently been above or close to Fair Trade minimum prices, reducing the significance of Fair Trade- controlled prices. Certified farmers are vulnerable to price volatility also because when market prices are higher than Fair Trade minimum prices, the price volatility is the same for Fair Trade and conventional coffee. Fair Trade does not require that higher than market prices be paid to certified farmers. Prices and services offered by Fair Trade certified cooperatives to farmers have not remarkably exceeded those offered by conventional actors in Nicaragua. Although the minimum price system is a safety net in case of a future price collapse, the results of this research indicate that challenges exist in distributing benefits equally between and within producer organizations. The implementation of minimum prices also involves other practical challenges such as to what level prices should be set under constantly changing market prices. The physical quality characteristics of coffee affect its price and, because they are so varied, it is impossible to create a pricing system taking all these characteristics into consideration. The Fair Trade premium for social development has provided financing for cooperatives and farmers. While some of these funds have been targeted to pressing social needs, a large part of the funds have been used to finance improvements in producer organizations and to pay for certification fees, undermining the ability of these funds to focus on social issues. In addition to the Fair Trade social premium, cooperatives and farmers have been assisted by numerous development projects. As a result, infrastructure in cooperatives has improved. A possibility for making Fair Trade pricing more transparent for all actors in the value chain would be to make the social premium a percentage of retail price of Fair Trade products and to document more carefully its use in improving cooperative and farm infrastructure and management as well as its use to improve social conditions in coffee producing communities. Fair Trade has not significantly altered the working conditions of hired labor in coffee production in Nicaragua. Because the advantages Fair Trade offers to farmers and cooperatives are limited and vary in different contexts, the system cannot present strict demands on improved working conditions. The participation of farmers and workers in formulating Fair Trade policies is narrow, as evidenced by most of the interviewed farmers and hired laborers not knowing they were involved in producing Fair Trade coffee and what this entailed. Despite changes aimed at involving producer organizations in Fair Trade governance, Northern actors exercise the greatest control of the system. Approximately half of Fair Trade certified farmers are also organically certified, globally and in Nicaragua. Although the Fair Trade/organic farmers receive price premiums, the benefits of Fair Trade are not clear-cut. As experienced by the interviewed farmers, organic farming has lower yields, especially when higher intensity management systems are compared. As a result, price premiums do not necessarily lead to higher income compared to alternatives. Inequalities in the distribution of value creation are estimated to be higher in Fair Trade than conventional coffee in the case of coffee trade from Nicaragua to Finland. In absolute terms, Fair Trade has offered slightly higher prices to producer organizations particularly when Fair Trade minimum price has exceeded market prices. In view of the many difficulties coffee production has faced in Nicaragua in recent decades, Fair Trade certified cooperatives have been successful. Fair Trade can provide financing for development and reduce price risk. However, many other risks exist for farmers and cooperatives including loss of crops due to diseases or adverse weather conditions. If small-scale coffee production in cooperatives is to thrive, well-managed cooperatives and farms are needed. Many Fair Trade certified farmers produce low volumes of coffee. While price premiums are welcome, income from small quantity of coffee remains meager. As a result, some Fair Trade farmers are trapped in poverty.

This dissertation revolves around the enigmatic role of development policy in the European Union (EU), and its place and purpose in relation to the EU’s trade policy and to the Union at large. In particular, it looks at the preconditions that direct the EU’s work for the international development objectives of poverty eradication and sustainable development. In this regard, there has been considerable debate on policy coherence for development, or in other words, on how the EU policies in the field of trade work in favour of, or against, development goals. In fact, the EU has made binding commitments in the EU treaties and in international conventions to advance coherence from a development perspective. However, what actually constitutes policy coherence for development in the EU, and how it is defined and promoted have largely remained unstudied to date. In addition, the question of the power to establish common standards for policy coherence deserves a closer look, both within the EU and in global governance at large. This contribution aims to fill this research gap by tracing the key development- and trade-related processes and analysing their outcomes. These include the first joint policy statement by the European Commission, the European Council and the Parliament, entitled the European Consensus on Development (2005-), as well as those elements of the EU trade policy that were officially declared to manifest policy coherence for development. Regarding the latter, the EU position in relation to the WTO Doha Development Round, as well as the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), is a case in point. The dissertation addresses these issues in the broader historical, international and institutional settings before the Lisbon Treaty (2009), but also draws lessons for the present. The primary data consist of official EU documents and 34 semi-structured interviews with development and trade actors involved in these processes. Drawing on two analytical frameworks – power in global governance (Barnett & Duvall 2005) and normative power Europe (Manners 2002; 2006) – I examine the formation of the policy coherence for development principle in the EU’s development- and trade-related texts, discourse production and social practices that define, naturalise and reproduce certain norms while dismissing others (cf. Fairclough 1992; 2003). My findings indicate that the EU’s contribution to policy coherence for development is affected by intra- and inter-institutional tensions, as well as by ambiguity surrounding the role and purpose of development policy in the Union. In particular, I demonstrate how the proactive role of the Commission in the policy initiation was triggered primarily by the changes in the security and trade branches of the external relations, rather than by learning from the past development policies and its own goal attainment. Although these linkages can be seen as a strategic choice to improve the institutional position of European Community development policy both within the Commission as well as between the Commission and the Council, this choice compromised the development policy content. This tendency is particularly clear in the gradually narrowed, administratively and technically oriented approach to policy coherence for development. In relation to trade, policy coherence was limited mainly to the EU market access proposals for the Least Developed Countries. This aspect of trade liberalisation formed the core for both the international and EU consensus on trade and development. In turn, the reciprocal liberalisation of developing country markets under the Economic Partnership Agreements was initially much weaker. This changed with the dominant role and interests of DG Trade, which adopted the development policy discourse and influenced the Commission policy on development and trade. Consequently, the reciprocal free trade format and the European Commission’s interpretation of international trade law (i.e. GATT Article XXIV) also became the official understanding of policy coherence for development in the EU. As a result, the EU’s model for policy coherence is inclined towards trade policy coherence and in favour of the overall consistency of the Union, rather than policy coherence for development. Therefore, the EU’s normative model risks being inadequate when it comes to safeguarding and advancing development policy goals.

The objective of this thesis is to study policy making in the Nepalese rural water supply and sanitation sector by analysing the process of national policy formulation and how the donors and their policies influence the national policies in aid recipient country, such as Nepal. It exposes the dynamics underlying the interaction between donors and the Nepalese water bureaucracies by focusing on the analysis of the roles, motives and interests of the sectoral actors in the making of policies. The study highlights the political side in the aid giving and receiving through making use of the politics of policy theoretical perspective. The rural water supply and sanitation sector was chosen as the framework for this study, because of the important role that water has for Nepal often presented as the blue gold of Nepal and the multiple and powerful donors that are active in the sector, for whom the water sector is also an important investment target. The policy making process is analysed through a case study, the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Policy, Strategy and Action Plan formulated in 2002-2004 and funded by the Asian Development Bank. The empirical evidence of this study is based on the mixed qualitative methods research done in Kathmandu, Nepal, in the summers of 2009 and 2010. The core data is based on the interviews of 89 people, as well as water supply and sanitation related policy documents draft versions, final policy documents and reports, prepared in the process of policy formulation. In addition, I have included a wide-ranging literature study. The research illuminates that policy making in the Nepalese rural water supply and sanitation sector is a game between donors and the water bureaucracies both having political and economic interests that they aim to secure in policy formulation. Based on these interests, the policy actors manoeuvre in the policy negotiations. The aim of the donors is to legitimate their aid towards the donor headquarters through influencing national policy making into their preferred direction in order to keep their business ongoing. Yet, even though the donors are able to influnce policy making, the study found out that the Nepalese water bureaucracies are not powerless in front of the donors, but they have successfully adopted several strategies in manoeuvring the donor influence. Thus, even though the aid relationship is inherently unequal, is not only the donors that have interests and power that drive policy making, but also the water bureaucracies have their own incentive structures that shape the policy processes. The donor involvement in the policy process can be characterised as a state of permanent negotiation, in which policy formulation is just a part of the further institutional entanglement by the donors.

This Ph.D. thesis Participation or Further Exclusion? Contestations over Forest Conservation and Control in the East Usambara Mountains, Tanzania describes and analyses the shift in the prevailing discourse of forest and biodiversity conservation policies and strategies towards more participatory approaches in Tanzania, and the changes in the practises of resource control. I explore the scope for and limits to the different actors and groups who are considered to form the community, to participate in resource control, in a specific historical and socio-economic context. I analyse whether, how and to which extent the targets of such participatory conservation interventions have been able to affect the formal rules and practices of resource control, and explore their different responses and discursive and other strategies in relation to conservation efforts. I approach the problematic through exploring certain participatory conservation interventions and related negotiations between the local farmers, government officials and the external actors in the case of two protected forest reserves in the southern part of the East Usambaras, Tanzania. The study area belongs to the Eastern Arc Mountains that are valued globally and nationally for their high level of biodiversity and number of endemic and near endemic species. The theoretical approach draws from theorising on power, participation and conservation in anthropology of development and post-structuralist political ecology. The material was collected in three stages between 2003 and 2008 by using an ethnographic approach. I interviewed and observed the actors and their resource use and control practices at the local level, including the representatives of the villagers living close to the protected forests and the conservation agency, but also followed the selected processes and engaged with the non-local agencies involved in the conservation efforts in the East Usambaras. In addition, the more recent processes of change and the actors strategies in resource control were contextualised against the social and environmental history of the study area and the evolvement of institutions of natural resource control. My findings indicate that the discourse of participation that has emerged in global conservation policy debate within the past three decades, and is being institutionalised in the national policies in many countries, including Tanzania, has shaped the practices of forest conservation in the East Usambaras, although in a fragmented and uneven way. Instrumental interpretation of participation, in which it is to serve the goals of improving the control of the forest and making it more acceptable and efficient, has prevailed among the governmental actors and conservation organisations. Yet, there is variation between the different projects and actors promoting participatory conservation regarding the goals and means of participation, e.g. to which extent the local people are to be involved in decision-making. The actors representing communities also have their diverse agendas, understandings and experiences regarding the rationality, outcomes and benefits of being involved in forest control, making the practices of control fluid. The elements of the exclusive conservation thinking and practices co-exist with the more recent participatory processes, and continue to shape the understandings and strategies of the actors involved in resource control. The ideas and narratives of the different discourses are reproduced and selectively used by the parties involved. The idea of forest conservation is not resisted as such by most of the actors at local level, quite the opposite. However, the strict regulations and rules governing access to resources, such as valuable timber species, continue to be disputed by many. Furthermore, the history of control, such as past injustices related to conservation and unfulfilled promises, undermines the participation of certain social groups in resource control and benefit sharing. This also creates controversies in the practices of conservation, and fuels conflicts regarding the establishment of new protected areas. In spite of this, the fact that the representatives of the communities have been invited to the arenas where information is shared, and principles and conditions of forest control and benefit sharing are discussed and partly decided upon, has created expectations among the participants, and opened up opportunities for some of the local actors to enhance their own, and sometimes wider interests in relation to resource control and the related benefits. The local actors experiences of the previous government and other interventions strongly affect how they position themselves in relation to conservation interventions, and their responses and strategies. However, my findings also suggest, in a similar way to research conducted in some other protected areas, that the benefits of participation in conservation and resource control tend to accrue unevenly between different groups of local people, e.g. due to unequal access to information and differences in their initial resources and social position.

This is a study of Namibian ex-combatant and veteran policies after the country s transition to independence in 1990. Instead of assessing the successfulness of reintegration against its stated objectives or the perspective of post-conflict policy discourses, it examines the politics of reintegration as a process of multiform negotiation over recognition and entitlements for the ex-combatants, and political authority and legitimacy for party and government leaders. The study interrogates the ways in which this process reflects and contributes to postcolonial Namibian politics, state formation and citizenship. It is based on nine months of fieldwork in 2002, 2003 and 2009 and its main sources include ethnographic observation, life historical interviews with ex-combatants, thematic interviews with politicians and civil servants, grey literature as well as Namibian newspapers and internet sources. The study finds that instead of being a neutral exercise in post-conflict management and peacebuilding, Namibian reintegration has been motivated by more exclusive ideas of the nation and by the special bond between the ruling party and the former liberation movement Swapo and its formerly exiled cadres. This close tie and the characterization of Swapo combatants as heroes who hold a special place in the Namibian narrative of national liberation have repeatedly enabled Swapo ex-combatants to demand recognition, employment, monetary compensation and other benefits. Coupled with this, the relative strength of the Namibian state and economy has made it possible to plan and implement ex-combatant reintegration as a predominantly domestic process without the close involvement of international agencies. Hence, it has been possible to diverge from mainstream disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programmes and attempt to solve the ex-combatant question by broad-based public employment. After most ex-combatants were employed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, their demands and policy responses shifted towards monetary compensation. The domestic character of Namibian reintegration also made it possible to implement ex-combatant and veteran policies selectively so that former Swapo exiles have gradually been transformed into an officially recognized group of veterans while their former enemies, Namibian fighters of South African surrogate forces, have been sidelined. This process of domestically driven, selective reintegration has multiple broad implications. First, as Namibia has recently emerged from a long period of violent conflict, security concerns and the imperative to control organized violence are clearly visible. The targeting of Swapo ex-combatants in reintegration and their recruitment to the public service, particularly the uniformed services, have relinked their fates with that of the Swapo government, pacifying them and making them useful in consolidating the hold of the regime over the security agencies and the marginal and frontier areas and populations. Indeed, a key reason why the demand politics of the ex-combatants have been so successful is that their interests have been largely congruent with the perceived interests of the political elite. Second, the tendency of Namibian reintegration to entrench involvement in liberationist history as a criterion of full membership in the political community, creating an ever-widening circle of veterans versus others, provides and interesting comparison with struggles over recognition and citizenship elsewhere in Africa which are often framed in terms of language, religion, ethnicity, race or historical origins. The movements thus generated may adopt anti-national stances but they are as likely to seek to reformulate and colonize nationalism itself. Namibian ex-combatant reintegration, on the other hand, exemplifies a situation where nationalism as a supposedly unifying force still has salience but has been appropriated by a particular narrative of belonging. Thus, instead of representing a break from inclusive citizenship towards increasingly codified particular identities that compete within the national space, the Namibian case demonstrates the coexistence of a legal concept of universal national citizenship with a pervasive ideology of national belonging. The latter, however, inherently contradicts the supposed universalism of legal citizenship. The long-term effects of Namibian veteran politics remain to be seen. On the one hand, the aim to reconcile and build a nation, evident in some of the decisions and statements associated with reintegration as well as in Namibian political discourse more generally, is countered by the persistence of pre-independence political logics and divisions, and a concentration of power according to liberationist fault lines. It is not surprising that a militant version of nationalism seems appealing to certain political elites in their bid to justify the current regime and entrench their own positions in it. On the other hand, in the long run the politics of ex-combatants and veterans may also offer a template for more broad-based demands that question entrenched patterns of economic and political privilege, and provoke responses that may lead towards more inclusive citizenship and more broadly legitimate authority.

The objective of this study is to examine the social impacts of the integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) aimed at biodiversity conservation and local socio-economic development in the Ranomafana National Park (RNP), Madagascar. Furthermore, the study explores social sustainability and justice of the ICDP in Ranomafana. This ethnographically informed impact study uses of various field methods. The research material used consists of observation, interviews (key-person and focus group), school children's writings, official statistics and project documents. Fieldwork was conducted in three phases in 2001, 2002 and 2004 in twelve villages around the park, as well as in neighbouring areas of Ranomafana. However, four of those twelve villages were chosen for closer study. This study consists of five independent articles and a concluding chapter. Social impacts were studied through reproductive health indicators as well as a life security approach. Equity and distribution of benefits and drawbacks of ICDP were analysed and the actors related to the conservation in Ranomafana were identified. The children and adolescents' environmental views were also examined. The reproductive health indicators studied showed a poor state of reproductive health in the park area. Moreover, the existing social capital in the villages seemed to be fragmented due to economic difficulties that were partly caused by the conservation regulations. The ICDP in Ranomafana did not pay attention to the heterogeneity of the affected communities even though the local beneficiaries of the ICDP varied according to their ethnicity, living place, wealth, social position and gender. In addition, various conservation actors (local people in various groups, local authorities, tourist business owners, conservation NGOs and scientists) contest their interests over the forest, conservation and its related activities. This study corroborates the same type of evidence and conclusions discussed in other similar cases elsewhere: so called social conservation programmes still cannot meet the needs of the people living near the protected areas; on the contrary, they even have a reverse impact on the people's lives. A fundamental misunderstood assumption in the conservation process in Ranomafana was to consider the local people as a problem for biodiversity conservation. Major reasons for the failure of the ICDP in Ranomafana include a lack of local institutions that would have been able to communicate as equals with the conservation NGOs as well as to transfer the tradition of the authoritarian governance in conservation management together with the over-appreciation of scientific biodiversity, and lack of will to understand the local people's rights to use the forest for their livelihoods.

The thesis examines how the national water policies of Tanzania and Kenya address informality in the urban water sector by critically analysing the representations of “problems” in policies related to increasing urban water access. While access to safely managed water has increased rapidly on a global in the last decades, in most cities in the global south 30¬–60 per cent of the urban population relies on informal practices to meet its daily water needs. Especially the urban areas of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) struggle to increase access to safe water to citizens, resulting in a high reliance on informal practices, such as getting water from unprotected wells or buying water from street vendors. While these practices are generally associated with health risks and higher water prices, they serve as the main everyday water supply for millions of people. Since the state has failed to provide access to water for everyone, both under private and public management, informally managed water systems are, despite their problems, increasingly seen as a viable alternative to the standard solution of expanding the piped network to increase access. Many of the case studies on informality in SSA cited in this thesis argue that the state should accept and support the informal water sector as a pragmatic alternative for water supply in unserved urban areas. By analysing the national water policies of Tanzania and Kenya, this thesis sets out to answer the research questions of (1) how the problem of water supply is constructed in urban water policy in Tanzania and Kenya and (2) how Tanzanian and Kenyan water policies approach the informal water sector. The analysis applies Carol Bacchi’s (2009) poststructuralist approach to analysing policy, the ‘What’s The Problem Represented To Be?’ (WPR) approach. Four general representations of problems related to urban water access and informality were identified in the data: (1) The problem of lacking infrastructure, (2) the problem of identifying appropriate technologies, (3) the problem of stakeholder involvement and (4) the problem of informality in the water sector. The results show a high reliance on investment in large-scale infrastructure projects as the main policy for increasing access to water in urban areas in both Kenya and Tanzania, even though previous studies on informality and urban water provision suggests this tactic will fail in providing safe water for all. In addressing the informal water sector in urban areas, informality was represented as a problem that eventually will fade away as soon as the piped network reaches all. However, both countries appeared to take a completely different stance towards informality in rural areas. Whereas large-scale infrastructure projects still were the go-to solution for increasing access in urban areas, for rural areas the analysed documents proposed a massive support of community-based informal practices as the cornerstones of future rural water supply, covering tens of millions of people in the coming decade. If the attempt to solve lacking access to safe water in urban areas by expanding the piped network should fail, as previous research suggests it might, the community based policies for rural water supply may be scaled out to solve the urban water problem. This thesis shows that the informal water sector is still to a large extent seen as a temporary problem. However, both Kenyan and Tanzanian water policy has opened the door to supporting informal practices as sustainable solutions as a way to achieve the ambitious goal of safe water for all.

This PhD thesis examines the everyday politics of microcredit by drawing on a case study from Limpopo Province, South Africa. Special attention is focused on how the distribution of rights and responsibilities, together with the multifaceted struggles over authority and power, mediate the different actors social agency and opportunities to benefit from the microcredit programmes. The study rests on thematic interviews and participant observation carried out in four villages and semi-urban settlements in May-July 2007. Drawing on the theoretical ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, and considering microcredit as an arena of struggle, the thesis undertakes a critical analysis of the interpretations of social capital and the associated solidarity and reciprocity based on the conceptualisations of Robert Putnam. In the spirit of the concept of governmentality by Michel Foucault, the thesis also illustrates processes and practices of governance, and the creation of a set of rules and procedures that can govern and discipline microcredit clients to achieve selected goals. The results of this study illustrate how social relations between the members of the microcredit groups were based on ambiguous forms of co-operation and conflict around diverse interests and multifaceted power relations. There was a tension between co-operation and competition and between solidarity and the power differences in the women s everyday businesses and microcredit groups. While social networks were crucial for the establishment and maintenance of business operations, the structural conditions of poverty and marginalisation placed the women in competition with each other over limited resources and easily saturated markets. The group loan system intensified the anxieties about solidarity lending and the tensions between group members. The study explores the everyday politics, contradictions and tensions at several levels, including the clients, organisation and the wider economy and society. High repayment rates were secured through strict rules and monitoring procedures; public reprimand in the repayment meetings; extending repayment liabilities to husbands or other relatives; and refusing to let anyone leave the repayment meetings until the money was paid. Although according to the microcredit rhetoric group members take joint liability for loan repayment, in reality the centre, community and kin operate as collateral for microloans. In this kind of system, joint security is a fact only at the institutional level. In the everyday politics of the clients, business affairs and the logic of decision-making were tightly intertwined with financial, social and cultural norms and political power relations. The most successful clients were those who were able to utilise various social networks and regular household incomes, as well as take advantage of their social status to create the market. In terms of the disadvantageous ways in which people are incorporated into economic and social life, the study highlights the contradiction between the idea of a microcredit organisation operating as a linkage between formal and informal economies and borrowers considered as agents of their own empowerment, and the structural obstacles the poor encounter under systematic political inequality. The study calls more attention to the everyday struggles of these poor women caused by the distorting microcredit rules and mechanisms, the weak pillars of the society, and the vulnerability and disadvantageous power relations within which people are caught. Key words: authority and power, co-operation and conflict, everyday politics, microcredit, rules and responsibilities, social networks, solidarity, South Africa