Poster: Poster Session (30th of July, Afternoon/Evening) on Wednesday, July 30, 2025, 12:00 PM
Room: Virtual Room Main
Thread: Learning and Teaching
Duration: 60 minutes
Chairs: Jack Mercer, Vedansh Patel
Support: Meltem Ceylan Alibeyoglu
Watch RecordingColonised Commons: Climate, Agrarian and Elite Control in Bangladesh Beel Fisheries
Presenter: Md. Mahmudul Hasan
Freshwater fisheries in former colonies face more sustainability challenges. Floodplain wetland fisheries in Southern Africa and South Asia, particularly Beel wetlands of Bangladesh, are under growing pressure from both climate variability and institutional exclusion. Here, we examine how elite control and erratic rainfall interact to transform these fisheries commons into privatised, profit-driven systems undermining ecological sustainability and the socio-economic security of small-scale fishers. Drawing on 54 semi-structured interviews across two climate-vulnerable Beel regions, we applied a system thinking approach combining the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach and the Socio-Ecological System Framework to model feedback loops between declining ecological productivity, property-rights insecurity, and fisher displacement. We introduce the concept of “colonised commons” to explain how competitive leasing policy—rooted in colonial legacies—enable local elites to act as internal colonisers, dispossessing traditional fishers through asymmetric access to resources. This process is intensified by infrastructural policies, promoting irrigation and flood control accelerate wetland conversion to farmland, diminishing fish stocks and disrupting breeding cycles which is exacerbated by highly intensified, short-duration, and unseasonal monsoonal rainfall. However, our causal loop diagram provides a systems-based explanation of the root causes of exclusion and privatisation embedded in leasing system and agrarian infrastructures and identifies leverage points to manage Beel fisheries sustainably for more equitable and climate-resilient co-management. Keywords: Access, Common pool resource, Fisheries governance, Land management, Socio-ecological system, Rural livelihood
Investigating the Impact of Non-Existing Industrial Strategy on Steel Manufacturing Productivity: An Integrative qualitative sy
Presenter: Emmanuel Abuede
This paper aims to investigate how the absence of an industrial strategy in the UK steel sector influences steel manufacturing productivity. This issue arose from semi-structured interviews designed to understand how policy integration affects UK steel manufacturing productivity. During these interviews, UK steel businesses highlighted that the lack of an industrial strategy for the sector adversely impacts business responses, decisions, and strategies. Without a clear industrial strategy, there can be no roadmap to guide the steel industry's direction. Their statements also suggested that the absence of industrial policies has damaged the competitiveness of steel manufacturing. The recent decline confirms this. Since industrial policy fosters a competitive entrepreneurial environment and addresses issues that hinder interactions among industry components, examining its influence on the industry's future regarding productivity and the entrepreneurial ecosystem is important. Therefore, this paper demonstrates how abstracting and causal loop modelling can help to represent the relationships between industrial policy variables and productivity indicators. Are these assertions supported by existing scholarly work? If so, how can we validate the impact of the lack of an industrial strategy on manufacturing productivity?