The political ecology of governance, inequality, and unrest

This dissertation is composed of three essays, each presenting research on different aspects of the environmental underpinnings of socio-political processes. The first essay (Chapter 2) investigates the joint and independent effects of cultural, economic and environmental geographies on the global pattern of good governance. Using canonical correlation analysis and measures derived from geospatial data, it is shown that GDP per capita, individualism and a climate characterized by cooler temperatures and seasonal precipitation cycles have intersecting effects on institutional effectiveness and rule of law. The second essay (Chapter 3) examines inter-regional income disparities in the Philippines across naturally occurring ecological regions and political administrative regions. Factor analysis and K-means clustering is used to derive groupings of cities and municipalities that describe the environmental and political-economic structure of the Philippine state. A decomposition of the Theil index of inequality is used to examine disparities across groups. It is shown than inequality in income generation at the local governmental level is greatest between political administrative regions, but disparities in local government fiscal capacity also occur across the urban primate divide, a North-South gradient and an urban-rural population division. The third essay (Chapter 4) examines the impact of meteorological conditions on the occurrence of social unrest in 50 Asian and African cities. A secondary analysis of revolutionary protests in Manila, Philippines is also presented as a quantitative case study. The findings indicate that weather conditions have discernible between-country effects on the number of events, but there is little evidence of within-country temporal effects. Socio-political violence of the kind reported in the third essay does not demonstrate a dynamic temperature-aggression relationship as proposed in the literature.