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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how anthropological research can contribute to co-create innovative modes of thinking and acting when encounters of different knowledges take place. This provides the opportunity to adequately address challenges of communities to adverse effects of climate change in Oceania.

Paper long abstract

Island communities across Oceania face multiple adverse impacts from the global climate crisis and thus become a focus of attention for adaptation measures, typically implemented by international NGOs, and aiming to address these challenges in areas such as crop cultivation. These interventions predominantly employ concepts grounded in natural science and solutions based on unilinear thinking. Project implementations thus become sites where encounters of divergent concepts, knowledges, and practices take place. Community members’ concepts, for instance of climate change, and practices dealing with challenges often differ epistemologically and ontologically from those used in adaptation projects: they may be based on holistic frameworks that resist categorical distinctions of environment and human life or nature and culture.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Oceania and participation in multiple international and interdisciplinary research projects, this paper explores how anthropological research might contribute to co-create innovative modes of thinking and acting. Focusing on the dual perspective of Pacific Islanders on their environment, namely knowing and interacting with the land and the ocean, it argues that an anthropological approach can initiate an iterative process of collaboratively identifying epistemological and ontological differences and facilitating knowledge co-creation with research partners. This might take the form of laboratories, underlining the importance of experimenting collaboratively with conceptual framings and approaches for developing knowledge and practices that resonate with contributors’ frameworks while adequately addressing challenges to adverse effects of climate change.