The Political Economy of Climate Adaptation and Environmental Health: The Case of Ethiopia

The environment affects our health, livelihoods, and the social and political institutions within which we interact. Indeed, nearly a quarter of the global disease burden is attributed to environmental factors, and many of these factors are exacerbated by global climate change. Thus, the central research question of this dissertation is: How do people cope with and adapt to uncertainty, complexity, and change of environmental and health conditions? Specifically, I ask how institutional factors, risk aversion, and behaviors affect environmental health outcomes. I further assess the role of social capital in climate adaptation, and specifically compare individual and collective adaptation. I then analyze how policy develops accounting for both adaptation to the effects of climate and mitigation of climate-changing emissions. In order to empirically test the relationships between these variables at multiple levels, I combine multiple methods, including semi-structured interviews, surveys, and field experiments, along with health and water quality data. This dissertation uses the case of Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous nation, which has a large rural population and is considered very vulnerable to climate change. My fieldwork included interviews and institutional data collection at the national level, and a three-year study (2012-2014) of approximately 400 households in 20 villages in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. I evaluate the theoretical relationships between households, communities, and government in the process of adaptation to environmental stresses. Through my analyses, I demonstrate that water source choice varies by individual risk aversion and institutional context, which ultimately has implications for environmental health outcomes. I show that qualitative measures of trust predict cooperation in adaptation, consistent with social capital theory, but that measures of trust are negatively related with private adaptation by the individual. Finally, I describe how Ethiopia had some unique characteristics, significantly reinforced by international actors, that led to the development of an extensive climate policy, and yet with some challenges remaining for implementation. These results suggest a potential for adaptation through the interactions among individuals, communities, and government in the search for transformative processes when confronting environmental threats and climate change.

Design and Emergence in the Making of American Grand Strategy

The main research question of this thesis is how do grand strategies form. Grand strategy is defined as a state's coherent and consistent pattern of behavior over a long period of time in search of an overarching goal. The political science literature usually explains the formation of grand strategies by using a planning (or design) model. In this dissertation, I use primary sources, interviews with former government officials, and historical scholarship to show that the formation of grand strategy is better understood using a model of emergent learning imported from the business world. My two case studies examine the formation of American grand strategy during the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras. The dissertation concludes that in both these strategic eras the dominating grand strategies were formed primarily by emergent learning rather than flowing from advanced designs.

Essays on State-Building and Sectarian Violence

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This dissertation seeks to explain the role of governmental and non-governmental actors in increasing/reducing the emergence of intergroup conflict after war, when group differences have been a salient aspect of group mobilization. This question emerges from several interrelated branches of scholarship on self-enforcing institutions and power-sharing arrangements, group fragmentation and demographic change, collective mobilization for collectively-targeted violence, and conflict termination and the post-conflict quality of peace. This question is investigated through quantitative analyses performed at the sub-national, national, and cross-national level on the effect of elite competition on the likelihood of violence committed on the basis of group difference after war. These quantitative analyses are each accompanied by qualitative, case study analyses drawn from the American Reconstruction South, Iraq, and Cote d'Ivoire that illustrate and clarify the mechanisms evaluated through quantitative analysis.

Shared findings suggest the correlation of reduced political competition with the increased likelihood of violence committed on the basis of group difference. Separate findings shed light on how covariates related to control over rent extraction and armed forces, decentralization, and citizenship can lead to a reduction in violence. However, these same quantitative analyses and case study analysis suggest that the control of the state can be perceived as a threat after the end of conflict. Further, together these findings suggest the political nature of violence committed on the basis of group difference as opposed to ethnic identity or resource scarcity alone.

Together, these combined analyses shed light on how and why political identities are formed and mobilized for the purpose of committing political violence after war. In this sense, they shed light on the factors that constrain post-conflict violence in deeply divided societies, and contribute to relevant academic, policy, and normative questions.

Full of Hot Air? Three Examinations of Climate Change in the American Political Information Environment

Climate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.

Prenegotiation public commitment in domestic and international bargaining

We use a formal bargaining model to examine why, in many domestic and international bargaining situations, one or both negotiators make public statements in front of their constituents committing themselves to obtaining certain benefits in the negotiations. We find that making public commitments provides bargaining leverage, when backing down from such commitments carries domestic political costs. However, when the two negotiators face fairly similar costs for violating a public commitment, a prisoner's dilemma is created in which both sides make high public demands which cannot be satisfied, and both negotiators would be better off if they could commit to not making public demands. However, making a public demand is a dominant strategy for each negotiator, and this leads to a suboptimal outcome. Escaping this prisoner's dilemma provides a rationale for secret negotiations. Testable hypotheses are derived from the nature of the commitments and agreements made in equilibrium.