Peter Larmour (2005) investigates the transfer and institutionalisation of so-called ‘foreign flowers’ to Pacific Island Countries. These foreign flowers, argues Larmour, are policies and institutions that were introduced during colonialism and after independence, e.g. customary land registration, constitutions and representative democracy, public sector reform and anti-corruption, by a variety of agents, e.g. colonial officials, missionaries, aid donors and non-governmental organisations. Not all institutional transfers, argues Larmour, were equally successful. The factors that contribute to success or failure are complex. They depend on timing, socio-economic circumstances and the compatibility with and adaptation to local values. Taking Larmour as a starting point, this panel wants to explore these so called foreign flowers, the agents and contexts that introduce them and their possible abjections, contestations and/or adaptations with a special focus on concepts of democracy, human rights, and/or feminisms. All these are travelling concepts that came to the Pacific from Europe, other countries of the West or, in the case of universal Human Rights, the global field of the United Nations through a variety of agents, e.g. state bureaucracies, aid donors and non-governmental organisations. They all are mostly based on Western concepts of personhood, individualism, liberty, gender and rights that are partly vastly different from their Pacific counterparts. As such, all of these are contested, rejected or adapted by different communities and social agents in Pacific states which may see in them threats to local ways of being or new avenues of desired social change, or something in between. And while some concepts such as Human Rights are highly contested, others like the UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights are embraced favourably. In these processes local actors construe articulations between the global and the local and particularizations of the global arise. This panel invites contributions that examine these processes at work in the past and at present.
Paper submissions are closed