Visualising the invisible: collaborative approaches to local-level resilient development in the Pacific Islands region

Abstract

The Pacific Islands region has made strong progress on the integration of climate change, disaster management and development frameworks, particularly via the Pacific Urban Agenda and the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific. These frameworks highlight the need for local- level collaboration in achieving ambitious pathways for climate- and disaster-resilient development. However, to date little research has investigated the role that local-level collaboration plays in implementation. Additionally, there is a lack of guidance on how to design and implement local-level collaboration that is informed by in-country practitioner experiences. This study addresses those gaps. Its findings indicate that in the Pacific collaborative attributes span individuals, institutions, collaborative arrangements, and broader governance systems. They also suggest that the skills needed to undertake collaboration well at the local level are, in part, already manifest in Pacific cultures as invisible skill sets. More can be done to make the invisible visible by documenting and developing the ‘soft skills’ that are necessary to achieve climate- and disaster-resilient development. This action could contribute to bridging the gap between ambition and reality.

Spirituality and Sustainable Development: A Systematic Word Frequency Analysis and an Agenda for Research in Pacific Island Countries

“…Yet, an audit of the Australian government documentation conducted for this research revealed there is little acknowledgement of the worldviews of the citizens or communities in the aid-receiving countries or their connections to the natural environment and, most importantly, how this influences stakeholder uptake of foreign-funded interventions [16,17]. For, if the success of climate change projects is tied to an understanding of the interconnectedness between the people, their spirituality, the land, and the environment, then it follows that the effectiveness and sustainability of aid projects hinge on their adoption of holistic perspectives [18,19]. There is thus a tension between secular funders, who generally do not acknowledge the spirituality of the recipients, and the values and practices of the recipient populations that hold spiritually informed worldviews, especially in the Pacific [2,11].…”