Smallholder agricultural value chains remain as one of the most widely supported market-based strategies for achieving rural development. This thesis goes beyond measuring the monetary benefits from value chain participation, seeking to conceptualise how trade-offs and heterogeneous rural development outcomes may emerge from smallholder value chains. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, this thesis utilises narrative, spatial modelling, econometric, and psychometric methodologies across two case study regions in Uganda and Indonesia. In doing so, the thesis seeks to highlight methodological blind spots in empirical value chain research, and to provide internally valid research findings to support value chain policy in each case study region. Importantly, the thesis develops concepts and methods that are externally valuable for broader value chain research and design.

The thesis begins with a scoping literature review to articulate the domains of which smallholder value chains act as rural development tools. These domains include the ability of smallholders to participate in smallholder value chains (inclusion), the benefits these smallholders and rural communities receive from value chains (value), and the extent in which value chains can scale and remain financially sustainable (scalability). The review then explores to what extent trade-offs between these three domains emerge for smallholder-targeted value chain programs. From a sample of 344 case studies emerges a strong pattern of trade-offs and heterogenous outcomes which inform the remaining focus of this thesis: patterns of value chains exclusion, heterogeneous interhousehold and intra-household experiences from value chain participation, and tradeoffs between agricultural development and broader policy objectives such as sustainability.

The second chapter seeks to understand why some of these trade-offs between outcomes may emerge using an agent-based linear programming model (ABM) of upland landscapes of Bandung, Indonesia. The model simulates value chain interventions to understand how these interventions may perform in respect to poverty alleviation, inclusion, and broader environmental concerns. The modelling results show the extent in which transaction and investment costs impede inclusion of smallholders in coffee agroforestry value chains, and highlights how environmental objectives of agroforestry value chain interventions may fail due to the complex and diverse land use decisions made by heterogenous smallholders.

The scoping review also highlights methodological limitations of value chain inclusion and how exclusion is currently conceptualised and empirically identified. Chapter four introduces empirical methodologies to identify and measure value chain inclusion opportunities, which separate out value chain inclusion/exclusion outcomes derived from structural barriers from the choices and preferences within a smallholder’s control. These inclusion methodologies combine insights from the inequality in opportunity literature with stated preference experiments, and was tested with a case study of coffee farmers in Kapchorwa, Uganda.

By assessing the inequality associated with expected participation outcomes based on circumstances alone, we show that coffee value chains are moderately exclusive. This finding holds for binary (extensive) and continuous (intensive) measures of value chain participation, measured at both the household and individual level. Spatial factors, such as altitude, and disagreements over financial norms within the household are particularly associated with value chain exclusion.

The final chapter explores how these disagreements over financial norms may also result in heterogeneous intra-household outcomes from value chain payments. This chapter presents psychometric models derived from social psychology literature to understand how disagreements in household financial norms create intentions for hidden financial behaviour amongst coffee growing households in Uganda. The results show that the failure to resolve differences in household norms regarding expenditure patterns is significantly associated with the intention for private expenditure for women, but not so for men. Private consumption strategies representing just one approach chosen by women where the benefits of hiding consumption (e.g. being able to consume in ways that better reflect their personal preferences) outweigh the costs (which may include psychosocial costs such as guilt and the risks of being ‘found out’ by their partner). Equitable bargaining power appears to play an important, albeit partial, role in achieving greater household cooperation.

Throughout, the thesis calls into questions whether value chains can act as effective rural development tools. There appears to be a common basic assumption that the private sector can, through self-interested actions, generate positive social outcomes associated with rural development. This is a considerable assumption and relies heavily on the (unlikely) case that incentives for private (business) outcomes happen to generate the same organisational structures as concerns for the rural communities. Value chains can still act as important moderators for welfare gains for some, but likely not all, cohorts.

The four thesis chapters are all currently submitted to international peer review journals. The scoping review presented in Chapter Two is currently under review at World Development. Chapter Three has been submitted to Land Use Policy, Chapter Four to World Development, and Chapter Five to Feminist Economics. In addition, all chapters have been presented at conferences in Australia and Internationally, including the International Conference of Agricultural Economists (2024), the Australian Society of Agricultural and Resource Economics Conferences (2022, 2023, and 2024) and the University of New England Research Pathways Conference (2024).

Global prevalence rates suggest that three to four males are diagnosed as autistic for each female (Loomes et al., 2017; Zeidan et al., 2022). To explain this, there is some suggestion that autistic females have a different clinical presentation of their autism symptoms, and that this is influenced by the degree that they ‘camouflage’ their autistic behaviour (Allely, 2019b; Hull, Petrides, et al., 2020b). Camouflaging has been defined as “the employment of specific behavioural and cognitive strategies by autistic people to adapt to or cope within the predominantly non-autistic social world” (Cook, Hull, et al., 2021, p. 1). However, some researchers have argued that there is a lack of clarity in camouflaging studies, such as inconsistency in the terms and definitions used in describing this behaviour (Fombonne, 2020). The present research reviewed the extent of these conceptual issues, plus some measurement and methodological limitations that may have resulted from a lack of clarity (Chapter Two). To address this lack of clarity, conceptual analysis was employed in two Chapters. This involved synthesising findings from autism research with concepts from two domains of the wider literature. First, in Chapter Three, concepts and theory on a behavioural consequence of stigma (i.e., negative stereotypes, attitudes, and beliefs held about autistic people; Link & Phelan, 2001), known as concealment, were reviewed. From this synthesis, a definition of autism concealment was given, and its empirically supported behavioural characteristics were reviewed. A novel theory was developed to explain the correlates of this behaviour. It was argued that the concept of camouflaging could largely be understood by reference to this framework, which was more informed by the wider literature than camouflaging studies. However, some aspects of camouflaging, argued to resemble forms of social learning, were unexplained by this framework. To resolve this, another conceptual analysis was conducted (Chapter Four), in which concepts from the wider literature on recovery and compensation, two forms of adaptive brain plasticity, were extended to the autistic population by framing them as neural mechanisms underlying biobehavioural resilience. This concept was supported by a scoping review of studies of the brain-behaviour relationships of autistic people, and a conceptual framework was constructed to integrate several modulators of this process. Finally, to address some of the measurement issues of camouflaging research, a new psychometric scale was developed to measure autism concealment: the Autism Concealment Scale. Its development process was assisted by a content validation study, and its psychometric properties were largely supported in a second exploratory study (Chapter Five). Limitations to the replicability of its factor structure, and some aspects of its validity, warrant future study. Strengths, some other limitations, and various implications of the present research, such as the impacts of these concepts on the reliability of autism diagnosis, were discussed (in each Chapter, and summarised in Chapter Six).

It is widely acknowledged in the research literature that due to cultural differences across countries and communities, creating a universal definition of play that applies everywhere is challenging and perhaps even undesirable. In education, Play and Play-Based Learning (PBL) are culturally and socially situated constructs. Consequently, people from different cultures vary both in how play is perceived and in their understanding of the practices best designed to pedagogically support children’s learning and development through play. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Early Childhood Education curriculum is based on the understanding of play and PBL identified and accepted in Western countries as best practice for supporting children’s learning and development. However, the Saudi social, cultural, and religious contexts differ markedly from those in Western educational settings and could therefore be expected to influence preschool teachers’ perspectives and practices of play and the relevant pedagogies they utilise, which may influence how preschool teachers understand and implement it. In this study, I explored Saudi female preschool teachers’ perspectives on play and how they conceptualised and enacted play and PBL in their teaching practice. This study was guided by a qualitative research design informed by social constructivism as a framework, and an indigenous methodology. The participants were 23 preschool teachers working in public, private, and charity-based settings. The data collected for this study were through first and second semi-structured interviews, lesson plans, and focus groups. The data were analysed manually using an inductive thematic approach. The findings showed that Saudi social, cultural, and religious factors played important roles in the preschool teachers’ constructions and understandings of play and PBL in supporting children’s learning and development. The teachers shared their understandings of different types of play, which included Outdoor play (Allaeib fi Alkharij) routines aligned with school, social, religious, and cultural contexts; Interest area activities (Allaeib fi Alarkan) as scripted play informed by the curriculum and society’s cultural norms and contexts; and Refreshment play (Allaeib Altanshitiu ) for when children had a little spare time at the end of a group activity. In each of these areas of play, teachers shared their understandings of how to support children’s learning through different pedagogical strategies.

The roles that preschool teachers enacted in these different forms of play varied based on their social, cultural values, the curriculum goals and their perspectives on the purpose for children’s play. Teachers’ roles were classified as: Mukhatat (Planner), Laeib Musharik (Co-player), Alqayid Almuyasir (Facilitating leader), Musharaf Al Muraqib (Supervising Observer), and, Mutawir Al Daeim (Developing Supporter). The preschool teachers also identified key challenges to implementation of the curriculum-based PBL practice, which arose from the entrenched societal gender-specific norms and expectations of mothers regarding their children’s educational activities and outcomes, together with the demands of supervisors and administrative performance evaluations of preschool teachers.

To overcome these barriers, I have proposed a practical model to culturally meld the Western and Saudi Arabia notions of play and PBL by creating a metaphorical model entitled, “Using a Date Palm Tree Metaphor for Play-Based Learning in the KSA”. ’The aim of this model and other recommendations arising from the study is to improve the cross-cultural transferability of the Western concept of Play-Based Learning and to offer a suitable and consistent framework for supporting children’s learning and development in ways relevant and applicable to the Saudi educational setting.

Due to climate change environmental hazards have become more prevalent and severe. Environmental hazards cannot be prevented but what can be diminished is the negative impact hazards have on people and property. Previous research looking into interventions for environmental hazards have identified that communities negatively impacted by hazards can benefit from interventions that focus on preparedness for disasters, mental health and increasing social support. The Community-Based Disaster Mental Health Intervention (CBDMHI) is an evidence-based approach that aims to increase disaster preparedness, resilience, social cohesion, and social support, and decrease mental health symptoms. The overarching aim of this project was to adapt the CBDMHI for an Australian bushfire context. This project specifically aimed to adapt the CBDMHI to rural Australia community who were impacted by the 2019-2020 bushfire season. This project aimed to assess the feasibility and acceptability of the CBDMHI in the studied community with the hope that the CBDMHI could be adapted to other rural Australian disaster-prone communities.

Study One aimed to explore a rural Australian community’s experience of the 2019-2020 bushfires in order to ascertain insight into the community recovery and preparedness needs so that the CBDMHI could be adapted to the local community context. Thirteen Australian adults who resided within a small rural community in New South Wales during the 2019-2020 bushfires participated in semi-structured interviews. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted. Results of this analysis were broken into two separate papers. Paper one focused on disaster preparedness and mental health needs and found that participants reported being unprepared for the 2019-2020 bushfires and that the community has started to prepare for future bushfires. Participants also described a belief in ‘climate cycles’ rather than climate change, limiting engagement in preparedness for future hazards. Participants also reported that they did not talk about the 2019-2020 bushfires, although described experiencing residual anxiety. Paper two focused on the community’s social cohesion following the 2019-2020 bushfires. Five themes were identified regarding social cohesion across different points in time. Before the bushfires, participants reported that their community was “fractured”. During the bushfires, participants reported that the community “rallied”. Post bushfires the participants discussed the “external supports” that entered the community, the “community wedges” that occurred, and how the community went “back to normal”, illustrating that the community returned to being “fractured” after the bushfires.

Study two aimed to pilot the adapted CBDMHI in a rural Australian community and assessed acceptability and feasibility of the intervention. Nine Australian adults participated in the intervention. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis were used. Data were analysed using repeated measures ANOVAs. Results showed large main effects for time in resilience and cohesion, though these results all fell outside conventional significance. There was also a significant interaction between the number of modules completed and time for preparedness, such that those who completed all modules sustained preparedness over time. Results highlighted that the intervention was found to be acceptable, with participants reporting that they found the intervention to be helpful for themselves and their community, well-structured, enjoyable, and engaging. The CBDMHI was feasible in a rural Australian community and this was evidenced as the intervention was aligned with the resources, time frames and logistical requirements. Taken together the findings of this research illustrate that the CBDMHI was feasible and acceptable in a rural Australian bushfire context.