"Summary The aim of this meeting is to discuss local environmental knowledge in relation to policies and scientific perspectives on climate change. The purpose is for Pacific Islanders to talk about and represent their local knowledges,...
more"Summary
The aim of this meeting is to discuss local environmental knowledge in relation to policies and scientific perspectives on climate change. The purpose is for Pacific Islanders to talk about and represent their local knowledges, values and environmental practices in ways that effectively speak to national and international policy makers and climate scientists. We have chosen traditional calendars as our guiding theme because they offer a useful, organized set of systems for approaching indigenous environmental knowledges.
By placing traditional calendars at the centre of this conversation we hope to offer a space for community researchers and representatives from across the Pacific to compare and present their local knowledges in ways that can be understood and incorporated into climate studies and policy without losing their sense of origin, ownership and cultural value. This translation between local knowledge, science and policy poses big challenges, because traditional knowledge is never separate from moral and social values, nor the places where they are rooted, while the production of scientific knowledge about the environment is usually about creating abstract data that are kept separate from local and cultural considerations.
The solution that we want to explore seeks to encourage participants to think about how the environmental practices of their community fit within larger configurations across neighbouring islands in order to produce shared models of knowledge across Pacific communities with similar environments and challenges. For example, the representatives from Melanesia can relate their local experiences of the environment to broader monsoon seasons, strong cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis, which are characteristic of the Western Pacific; by contrast, the Central Pacific, Eastern Polynesia, Micronesia, and Aotearoa will each share different sorts of cycles and challenges, as well as certain shared cultural values.
Producing regional models through the joining of local experiences can facilitate locally-grounded and collective representations of Islander knowledge - a sort of clustering that carries more weight than single case studies. This may allow indigenous knowledges to be presented to policy makers and scientists on Pacific Islanders' terms, which means not losing sight of the networks of people, places and forms of understanding that underpin these assemblages. It takes us away from "intellectual property" discussions that assume that knowledge is alienable. It is a way of bringing together different worldviews on an equal basis, rather than separating them."
