Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that people in Vanuatu, by engaging in discourses and implemented climate change policies, constantly create new realities. These include assumptions about the nature and effects of climate change as well as actions to be taken, which differ among various actors.

Paper long abstract:

In Vanuatu, climate change plays an important role in foreign as well as in national policy. Implementation of climate change policy includes most importantly climate change adaptation projects, planned and realised by international development organisations and NGOs in cooperation with governmental departments. Staff of these climate change adaptation projects, which focus for example on the introduction of new agricultural methods, figure prominently for the dissemination of information about climate change, besides various other actors, like media. Nevertheless, politicians, staff of governmental institutions, and inhabitants of villages have quite different assumptions about the nature and effects of climate change and consequently do not perceive proposed adaptation strategies in the same way.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the rural area of the island of Efate, I will show that villagers in Vanuatu constantly generate new 'climate change realities' by interacting with staff of organisations as well as with their environment(s). These realities created include not only assumptions about climate change, but also subsequent actions (or non-actions) to be taken when dealing with environmental changes. I argue that in this context villagers might challenge policies and with it concepts connected to climate change, like adaptation.