Localising Global Climate Change Policies in Vanuatu: Reception of Knowledge and Cultural Transformations

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Global anthropogenic climate change impacts people worldwide not only in the form of environmental changes but also as a cultural phenomenon in the broadest sense, including emerging knowledge flows and interactions between various places and scales. The research project concentrates on effects of three developments which result from global debates on climate change: Concrete measures which are undertaken to contribute to mitigation or to initiate or promote adaptation of human ways of life in order to encounter adverse impacts of climate change; the spread of information and views on climate change by media and the introduction of legal and economic changes. The primary aim of this research project is to investigate two processes that are connected to these new developments. First, it investigates how local actors receive knowledge with which they are confronted, and how they interpret and transform it during the reception process, including whether and why they refuse or adopt it. Second, it focuses on the subsequent cultural changes and particularly on the potential transformations of fundamental ontological concepts. These perspectives constitute an innovative way of looking at climate change as a cultural phenomenon, allowing consideration of aspects that have not been included and processes that have been neglected by anthropological climate change research to date. The results of the research project will contribute to an advancement of the theoretical debate in social and cultural anthropology in the field of change and persistence of human-environment relations and in relation to ongoing ontological transformations. The research project will be conducted in the Pacific island state of Vanuatu - a country where climate change has been discussed at a political level for more than a decade, and where since the recent past numerous development projects are currently being carried out aiming to facilitate an adaptation to climate change for the population of Vanuatu. Ethnographic fieldwork will be undertaken in two places in Vanuatu, during which a number of different qualitative methods are employed. It will be conducted by the applicant and a research assistant/doctoral student as combination of team and individual research in order to give consideration to the strictly separate domains of men and women and additionally of other cultural differences in Vanuatu, for instance those between rural and urban regions.