Session Proponent: John Overton (Massey University)

Session Contributors Claire Kokinai (PNG, PhD candidate Massey University) 

Avisake Naivaluvou (Fiji, Masters candidate, Massey University) 

Ruveni Tuimavana (Fiji, PhD candidate Massey University) 

Gordon Nanau (Solomon Islands, Senior Lecturer, University of the South Pacific) 

John Overton (Massey University)

 

Notions of climate refugees, disappearing islands, and non-viable states tend to pervade predictions of Pacific futures. It is often assumed that these changes are inevitable, deleterious and cast Pacific communities and small island states as largely static, passive and powerless. Processes of change, intersecting with and embedded within globalization, demographic shifts, and political and cultural transformations, are seen as already testing community resilience, livelihoods, migration patterns, land use, health and geopolitics. On the other hand, there is a solid body of research over the past 70 years that demonstrates the ways Pacific peoples faced and adapted to profound changes in their societies and environments in the past, employing a considerable degree of local agency.

This session brings together a group of researchers working on a Marsden-funded project ‘Samting i narakain: diverse experiences of change and resilience across the Pacific’ and invites others to participate in presentations and discussion regarding the way change is conceived of, researched, and communicated with both the policy and public spheres; and the implications of these for the ability of Pacific peoples to exercise their own experiences, worldviews, desires and actions. The core team of researchers comprises mainly Pasifika scholars conducting field research in PNG, Fiji and Solomon Islands. 

The research is working to co-construct indigenous understandings of change that ‘foreground relational assumptions of causality and temporality’ (Anae 2019) and draw on local experiences and accounts of change, sometimes within a longer historical or cosmological view. We hope that these accounts will open up possibilities for new strategies to make sense of and respond actively to shifting conditions of life locally, beyond an almost myopic focus on climate-driven change.

Session format:

The session will involve a series of presentations from the researchers presenting the initial findings of their research (4-5 presentations, approximately 15 minutes each) followed by a panel discussion (with space for audience participation and Q&A) on the broader topic of change and resilience in the Pacific. (We would hope for online participation if possible).