Leila Harris

Multiple factors coalesce to make some communities more at risk than others during extreme heat events. Tenants are one such community for whom this might be the case. This research investigated how tenants in Metro Vancouver engage with mutual aid in response to extreme heat events by conducting focus groups, expert interviews, and oral histories with tenants and grassroots organizations. The findings reveal that mutual aid emerges as a way for tenants to meet their immediate needs, exercise agency and build connections when they experience ongoing risk to extreme heat due to structural and infrastructural conditions. Yet, existing mutual aid efforts risk placing unsustainable pressures on people’s time and energy and unevenly distributing the acts of care. While institutional involvement with mutual aid can improve resourcing, such involvement may also bureaucratize and centralize mutual aid. This does not mean that institutions do not have a role to play in supporting mutual aid networks. Nevertheless, institutions’ involvement with mutual aid risks reducing the efficacy of mutual aid, which is understood to work best when localized, decentralized, and horizontally organized. The research suggests that the future strength of mutual aid will lie in its wider, primarily grassroots, adoption. This can be facilitated through direct actions and relationship building. The existing blueprint of tenant organizing and the relatability of feeling too hot have the potential grow mutual aid networks. Coupled with government supports such as a legal right to cooling, and affordable housing, strengthened mutual aid can make people safer and more secure during extreme heat events and in the face of other future climate impacts.

View record

Plant-Based Research concerns kinship-making practices in the context of mass extinction. This research is grounded in queer ecologies and critical animal studies, while aligning with the tenets of feminism, decolonization, critical disability studies, and critical environmental justice. The problem it undertakes is the ways in which settler colonial, cis-heteropatriarchal, white supremacist and anthropocentric approaches to building relationships, or making kin, are fostering mass extinction and climate change. The methodological fuel for this research is multispecies autoethnography, as described by Kathryn Gillespie. Despite auto-ethnography’s egotistical tendencies, “multispecies autoethnography, like humanist autoethnography, is by nature a relational methodology; it signals a focus on the self, but in its multispecies naming necessitates attention to the self in relation to another (or multiple other) species” (Gillespie 3). The “participants” of this research are considered as coconspirators. To co-conspire against something means to work together against it, “it” in this case being white speciesist capitalist cis-heteropatriarchal settler colonialism. “Coconspirator” encapsulates the agencies of multispecies kin, including plants, who communicate by means other than language or sounds (Lawrence 1). The root word “conspire” shares a postal code with “respire”, meaning to breathe; respiration is what connects plants and animals (including humans). We are coconspirators and corespirators.Plant-Based Research is an attempt to unhinge from science-based climate change engagements through its devotion to artistic praxis and attunement to place. The chapters contained in this thesis are a collection of poetry, a zine, a stand-up comedy transcript, a playlist, and more traditional academic prose. This multi-modal, arts-based, and place-based thesis engages the themes of aging and death, plants and gardening, veganism, dogs, disability, astrology, restitution, harm and care, home, friendship, and love. While being generally inconclusive, this thesis invites its readers to critically reflect on the ways in which they make kin, and how they might practice kinship in ways that are antithetical to settler colonial, cis-heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, and anthropocentric modes of being in relationships.

View record

This thesis explores the ways in which recent extreme weather events in Vancouver, British Columbia (B.C.) are experienced, narrated and remembered in the context of already-existing inequalities, such as housing and economic injustice. The 2021 summer “heat dome” was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history and was responsible for the deaths of over 600 people, almost all of whom died indoors at home or in a hotel, according to the BC Coroners Service. Echoing studies of other heatwaves, social isolation and factors such as older age, underlying health conditions, and economic inequality have been identified as particular risk factors for the 2021 heat dome. In B.C.’s population centre, Metro Vancouver, the recently declared climate emergency by the City of Vancouver coincides with a housing emergency, with Metro Vancouver currently home to the highest average rents and the most evictions across Canada.Based on collaborative work with the UBC Centre for Climate Justice, this thesis examines senior tenants’ experiences, stories, and memories of extreme heat and home. Two focus groups and fourteen oral histories were conducted between February and April 2023, primarily in South Vancouver. Drawing on feminist political ecology, disaster studies, and memory and weather studies, I illuminate four key ways that participants experienced and remembered the 2021 heat dome: 1) disruption of everyday activities, 2) experiences of loss of control, often linked to their positions as tenants, 3) comparisons to other places and expected weather norms, especially as past memories informed experiences of present weather and 4) stories told through participants’ diaries of everyday life. Through these key pathways of experience and memory, I argue that understanding how participants experience extreme weather through an embodied, memory-rich, and political lens allows for better scholarly and policy understandings of how to support communities during events like the heat dome. I recommend that future work on heat policy, climate justice, and planning for extreme weather better incorporate narratives and embodied knowledges of senior tenants, and further consider the unjust power dynamics that can arise around relationships to housing and home.

View record

Urban rain gardens, wetlands, street trees: these “green infrastructures” (GI) are being used for a variety of urban planning priorities, like climate adaptation and rainwater management. Environmental justice scholars have stressed the need to develop green infrastructure for those who need it most (Anguelovski et al., 2021; Meerow & Newell, 2019). They have also identified “blind spots” in planning processes—from siting, through to public engagement, to maintenance—that may perpetuate uneven development or power imbalances (Brent et al., 2022; Zuniga-Teran et al., 2020). In Vancouver (Canada), modeling and mapping exercises have identified areas that can benefit most from GI development (“equity initiative zones” (City of Vancouver, 2022c); “areas in need of resources” (City of Vancouver, 2022b). This analysis helpfully indicates who is experiencing environmental vulnerability (e.g., heat, sea level rise), socio-economic vulnerability (e.g., low-income), and lack of urban green amenities (e.g., park access) in the city. As scholars recommend, however, there is a need to understand what these overlapping experiences mean to affected residents, and perhaps more importantly, what residents see as appropriate environmental and climate planning priorities as a result (Hoover et al., 2021). In this project, I facilitated two participatory workshops with residents who live in Vancouver’s eastern neighbourhoods, asking: what are residents’ self-identified GI priorities, challenges, and aspirations? Participants shared how GI projects can be adapted to meet their needs as renters, parents, seniors, immigrants, and low-income individuals. Participants wanted to see GI in the everyday spaces where they spend their time, noting possibilities such as developing green roofs directly on their affordable housing units. Second, participants stressed that improved livability (namely through public transit and affordable housing) can improve their overall experience with GI. Supplementary expert interviews (n=4) and an integrative document review (n=25) revealed other factors that might obscure or limit pathways for equitable development. These factors include opportunistic development patterns, budgetary constraints, and a lack of specific, actionable equity objectives. As the City of Vancouver continues to strive for equitable green infrastructure development, this project synthesizes potential entry points and limitations.

View record

Due in part to negative climate change impacts on water availability, and the fact that urban populations across the globe are growing, cities are experiencing increasing stress on their water resources. Therefore, new options for urban water demand and supply management are being considered to address this concern. In the case of Cape Town, South Africa, overall water demand is increasing despite a successful water demand management campaign, while water supplies are dwindling. These conditions are aggravated by a recent severe drought that began in 2015. Transitions towards additional bulk water supplies are therefore needed, and the City has addressed this through plans for future water supply diversification in the form of large-scale groundwater development. However, given the historical focus on surface water infrastructure in Cape Town, there are significant obstacles in adding new sources, such as aquifers, into the supply chain. This Masters’ of Science thesis will present the findings of a research study that was aimed at analyzing the motivations, barriers and possibilities for groundwater governance in Cape Town, with particular attention to the expert perspective. Findings are based on three months of fieldwork in Cape Town, where data was collected through in-depth interviews with water experts and professionals involved in the Cape Town water sector, as well as field observations and water policy and document analysis. Chapter 2 of this work outlines the motivations and barriers for groundwater integration. This chapter emphasizes the benefits of groundwater for water security and resilience, while maintaining that fragmented roles and responsibilities to do with groundwater governance present significant challenges. Chapter 3 explores an existing groundwater scheme in Cape Town and presents three lessons learned for future groundwater policy development. Lessons learned include aquifer recharge zone protection, sufficient field operator training and consistent institutional support for groundwater knowledge leaders. The main goal of this thesis is to provide insight into the motivations and challenges associated with water supply diversification, and sustainable groundwater use in particular. These insights are relevant for broader discussions of water governance transitions in light of changing water demand and supply dynamics, as well as hydrological regime changes.

View record

With increasing legal recognition of Aboriginal rights and title, growing calls for collaborative water governance arrangements with First Nations, and approval of British Columbia’s new Water Sustainability Act (2014), shifts are unfolding in water governance in BC which have some significant implications for First Nations. First Nations across British Columbia have also clearly articulated that water and water governance are priority areas of concern. Within this context, this thesis examines the historic and present roles and experiences of First Nations in colonial water governance in British Columbia, based primarily on a case study conducted with the Lower Similkameen Indian Band.In Chapter 2, I examine the historical formation of reserves and the colonial water allocation system, exploring how the demarcation of reserve boundaries and water licenses established some fundamental barriers for First Nations in water access and governance that persist today. Chapter 3 provides an overview of concerns about colonial water governance that were identified by Lower Similkameen Indian Band interviewees and others, followed by a critical discussion of how a collaborative watershed planning model could address, or further entrench, existing governance challenges.This thesis provides a timely and relevant commentary on the contested realities of First Nations’ engagement in colonial water governance in the province. Insights suggest that while there is growing recognition that First Nations have a legitimate place at the center of water governance in British Columbia, the collaborative watershed planning approach adopted in the Water Sustainability Act falls well short of adopting the necessary steps towards full Indigenous water governance or water co-governance. Existing colonial water governance challenges and failures are not likely to be addressed by a collaborative watershed planning approach. Overall, this thesis suggests that the transition to more effective and just water governance in British Columbia includes observation of Aboriginal rights and title, commitment to relationship and trust building, and capacity development for colonial and First Nations governments.

View record

The role of education in the formation of citizens, particularly from the perspective of sustainable development, has strongly influenced the Chilean environmental-education curriculum since Chile’s educational reform of the 1990s. The school textbooks provided by the Chilean Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) are an important resource for teachers and students in Chilean public and private-subsidized education. This study explores how Chilean school textbooks for basic-education (elementary years) appear to convey relationships between citizens and the environment. Apart from the Chilean context, similar studies have focused on identifying conceptions and social representations of the environment and the human-environment relationship among students, teachers, curricula, and textbooks. In this study, I specifically explore school textbooks and focus the inquiry on three aspects that appear to link environmental citizenship, sustainability, and education: awareness, values, and civic action. For the purpose of this interpretive study, I conducted a qualitative content analysis to examine the text and images in school textbooks for grades one, four, and eight for two compulsory subjects in Chile: Natural Science and History, Geography, and Social Science. These textbooks seem to represent civic-environmental relationships generally at local and national scales. The textbooks also appear to encourage environmental care mainly as an individual or personal duty and scientific attitudes, skills, and knowledge focusing mostly on material and practical aspects of the human-environmental system. The results of this study intend to advance our knowledge and understanding of how Chilean textbooks for the public and private-subsidized educational systems represent citizen-environment relationships. These representations appear to disconnect humans from dimensions that regard the environment symbolically and promote collective deliberation and participation. This study may guide interested ministries of education and publishers in the production of future school textbooks that may better foster sustainable and participative relationships between citizens and the environment.

View record

In the Global South, agrarian households face stressors to smallholder agriculture – a primary livelihood for many. One stressor increasingly documented is the re-allocation of surface irrigation for domestic and industrial uses. This is concerning because the timely, adequate, and predictable provision of irrigation was designed to enhance crop production and protect smallholders from hydro-climatic variation. Chapter 2 of this thesis examines a case from the Angat River Basin (Philippines) where a systematic set of rules have restructured reservoir governance to privilege domestic water use in Metro Manila over irrigation for regional rice-farming. A review of multiple secondary datasets and an analysis of household surveys (n = 124) and interviews (n = 70) in a rice-farming municipality (Bustos) reveals that restructured reservoir governance arrangements now interact with existing effects of climatic variation to undermine the intended benefits of irrigation. Based on the nature of irrigation service change, Chapter 3 argues that on- and off-farm efficiency measures alone are insufficient to protect households from risks of irrigation insecurity. Moreover, access to water alternatives is limited and increasingly uncertain. This suggests complementary and alternative (CA) livelihood activities are increasingly important as risk mitigation measures given irrigation service change and broader social-ecological stressors. All too often however, standardized livelihood activities promoted by governments encounter resistance, rejection, or are rendered irrelevant. One reason why proposed activities fail is because they do not align or overlap with certain CA activities that households are able and willing to engage in (termed here as “decision spaces”). Chapter 3 provides an integrative framework that allows policy-makers to better understand how contextual factors – from land-use regulations to cultural aspirations – constrain or widen household “decision spaces.” The framework is applied to Bustos providing direction for adaptation policy to i) promote CA livelihood activities that are both relevant and palatable to households; and to ii) challenge certain constraints to enlarge the set of activities household could engage in. Overall, this thesis represents an analysis of irrigation re-allocation as one facet of social-ecological change in the Angat River Basin and provides measures for accommodating change effects through substantive recommendations for adaptation policy.

View record

Low-income, peri-urban residents of Greater Accra face disparities in water access, particularly given that piped water services provided by the formal municipal network are highly erratic and unreliable. Often, those underserved by the official provider are able to meet their daily water needs by sourcing water through alternative, or informal, means. Although it is often the case that informal water services pose important challenges for users, for instance in terms of price and quality, this research attempts to understand other dimensions of how populations are served when they are not adequately reached by formal networks. This research also explores the potential for participatory water governance, querying policy and scholarly literatures that advocate for a more inclusive water governance process on the grounds that it is key towards service extension and empowerment. This thesis is based on two months of fieldwork in Ashaiman, a rapidly growing settlement located on the outskirts of the capital region of Accra, Ghana. The overall objective of the thesis is twofold: (1) To examine the myriad of mediums and networks through which water is accessed, with particular attention to those that extend beyond the municipal water system, and (2) To assess how participation in water governance is experienced and expressed by the peri-urban poor, with the aim of considering possibilities for managing water concerns in this context. These themes are addressed respectively in the two substantive chapters of this thesis. Insights suggest that a diversity of strategies to obtain water is a key factor in allowing peri-urban dwellers to cope with water insecurities. In addition, mainstream approaches to participatory water governance may be at odds with local institutions operating within Ashaiman, which tend to be multi-purpose and adaptive, based on a wide-ranging goal of improving social welfare. Among other implications of these findings, it is concluded that an in-depth process of consultation with community members, organizations and private water vendors is imperative to promote collaborative governance of water and well-being, where members themselves define the scope of the mandate, and where the critical role of informal water networks is accounted for.

View record

Access to potable water remains a key concern for most developing countries, especially across the sub-Saharan African sub-region. Although countries such as Ghana have already declared success in attaining its MDG target of halving its population without access to potable water ahead of the 2015 target date, there are disparities in water access across the country. This disparity is notable in growing urban areas such as Accra, the national capital, where access to potable water remains a daunting challenge especially for many neighborhoods located in low income enclaves of the city. Adopting a comparative approach, this research aims to elicit the everyday accessibility options and coping strategies of two low income neighborhoods; one indigenous (Ga Mashie) and one migrant (Madina), located in the metropolitan region of Accra. The study uses data from a two and half months of fieldwork conducted in both communities in Accra, Ghana. It includes a survey of 200 households in Ga Mashie and Madina, group discussions, and semi-structured interviews with local community leaders. Drawing on concepts of entitlement, social capital, vulnerability and water governance, the study analyzes the everyday lived experiences of water access in these communities. Results of the study show that while there are qualitative differences in water access between both communities, they both rely on informal water vendors for their water supply. Also, among the many social problems in both communities, water was considered to be among their biggest concerns. However, this notion held by the respondents in both communities was not shared by local public officials in Ga Mashie, where officials discounted the existence of a water problem. Moreover, in some notable ways, Madina appears to be more resilient in times of water shortages than Ga Mashie, contrary to what this study initially hypothesized. In conclusion, this study suggests that care must be taken in proposals for water governance reforms in particular settings since different localities likely call for different responses. For a sustainable governance outcome, there is the need to promote models that tend to account for the roles and needs of different social groups at the local level.

View record

Drinking water remains inaccessible for approximately 783 million people globally – an increasing portion of whom now live in cities. The incapability of municipal provision systems (both public and private) to adequately supply urban citizens means that for many of them water access is negotiated every day in places nowhere near a tap. Instead, points of access are located beyond the pipe, along informal delivery lines. This thesis aims to evaluate the potential of two alternative modes of provision in urban Accra –participatory water governance offering new points of access in underserved communities and small-scale private service providers producing sachet water. Through an exploration of the flows of water as it leaves the municipal mains, this thesis offers a qualitative account of water access in underserved areas in Accra, Ghana. Specifically, Chapter 2 examines participatory water governance in the form of Local Water Boards established throughout the last decade in several neighbourhoods of Accra. Through a discussion of participation’s limits, the chapter argues that a narrow approach to participation, less attentive to other multi-scalar political and social processes at play, undermines the possibilities to improve water access and foster more inclusive water governance in Accra. Chapter 3 offers an analysis of small-scale private service providers looking at the case of Accra’s flourishing sachet water industry –sachets are 500 ml bags of water manufactured locally and distributed throughout the city. The chapter argues that the sachet industry redefines water production and alters its distribution in Accra in a way unaccounted for by the small-scale private service providers literature. The sachet water industry in Accra alters the physical flows of water as well as the power relation vis-à-vis municipal authorities and as such has significant implications for water governance. This thesis is based on qualitative fieldwork including semi-structured interviews, field and participant observations, water user surveys, and document analysis conducted throughout two field seasons in Accra, Ghana (June to August 2011 and June to September 2012).

View record

South Africa has been undergoing significant changes over the past three decades with the dismantlement of the apartheid state, followed by a series of socio-political and economic changes. The structural transformation of the new democratic South Africa has been accompanied by many progressive developments for which the country has been widely praised - but also critiqued. Major elements of this transformation have been improving service delivery for formerly marginalized populations and redressing structural historical inequalities. The main goal of this work is to investigate how these changes affect on-the-ground realities in areas of Cape Town, South Africa, by focusing on the micro level, namely on communities and individuals in marginalized urban areas. This manuscript-based thesis is founded on Master’s research conducted in 2012, with a follow up in 2013, in Site C, Khayelitsha, a partly informal township in Cape Town, South Africa. It investigates the conditions of water access in Site C, the different meanings people attach to water access as well as associated implications for experiences of the human right to water and citizenship more broadly. Chapter 2 analyzes the ways in which the post-apartheid state is encountered in Site C through access to services, and water in particular. It traces the significance of service delivery to previously marginalized populations, such as informal settlements and black townships, as foundational in defining the relationships these populations have with the post-apartheid state. This chapter concludes that these relationships vary significantly along the lines of formality, whereby the housing formalization process contributes to the marginalization of shack dwellers. Chapter 3 focuses more specifically on the human right to water, for which South Africa has been widely praised in both academic and policy realms. This chapter adopts a “lived notions of rights” conceptualization and draws attention to the material conditions as well as the emotive and discursive meanings of water access for residents of Site C. This thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the everyday lived dimensions of relative marginalization, proceeding alongside the housing formalization process in Cape Town and South Africa as a whole.

View record

Urban life means your shit is not your problem. It is commonly felt that for urban residents the management of sewage should not be a personal responsibility; instead, disassociation from sewage, its production, presence, disposal, and management is central to participating in a full urban citizenship. Connection to centralized and water-borne sewerage infrastructure affords this luxury of ‘flushing and forgetting,’ not having to know about or have contact with shit after the toilet is flushed (Hawkins, 2006).This thesis is based on three months of fieldwork in Villa Lamadrid, a historically marginalized peri-urban neighborhood in Greater Buenos Aires. The neighborhood lacks connection to a centralized, water-borne sewerage system. During this period I spent considerable time in the neighborhood, engaging in participant observation, and conducted 36 semi-structured interviews with neighborhood residents.I examine how, in the absence of centralized sewerage connection that makes this sanitation imaginary possible, residents work to claim urban citizenship by employing narratives of disassociation from sewage in its visible forms throughout neighborhood. Notable among these is a racialization of shit and the practices that result in its presence in neighborhood streets and zanjas. In addition, as a part of my interviews I presented two sewage management systems appropriate to aspects of the neighborhood’s biophysical conditions, particularly its saturated groundwater table and vulnerability to flooding during storm events. Both of these systems were household level management systems, a common solution provided by development organizations to urban areas not connected to municipal sewerage service. Interviewees in Villa Lamadrid felt these decentralized sewage management options directly undermined the goal of participation in the urban sanitation imaginary, and their claims to full, rights-claiming citizenship by necessitating, and even relying upon, their personal engagement with the management of their own sewage.This research raises important questions regarding expectations of urban sanitation and the paradigms in which we frame sewage management, and, acknowledging the high failure rate of sanitation interventions in poor communities globally, questions of where we are to go from here, in a rapidly urbanizing world where infrastructure already lags behind ever growing demand.

View record