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Session Detail (parallel)

Cross-cultural exchange? Experts, collaboration, and knowledge forms in Pacific ecology

Coordinator(s)


James Leach, Carlos Mondragon


Session presentation

This panel investigates the possibilities for sharing and exchanging ecological knowledge between Europe and the Pacific, and the effects and effectiveness of this endeavour in education, sustainability, community dynamics, academic, and policy contexts. We begin from the premise that ‘knowledge’ does not necessarily travel in a simple manner, and that the effects of holding, professing, preserving, or circulating knowledge differ, as do motivations and intentions around knowledge. We are critically aware of the complex ownership and political aspects of knowledge recognition and transmission, and of the necessity to reflexively examine assumptions about the purposes and registers of knowledge. Understanding seemingly practical issues about recording, preserving or utilizing ecological knowledge in fact requires an awareness of the different modes and status of ‘knowledge’ on the part of each participant, as well as of political ambitions, expectations arising from recognition, etc.

We seek contributions for the panel that reflect upon the implications for collaboration, documentation, and mutual comprehension of different forms of ‘situated’ knowledge systems. How is situated knowledge reconfigured by local experts (a very broad term, not meant to be exclusive of all but ritual specialists) and put forth to broader audiences?

One frame for discussion will be UNESCO initiatives bringing together Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal Australians to represent their various environmental knowledges and experiences of climate change for policy design. Here, we are concerned with the prospects of reconfiguring practice and kinship as ‘knowledge’ in a highly bureaucratic context, and within exclusivist management practices and naturalist frames.

Another focus will be collaborative documentation initiatives, asking what we need to consider when engaging in collaborative documentation and what forms the outputs should take to meet converging, and diverging, expectations from the parties involved.

We hope other contributors will develop our understanding of the role and opportunities for ecological knowledge to figure in education, in climate apprehension, in cultural and social change, and in developing Pacific perspectives and presence in Europe.


Paper submissions are closed



Accepted papers


Weeds and manicured landscapes. Reflecting across the decades on knowledge and ecological knowledge



Frederick H. Damon (University of Virginia)


This paper reflects across the decades, from 1973 to 2014, of moving in and out of the Kula Ring in Papua New Guinea while participating in the intellectual swirls that have traversed these times and spaces. Some children of that first time and space—the northeast Kula Ring of the 1970s—now occupy positions in the country’s governmental establishments, including Fisheries Department and its research institutions; others are teachers in the Muyuw, Woodlark Island’s transplanted educational system. They are turning people in that culture into ranked age and knowledge grades like many other places in the world. In all their eyes this researcher is to look upon them as successful products of a process that started long before them. The anthropological irony here makes for another sad tropics. For these are a people who came out of an ecological context bent on becoming inscribed in the interiority of its existence. By contrast, as a European transported to the American Wilderness, this researcher continues a now long cultural paradigm that still strives to occupy the world. From Tim Flannery’s disturbingly accurate account we know that Europe’s contexts “have made Europe a ‘weedy’ environment. Mobile, fertile and robust, Europe’s life forms were purpose-made to inherit new lands…” (Flannery, The Future Eaters, C.13 “The Backwater Country,” p. 304). Undoubtedly only a partial truth, nevertheless, it leave us where for future action?

‘I am the river and the river is me’: harnessing reciprocal knowledge for ecological wellbeing in Tāmaki Makaurau–Auckland.



Billie Jane Lythberg (University of Auckland)

Mānuka Hēnare (University of Auckland Business School)

Christine Woods (University of Auckland Business School)

Tessa Chilala (Auckland Council)


Oruarangi ka toto te Wairua
Oruarangi—Her flowing waters nurture, sustain and give us strength.

This paper examines the articulation between the knowledge systems of mana whenua (Indigenous people with customary rights to, and responsibility for, land and waterways in Aotearoa-New Zealand), local government, ecological experts and local businesses, as they pertain to natural resource management and biodiversity conservation in Tāmaki Makaurau-Auckland.

In July 2013, the ancestral river called Oruarangi ran purple. More than 1000 litres of Methyl violet dye coursed through its waters, as it flowed past Makaurau Marae, the home of its people and kaitiaki (guardians) and into the Manukau Harbour. 3.5km of estuarine environment were polluted. The river lost most of its fish, shellfish and eels—significant food resources only recently returned to its people following the area’s previous use for sewage treatment a decade earlier. Its people mourned.

Soon after, Auckland Council collaborated with Makaurau Marae to develop and deliver an innovative Industry Pollution Prevention Programme (IPPP) to businesses in the Mangere area. The Oruarangi IPPP pivots on the exchange of knowledge between Makaurau Marae representatives and environmental experts. This ‘river’ of knowledge then flows to the sea of businesses, though face-to-face meetings and via tailor-made pamphlets that foreground the significance and fragility of the river as a living entity. The IPPP collaborative model allows differently situated knowledges to be acknowledged and reciprocated, influencing community dynamics, sustainable ecological wellbeing, and policy-making. We will examine this cross-cultural initiative, its outcomes, and its implications for further collaborations.

Recording What to Know: Designing simple tools and understanding complex motivations.



James Leach (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS)


Reporting on an iterative co-design process undertaken with Rai Coast villagers, we will share the process of developing a simple ‘toolkit’ with which villagers and schoolchildren can document ecological practices and understandings. In doing so, we reflect on what counts as knowledge, what expectations people have when ‘sharing’ it, and on how possible it is to capture something of its relational, narrative, and situated quality. Far from seeking utility for outsider ‘users’ of such knowledge, we seek to understand the utility and interest people themselves have in re-positioning what they do as ‘knowledge’ in this way, and how best to accommodate hopes for transmission and preservation through such a process.

The interpretation of indigenous ecological knowledge in different spheres of context in the Marshall Islands



Ingrid Ahlgren (Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University)


Throughout the Pacific, the concepts of tapu/tambu/tabu in relation to conservation has been well documented. The Marshall Islands is one of the more recent entities to become an internationally-recognized member of the club of societies with a traditional conservation ethic. When pursuing its national biodiversity planning, as mandated by the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, the Marshallese concept of mo was invoked and embraced, therein defined as “the traditional system to designate parts of land, a whole island, or a reef area, as a restricted site.”
Many other Pacific nations have similarly implemented no-take zones under a titular umbrella of traditional practices, with varying success and popularity. Indeed, programs in Fiji and Samoa have been used in many of the workshop blueprints for exemplary management plans. In the RMI, with mo as a guiding principle, biodiversity hotspots have been identified, with input from western consulting scientists, as potential areas for the creation of Locally Managed Marine Areas (LMMAs). These sites, however, are often conflated (and confused) with conservation areas, ignoring a complex, dynamic, and broad range of spiritually and politically imbued sites.
So how have institutionalized forms of knowledge interacted and morphed to meet a desired set of goals within their situated cultural contexts (whether it be a Pacific Island nation or an international political entity)? Are these activities empowering tradition and revitalization, or palatable guises for political or economic gain? Through ethnographic research and case studies of mo as part of my ongoing doctoral research, I hope to engage in a deeper review of how traditional knowledge is conceived of, held, and allowed (or dis-allowed) to interpretation in other spheres of knowledge for a variety of reasons, and to various ends.

Travelling ideas of climate change? Knowledge reception and transformation by young ni-Vanuatu



Arno Pascht (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Desirée Hetzel (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)


Ideas about climate change based on western scientific expertise are circulating around the world. These ideas shape the image of Pacific Islands in European public and politics as extremely vulnerable, and identify climate change as a serious ecological problem for Pacific Islanders’ future. Scientific knowledge about climate change and about possibilities for adaptation to the subsequent ecological changes is disseminated by the media and by local, European, and other foreign organisations which participate in the development of projects and strategies to circulate knowledge. Thus many young people in Vanuatu, especially those living in the capital, Port Vila, receive information on climate change and are subsequently convinced that climate change poses a serious threat to their futures. The youth regard gaining more knowledge about climate change as an important solution. By attending climate-change awareness workshops, participating in adaption projects, consulting various media such as the Internet, newspapers, and the radio, they try to meet this need.
This paper looks at the reception of knowledge connected with climate change by young ni-Vanuatu and at the translation processes that take place accordingly. The main questions to be answered are: How is this circulating knowledge about scientific models and concepts translated? How is it appropriated? How is the translated knowledge spread? And (how) will these processes result in action? In analysing these topics we will critically ask whether theories of reception and ‘travelling ideas’, including the translation processes involved, are sufficient to understand processes of knowledge transformation and agency of ni-Vanuatu youth.

Translating local knowledge for climate policy through locally-sourced collaboration across Oceania



Carlos Mondragon (El Colegio de México)


Since 2011 I have been working with UNESCO’s Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) programme, and their Climate Frontlines team, in order to create effective spaces for inclusion of indigenous environmental knowledge in regional and international climate policy design. To date, the outcome of this ongoing effort has been the bringing together of a host of local experts from across Oceania (i.e. Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands) in order to discuss and present their various experiences in relation climate change (CC), and how they have received and reacted to CC-related policies and interventions. The object of this paper is to take stock of how these local experts brought together and presented their multifarious knowledge forms in ways that foregrounded the relational and open-ended qualities of their environmental experiences in ways which challenge existing technocratic ideas about the definition, collection and inclusion of ‘traditional environmental knowledge ‘ in policy design contexts. An important part of this paper is to try to make sense out of how I, as the principal project expert, am attempting to convert and present these knowledge forms to policy designers in an effective, legible way while not losing their potential for radical critique and transformation of existing concepts, modes of intervention and the bureaucratic infrastructure on which CC-related policies are currently unfolding.

Talking about leaves: exchanging forms of knowledge in Vanuatu



Lissant Bolton (British Museum)


The project of documentation that is the Vanuatu Cultural Centre fieldworker programme brings talk about ni-Vanuatu knowledge and practice into semi-academic modes of knowledge production. The topics that fieldworkers have researched and discussed over the thirty or so years of the programme have addressed ecological knowledge of many diverse kinds. It is not possible, in fact, to talk about cultural knowledge without talking in some way or another about ecology. Working with the women fieldworkers for many years, I have particularly become interested in the ways in which so much of their knowledge and practice focusses on leaves. This paper turns over the question of how to address this category of knowledge. How can leaf-knowledge be understood within the frame of European knowledge categories? What is it, to know about and depend upon the properties of leaves?