London; Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2010. xiii, 218 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$79.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-84407-494-5.
Authors Jon Barnett and John Campbell deftly navigate the ocean of research, policy and practice addressing climate change in the Pacific Islands. Their critical work is timely and important as the impacts of climate change begin to directly influence the landscape of opportunities available for people living on small islands. The authors successfully bring social and physical processes into the same frame of analysis to demonstrate how they are mutually constitutive and to problematize facile designations of vulnerability. Drawing on their own wealth of experience in the Pacific Islands, the authors convey a well-organized, historically situated and readily accessible yet nuanced understanding of the science, tropes and power relations that are shaping responses to climate change. The book highlights barriers to adaptation in Pacific Island communities and is equally relevant to other peoples and places also experiencing the influences of a changing climate as well as the mitigation and adaptation policies designed to address climate change.
The authors have structured the book around their principal argument that “the presentation of climate change in small islands states is a discursive formation that limits understanding and action to address the interests of people living in islands” (1). The book opens in chapter 1 with a discussion of the discursive framing of climate change as a product of unequal power relations in three senses: 1) knowledge is created and institutionalized by NGOs and other power asymmetric structures; 2) the discursive framing is a recent version of an older stereotype of islands as backward; and 3) the power and knowledge involved in the discursive framing of climate change is multidirectional, flowing dynamically between different sites and actors and carrying the potential to transform how climate change is conceptualized and addressed in the Pacific Islands.
Chapters 2 to 5 elaborate on the architecture of climate change science, policy and practice in the Pacific Islands, focusing in particular on issues of the environment, development, climate science and climate policy. Chapter 6 focuses specifically on climate adaptation in the Pacific. It provides as comprehensive a review as possible of those projects that are documented. The chapter highlights the greater rates of success of those projects that are to some degree locally managed and reflect local priorities as opposed to more exclusively “top-down” structured projects run by non-locals and representing non-local interests. In chapter 7 the authors delve more deeply into two highly controversial climate-change related projects. The South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring project and the Environmental Vulnerability Index both demonstrate how “often science is not explicitly political but reflects the power relations and dominant discourse that exist within the political economy of the various societies” (145). The authors critique the monitoring project as an effort on the part of the Australian government to increase rather than reduce uncertainty, thus paralyzing adaptation efforts. The index is critiqued as a poor implementation of a methodology that produces questionable data which could be more harmful than beneficial if used as the basis for funding decisions.
Chapter 8 exposes the problematic representation of islands as vulnerable, a designation which, on one hand, has been helpful in leveraging international attention, but on the other, has not yielded substantive action in terms of either mitigation of climate change or adaptation to its impacts. Island communities that are portrayed as isolated, small and vulnerable can as accurately be described as connected, resilient and tenacious. Importantly, the authors draw a distinction between unhelpful characterizations of the islands as vulnerable used to sell magazines and the empowered appeals of community leaders who may also conjure an imagery of fragile islands. However, the distinction is not fully unpacked and deserves more attention to uncover the power relations evident in discourses of vulnerability. The book concludes with the authors’ challenge to the region to take proactive adaptation steps and to the global community to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the extent that adaptation in the Pacific Islands can be effective.
The authors do not fully resolve the tension evident throughout the book between their attempt to convey scientific knowledge of climate change while simultaneously critiquing the creation and application of that knowledge. Another criticism of the book, also noted by other reviewers (see Farbotko and Kelman, both in Island Studies Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, 2010, 261-265), is that while local agency is championed, there is very little attention given to what this looks like and what is being accomplished through local initiatives. Additionally, the authors do not satisfactorily address the lack of documentation of local agency, empowerment and activity, thereby to some degree replicating the very structures of knowledge and power in the region that they seek to critique.
Ultimately, the success of the book is that it demonstrates, through detailed examination, the ways in which climate change is primarily a problem of knowledge, power and justice. It critiques the many wellintentioned but dangerously ineffectual efforts to date, and offers guidance on ways forward for a sustainable future for Pacific Islanders.
Heather Lazrus
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, USA
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