Contingent communality and community-based adaptation to climate change: Insights from a Pacific rural atoll: Fid-Bau Portal

Contingent communality and community-based adaptation to climate change: Insights from a Pacific rural atoll

Jarillo, Sergio / Barnett, Jon

Abstract Research shows that community-based adaptation (CBA) can empower grassroots agents to determine their preferred responses to climate change. After two decades of practice, recent analysis is highlighting that CBA has its limits, which we argue is in part because it is predicated on an idea of ‘the communal’ as being local, static, and spatially distinct. We investigate the relationship between the nature of community and the successful implementation of CBA through an ethnographic longitudinal study in Namdrik in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. We show that the Namdrik community is best understood as a spatially dynamic network of actors whose sense of shared purpose and capacity to act varies over time in response to demographic, economic and political circumstances. These processes at times weaken the shared commitment necessary for collective action on adaptation, especially as the material support and leadership that initiated CBA in Namdrik has waned. In such circumstances, the success of CBA is spatiotemporally contingent, and depends heavily on the persistence of factors that sustain shared commitment to the task, which most often means ongoing financial and technical support for activities and for community leaders.

Highlights • The community in Namdrik Atoll is more than local and extends through a series of networks that determine collective action. • Mobility is an important influence on levels of cohesion and differentiation in the community. • The efficacy of CBA in Namdrik is shaped by the interaction of external institutions with the dispersed Namdrik community. • The efficacy of CBA relies on recognising and responding more flexibly to the changing nature of ‘community.’.