Public Policy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2803
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Item Acknowledging Survival: Political Recognition and Indigenous Climate Adaptation in the United States(2021) Cottrell, Clifton; Bierbaum, Rosina; Sprinkle, Robert; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Indigenous peoples in the United States are already disproportionately experiencing the impacts of climate change. Closely related to tribal efforts to manage climate effects are historical endeavors to assert indigenous sovereignty and govern tribal lands, but deficiencies in the process used by the U.S. government to acknowledge tribal sovereignty have left hundreds of indigenous communities unrecognized and especially vulnerable to climate harm. My dissertation aims to determine whether a tribe’s recognition status affects its capacity for climate adaptation. To make this determination, I utilize a case study methodology wherein I analyze the circumstances of one non-federally recognized tribe, the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, in three critical areas related to adaptation and tribal recognition — access to key species and cultural resources, utilization of federal funding opportunities, and participation in climate decision-making. Tribal access to resources is often predicated by historical treaty rights, so I applied a theme identification technique to extrapolate important strategies on easing barriers to resource access and regulatory authority. I then used the themes to compare the likelihood of the Burt Lake Band and nearby federally recognized tribes to maintain connections to key species in the future. I next employed a comparative statutory analysis methodology to differentiate eligibility for non-federally recognized tribes accessing federal funding. I also assessed tribal climate adaptation plans and interviewed tribal climate plan managers on the barriers to successful implementation of adaptation actions. Finally, I developed criteria from a review of global literature on the inclusion of indigenous peoples in adaptation projects to assess participatory opportunities for the Burt Lake Band in state and regional climate governance. My findings show that the Band’s lack of federal recognition inhibits its adaptive capacity to access key cultural resources, federal funding, and climate governance opportunities. However, I also conclude that state and local perceptions of tribal identity could have a greater influence on the adaptation of non-federally recognized tribes, so I recommend that a more inclusive federal recognition system be implemented to avoid the unequal development of indigenous adaptive capacity based on disparate approaches to indigenous affairs by state and local jurisdictions.Item Towards Adequate Analysis and Modeling of Structural Adjustment Programs: An Analytical Framework with Application to Ghana(2004-11-22) Kraev, Egor; Daly, Herman; Public Affairs; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When a country experiences a balance of payments problem, the typical remedy mix proposed by the International Monetary Fund consists of fiscal austerity, tight monetary policies, devaluation, privatization, elimination of subsidies and trade liberalization, combined with low interest rate loans. Throughout the late 1980s, Ghana has been hailed as a success story for that policy mix. However, Ghana's performance has been increasingly disappointing during the 1990s. This thesis explores the reasons for that slowdown, its distributional implications, and the extent to which the behavior of the Ghanaian economy validates commonly used assumptions in economic models of developing countries. We compile a complete consistent yearly dataset of financial stocks, nominal money flows (arranged in Social Accounting Matrices) and real product flows for Ghana in 1990-2001. The real-side data, available yearly, are then examined using fit optimization with alternative functional forms, while nominal time series (Consumer Price Index, the broad money supply and the exchange rate), available on a monthly basis, are analyzed using ARIMA-X regressions. We find that industrial production, as well as investment, has been demand-constrained during our period, while agriculture has hit an aggregate supply constraint around year 1995. The relative price elasticity of substitution between imports and non-traded goods (in volume terms) is around minus one. The government was the only net source of demand during the period. Inflation could be predicted extremely well using only broad money supply, wholesale price of food crops and price of fuel, and formed a weak positive feedback loop with money supply growth. The main channel through which exchange rate depreciation impacted the price level was revaluation of the foreign currency-denominated money supply component. The response of broad money supply to interest rate increases was significant but small. We also formulate a novel matrix formalism for a more compact description and analysis of financial stock dynamics, cleanly separating structural and accounting constraints from behavioral descriptions. We conclude that the major reasons for the economic slowdown of the 1990s were excessive liberalization of commodity imports and strangulation of industry through lack of demand and volatile real interest rates, and of agriculture through withdrawal of government support programs.