Thirteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

This inter-disciplinary paper examines the interdependent relationship between village communities and the environment in Fiji Islands. Research on inter village economic disparities suggest that while villages have been nationally integrated for decades, they still retain specific distributions of social endowments, which affect outcomes, and need to be tested with relations to the environment. Fiji, as Small Island Developing States (SIDS), is particularly vulnerable to long-term environmental changes – climate change, declining fish-stocks, deteriorating soil fertility and agricultural yields, and the energy and material demands of non-farm diversification. The paper focuses on Vabea village, and draws on two types of primary data (both quantitative and qualitative, including a round of socio-economic survey questionnaire, and qualitative semi-structured interviews) into the processes of production, commodification, consumption, experience, and perceptions of the environment. Our findings suggest that human interactions with the environment are construed through class (through which resources become private property and wealth is extracted), cultural status (which affects contact with material substances), religious beliefs (which effects social and individual perceptions and behaviours toward the environment); gender (through mechanisms of inheritance, control of financial resources, and mobility), and forms of social hierarchy (especially at the clan level). Given the lack of empirical research across disciplines concerning social variations in the micro-level material and social/cultural relations of rural communities whose livelihoods are reliant on the environmental resources, this empirical research is particularly important for devising effective climate change adaptation and mitigation policies at the village level in times of ecological crisis.