Paper short abstract:

This paper is about the diversity of local understandings and engagements with climate across Oceania. Knowledge as a multiple and locally embedded phenomenon, is incompatible with global policy design. A radical overhaul of modernist concepts and practices is the only way forward.

Paper long abstract:

The subject of this paper is the diversity of knowledge forms in relation to local understandings and engagements with climate across the Pacific Islands. Thus far, my approach to the issue of environmental knowledge has focused on cross-cultural exchange, translation, conversion and the co-production of knowledge in relation to climate change policies. Lately there have been increasing efforts at incorporating local knowledge in the design of global environmental policies; through the generosity of UNESCO's Climate Frontlines team, I myself had a key role in one recent initiative to document and highlight indigenous knowledge from across Oceania within the context of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report. After critically reflecting on this and other efforts I have come to conclude that the multiplicity of lived experiences and localised understandings of the climate are essentially incompatible with mainstream modernist forms of engaging with and representing weather and climate change. My paper dovetails with this panel's argument about the "exhaustion of both state-centered and market-driven approaches to the crisis", insofar as I argue that knowledge is a multiple, emergent, social, moral and locally embedded phenomenon. Consequently, existing attempts at translating and converting it in relation to international policy design - not to mention climate modeling and global media representations - are doomed to failure. The co-production of climate knowledge faces enormous challenges, and I contend that only a radical overturn of the modernist environmental imaginary may open spaces of significant political and social legibility and effect for local knowledges.