Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

166 collective willingness to adapt to a totally different way of life is what allowed them to survive. The village, which still exists today and is on the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage Sites, was named Ganvié, which in the Tofinu language roughly translates to “saved community”. Senegal The population in the southern region of Senegal known as the Casamance has been living through a low-level civil war for three decades, experiencing periodic bursts of violence from the ongoing conflict between the local separatist movement and the national government in Dakar. Yet while the media tend to fixate on the turmoil and unrest, when I visited the Casamance shortly after the breakdown of negotiations with the Senegalese government in early 2005 I saw armed soldiers smiling and joking with each other amidst an otherwise typical backdrop of Senegalese village and town life. A local man from the Diola ethnic group of the Casamance explained that while the people of the region had suffered, the conflict actually reinforced their cultural identity as a distinct group with an egalitarian structure and a sense of pride in resisting centralized authority, which is a narrative extending back to the time of French colonial rule. Tanzania Once having spanned most of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, the pastoralist Maasai are now having to adapt to decreasing access to land due to environmental preservation, tourism, or other pressures, leading to frequent characterizations of the Maasai as a dying culture or as a tribe struggling to survive. Yet, while working on a research project in Dar es Salaam from June to August 2006, I also saw another side of the story, in the forms of traditionally dressed Maasai men with machetes and cattle-herding staffs amidst the rush-hour pedestrian traffic of jeans, t-shirts, business suits, and briefcases—walking to work. The Maasai seem to have gained an impressive market share in the security guard business, leveraging their historical reputation as skilled warriors. While it is certainly no justification for forced migration, the ability of the Maasai to adapt to an urban livelihood while retaining their distinctive identity also makes it difficult to fully justify the “dying culture” narrative. Haiti Traditional religious beliefs were suppressed when Haiti became a French slave colony in the 18th century and Haitians were forced to convert to Christianity. In response, many Haitians nominally accepted the new faith to avoid persecution, simultaneously renaming traditional deities as Christian figures, including God and the saints. In 2007 I had the opportunity to see the modern-day expression of this religious syncretism while visiting Plaine du Nord with an undergraduate student research team during the Catholic celebration in honor of St. Jacques—who also happens to symbolize the voodoo spirit Ogoun. Inside the church a wall-to-wall crowd sang hymns and listened to passages from the Bible during Mass. At the same time, just outside the church doors and extending through the streets was a crowd of voodoo adherents with thousands of lit candles, chanting, drumming, dancing, and performing various rituals including animal sacrifices and bathing in a mud pool in the center of town. The Catholic practices and icons that were once imposed upon the country have now become a source of prayer and celebration for those still adhering to their traditional beliefs. Fiji To deal with and prevent shortages of fish as a food source, chiefs in Fijian coastal villages traditionally established periodic “taboos”, or bans, on fishing in certain areas to replenish the fisheries. Several local fishermen explained to me that this approach worked well in the past when the fishing vessels were small, stayed closer to shore, and were piloted by other islanders. With the advent of modern commercial fishing, often done in deeper waters by foreign vessels, the traditional taboos became markedly less effective and now the only feasible means of regulating fishing is through maritime policing by the national government. However, rather than managing this effort independently, the national government chose to integrate the traditional practice of taboo into the effort, thereby gaining widespread support and collaboration from communities across the country. While fish shortages are an ongoing challenge in Fiji, this method has already shown positive results in some parts of the country (Corcoran and Hughes 2012). RESEARCH SHOULD HELP TRANSLATE COMMUNITY NARRATIVES INTO INSIGHTS Human resilience is intrinsically linked to the social, natural, and built environments in which people live. Narratives provide a contextual richness that is critical for investigating the phenomenon. A clear analytical framework can sort through the details of these stories to derive insights that may help promote resilience, whether within the same community or elsewhere. For instance, if we refer to a community’s resilience, are we talking about its ability to maintain certain attributes during times of adversity, such as a sense of cultural identity, psychosocial wellbeing, access to food, or something else? Or are we referring to its ability to modify some characteristics in order to adapt to a changing environment or circumstances, such as moving to a new location or reinventing a belief system?