Unless you are cocooned in a tourism bubble, it is hardly possible to miss God when you visit the Pacific Islands. In every village, on every main street in every town there seems to be a church or temple, packed to bursting point on holy days, testimony to the considerable influence of spirituality on the way people live in the Pacific.
And yet almost every well-intentioned outside agency, including those of foreign governments (like Australia and the European Union), that seeks to intervene in the region to help its inhabitants adapt to the effects of future climate change draws up its plans in secular ways and communicates them in secular contexts using secular language. Over a span of some thirty years, most such interventions have failed, proving neither effective nor sustainable. The answer to the question “why” may in part lie in the sidelining of God.
At this point, conversations with representatives of donor organisations often become awkward. Why, they feel, should spirituality have any role in a problem – like climate-change adaptation or disaster-risk management – that is readily framed in secular terms? The answer lies in who does the framing. Far fewer people in most national donor partners of Pacific Island Countries are spiritually-engaged than in the Pacific. A survey of 1226 tertiary students at the highly-regarded University of the South Pacific found that more than 80% attended church at least weekly, 35% more often. This sample is that of the educated elite in the Pacific region, its future leaders, urbanites, but the proportion of regular churchgoers is over 97% in the Pacific Islands according to most national censuses. This is considerably more than the figures for donor countries like Australia, Europe and the USA where at most some 40% of people are habitual churchgoers.
The survey found that in addition to being spiritually-engaged, the majority of Pacific Island tertiary students felt a “connectedness to Nature” that exceeded that of most people living in richer countries and that they had a high level of concern about climate change and what it might mean for their future and that of their descendants. There was widespread pessimism that insufficient was being done to address climate change in the Pacific yet within those survey responses were two interesting points. The first was a “spatial optimism bias”, a widely-expressed belief that familiar environments were in a better condition that less-familiar ones. The other was a “psychological distancing” of environmental risk, the belief – often spiritually validated by individuals – that other places were more exposed, more vulnerable, than places to which the respondent had ties.
In early 2017, I attended Sunday church in a village in Fiji where I was conducting research, a village that has escaped the fury of Severe Tropical Cyclone Winston (February 2016) despite being only some fifty kilometres from its centre. The preacher told his congregation that it was their relationship with God that had saved them, that because they were pious they had been spared the cyclone’s wrath. It is deceptively easy to ridicule such views but ignoring them may be foolhardy.
This research suggests that one reason for the massive failure of external interventions for climate-change adaptation in Pacific Island communities is the wholly secular nature of their messages and their modes of communication. For where communities are engaged spiritually, any secular messages are likely to be discussed – or re-framed – in spiritual ways. And if those messages clash with the ways in which the community’s spiritual agenda is framed, they are likely to be received with indifference. For communities in poorer countries like most in the Pacific Islands region (and those elsewhere in the “developing” world), the most influential messages are those that engage with people’s spiritual beliefs, and the most influential communication channels are often those that involve religious leaders.
In April 2009, the ecumenical Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) issued the Moana Declaration that presciently accepted that future climate change and sea-level rise would force people from vulnerable coastal locations to others less vulnerable elsewhere. After this, the PCC set up a climate change unit and drove initiatives to put climate change into Sabbath sermons across this vast region. But more needs to be done. Practical discussions about what communities might do could be heavily influenced by church leaders at every level so maybe they are an important target for intervention agencies.
Research in Pacific Island Countries to look at why so many externally-sponsored interventions for climate-change adaptation have failed over the past thirty years is continuing. While initial results suggest that a lack of sustained community support for such interventions may be attributable to the cessation of funding, or the misfit between community goals and those of the external agency, the lack of effective community engagement – including with its spiritual values – is a recurrent theme being identified.
Much of this page was published in 2017 under the title Sidelining God: why secular climate projects in the Pacific Islands are failing in The Conversation and is freely available to read here.