From community-based to locally led adaptation: Evidence from Vanuatu

Abstract

The Green Climate Fund, donors, governments and non-governmental organisations, among others, are pouring vast amounts of financial and human capital into community-based adaptation across the developing world. The underlying premise is that the world’s majority—who have the minority of financial capital—are living on the margins and are the most vulnerable and at risk from climate change. Such a reality, coupled with a deficit understanding of the majority world, is resulting in significant implications for how the ‘adaptation industry’ (those that fund, design and implement projects) go about their work. Drawing on research evaluating 15 community-based adaptation projects in Vanuatu we found that despite genuine attempts, projects invariably fell short of success, longevity and sustainability. We argue that the indifferent, albeit variable, success of most projects is attributable to the construction of the geographical scale of ‘community-based’ and the deficit view flowing down to the ‘community’ through hubris policy, funding guidelines and individual implementers. Our findings show that ‘experts’ are working in Pacific communities, conducting assessments that involve asking what ‘community’ needs are, going away to design projects, coming back and implementing projects, which communities are inevitably challenged to sustain once funding has ceased. We postulate that these limitations stem from such a formation of adaptation work that pejoratively fails to see Pacific Islanders in situ as the best litmus test of their own agendas, needs, aspirations and futures and in the best position to make decisions for themselves about what and how they might become more resilient. We claim from a growing body of evidence and new frontiers in research that, rather than adaptation being ‘community-based’, it needs to be ‘locally led’, not limited to ‘communities’, and should take place across different entry points and incorporate, as appropriate, elements of autonomous/Indigenous peoples ownership.

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of community-based adaptation (CBA) research. Concisely defined, CBA “…embodies adaptation practice that is small-scale, place based and often grassroots-driven, engages development practitioners and development approaches, and most importantly is community-based” (Schipper et al. 2014, p. 3). This body of work has detailed the emergence of and push for CBA, identified key drivers, along with enablers and barriers to effective CBA (see systematic review of 128 CBA publications by McNamara and Buggy 2017). A key acknowledged strength of CBA is its focus on the local scale. This provides an opportunity for adaptation initiatives to be driven by and connect with local priorities and culturally grounded knowledge, and for impacts and vulnerability more broadly to be addressed at the scale at which they are experienced by the people they affect most (Berkes and Jolly 2001; Ayers and Forsyth 2009; Kirkby et al. 2017). Drawing on studies on CBA in the Pacific, outcome effectiveness is often contingent on local governance structures and social networks and the integration of local concerns in project design and implementation (Remling and Veitayaki 2016; Clarke et al. 2019).

In principle at least, focusing on the local scale allows for deeper acknowledgement and integration of existing local knowledge, capabilities and context of the community (Smit and Wandel 2006; Ensor and Berger 2009). Numerous Pacific studies have highlighted the need for Indigenous knowledge to be integrated meaningfully into projects (Remling and Veitayaki 2016; Laure 2017; Warrick et al. 2017; Nalau et al. 2018). CBA has also been considered as a ‘no-regrets’ approach to deliver improvements to development aspirations and pro-poor development outcomes (Heltberg et al. 2009; Barnett and Campbell 2010). These bottom-up efforts and increasing emphasis on local people and their knowledge have created further impetus to scale-up community-based approaches (Schipper et al. 2014).

On the flip side, there are numerous challenges plaguing CBA. Relying on the local scale can present issues such as its limited influence on broader structural processes at play across various international, regional and national dialogues (Conway and Mustelin 2014). There is also a pre-conceived limit to what communities can do on their own without access to global information, resources, finance and outside expertise (Fenton et al. 2014; Spires et al. 2014). Imagining communities as ‘homogenous’ is also a concern for CBA whereby intra-community inequalities need to be properly identified and addressed in terms of resources and power (Ensor and Berger 2009; Dodman and Mitlin 2013; Nunn and Kumar 2018; Titz et al. 2018). Some Pacific CBA studies have demonstrated concerns about socio-political contexts and power relations within communities causing limited project success (Buggy and McNamara 2016) while others have highlighted the critical need for gender inequalities to be overcome for successful CBA (Ensor 2016; Clarke et al. 2019). Ignoring entrenched inequities and power structures can further marginalise the most vulnerable, thereby making CBA ineffective and even in some cases maladaptive (Adger 2003; Barnett and O’Neill 2010; Juhola et al. 2016).

Community-based has been heralded in the development, humanitarian, disaster relief and adaptation fields as the central scale at which projects are to be located. Probably the greatest critique of such a location is the question of the ‘ubiquitous’ notion of ‘community’ (Titz et al. 2018). The central premise is to implant a project within the ‘community’, with little understanding of what constitutes a community, knowing that in reality communities are “…fragmented, hybrid, multiple, overlapping, and activated differently in different arenas and practices” (Rose 1999, p. 178). The panacea of ‘community’, without an understanding of the ‘communities’ elusiveness according to Titz et al. (2018) has led to multiple failures. The problem however is built into funding bodies, external agencies and non-government organisations (NGOs) which operate in the adaptation space. For them it is a competitive industry and the discourse is ‘community-based’ and so in order to legitimise, survive and compete they frame and reframe around ‘community’, conceptualising projects in this ‘language’, without critique (Titz et al. 2018). The consequence of this is that ‘communities’ need to be ‘produced’ before the implementer can mobilise the ‘communities’ (Bulley 2013, p. 276).

This paper focuses on findings drawn from various communities throughout Vanuatu, an archipelago of 83 islands in the South-West Pacific. Its population of 272,459 is spread across an area of 12,189 square kilometres (Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2016). Vanuatu is characterised as a Small Island Developing State and a Least Developed Country, ranked 131 out of 187 countries in the latest Human Development Index (United Nations 2016). It has also been consistently ranked as the country with the highest disaster exposure risk according to the World Risk Report (Heintz et al. 2018; United Nations 2016). 81% of Vanuatu’s landmass and 76% of its population are vulnerable to a diverse array of hazards including cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. The impacts of climate change also present major present and future concerns with high confidence in a further future increase in extremely high temperatures, extreme rainfall events, sea-level rise and ocean acidification (BOM and CSIRO 2014). As such, its people (Ni-Vanuatu) and communities are seen on these various barometers as being abjectly poor and vulnerable, and funding and projects have thus burgeoned. To visit such communities paints a greatly contrasting picture of vulnerability with resilience, Kastom (traditional culture/custom) and pride ubiquitous, along with significant local knowledge and experiences in responding to past disasters and extreme weather events (Campbell 1990; McNamara and Prasad 2014). Yet while vast amounts of funding for adaptation continues to come into the Pacific Islands region, which has the highest per capita of climate aid globally (Betzold 2016), growing evidence of limited success makes us question its effectiveness and sustainability (Piggott-McKellar et al. 2019).

This paper is not about naming or shaming donors, investors, NGOs or any implementing agencies. Based on our fieldwork in Vanuatu, but also based on over 50 collective years of the authors’ researching adaptation in rural island contexts, we see some uniformed approaches to adaptation that result in mixed or poor performance and some practices that are doomed to fail. There are also initiatives and lessons from better practices and projects that offer hope and warrant recognition. Sharing both poor and positive outcomes contributes to the growing (but still limited) empirical work on the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of adaptation across SIDS more broadly (Klöck and Nunn 2019). As for the Pacific, expanding on existing empirically grounded studies to identify good practice and inform better decision-making and outcomes for communities is a matter of urgency (see Dumaru 2010; Ensor 2016; Remling and Veitayaki 2016; Clarke et al. 2019).

This paper will speak generally about projects (n = 15) across four villages on three different islands of Vanuatu so as to draw broad lessons but to avoid identifying the specifics of each project and who funded it. Such generalised discussions will elucidate what the authors have discovered from talking with ‘host communities’ following each project’s implementation. Since some ‘communities’ involved feared repercussions if they were clearly identified as talking to the researchers, we have anonymised our study sites.

Researchers engaged with four Ni-Vanuatu communities through focus group discussions, formal interviews and informal conversations about the projects. Projects intended to assist climate-change adaptation, including: rainwater harvesting in two communities by different implementing agencies; water piping from a natural source to two communities; pollution and disease proofing existing rainwater harvesting; coral restoration in one community; bee-keeping across two communities; a solar food drying initiative in one community; freshwater fish farming in one community; forestry nursery and replanting along the foreshore in one community; seawall construction to enable safe and secure access for one community; agroforestry training and establishment of a root crops nursery in one community; crown-of-thorns starfish eradication project in one community; compost toilets in one community; poultry farming in one community; and replanting grasslands to inhibit erosion in one community. In total, 60 people were formally involved in this research (33 women, 27 men) across eight formal focus groups and four in-depth interviews, along with numerous informal conversations, during November–December 2018. A focus group guide was used to ascertain the performance of these projects in reducing people’s vulnerability, by considering the project’s appropriateness, effectiveness, equity, impact and sustainability. While there is no universal adaptation evaluation framework, there have been a growing number of attempts to establish evaluation tools and approaches, which this study draws from (see Hedger et al. 2008; Bours et al. 2013; Faulkner et al. 2015). A local Ni-Vanuatu research assistant acted as both the gatekeeper to the communities and translator during data collection. Group discussions were largely conducted in Bislama (at times parts of the discussions were in English) and were recorded. Ethical clearance was provided through The University of Queensland (No 2018001985). We first provide a summary of key lessons that emerged from the fieldwork, followed by a discussion about what this all means for the future of CBA in the Pacific.

Key lessons from the field

Poor project performance comes from the top

First and foremost, donor restrictions can readily predict the on-the-ground outcome of CBA projects for communities. By and large, projects that performed poorly on all levels were predestined to do so by specific donor funding guidelines that determined how projects should, would and could be enabled. Two such projects related to water security issues. One project was constrained by criteria established by the donor that demanded all resources, infrastructure and technical work for rainwater tanks be done overseas to exact specifications, and implemented with their expertise but this proved to be problematic when it failed operationally post implementation. Community members wanted to be involved in the implementation, which showed how the ‘framing’ of the donor of these adaptation projects actually resulted in the project performing poorly. Similarly, another water project which the donor criteria for intervention stipulated the number of people the adaptation project had to ‘serve’ inevitably resulted in water being piped from a natural source to one community and then on to another community (hence the stipulation led to working with two small ‘communities’); not long after implementation the agreement broke down between the communities causing conflict. Although one community did benefit and was satisfied, the other community never experienced direct positive outcomes. Such constructions are exactly what Titz et al. (2018) warns and fears when the elusiveness of ‘community’ is present and the ‘framing’ by agencies may not be for the benefit of those intended to serve. The prescriptive nature of funding conditions had a direct impact on the implementers’ decision-making, project negotiation and site selection. If Islanders at multiple scales had driven the agenda and not the donor with their stringent funding conditions, these water security projects may have been sustainable in the longer term.

Implementers also have their own agendas

Community members shared seeing implementers as having genuine community aspirations in their vision. Yet despite this, the visits by implementers often involved rapid community assessments, needs being superficially and hurriedly identified and articulated, brainstorming, going away to think about how best to serve the community, coming back and implementing, and then ultimately letting communities take control of the projects. The product of this process was that communities felt that projects were generally appropriate given the information they were given but the long-term sustainability of projects was lacking. One remedy used to address this included the implementer paying individual and active community members to run committees to sustain projects but once funding ceased or that person lost interest or moved elsewhere, the projects started to break down. This is exemplified by a forestry nursery project that aimed to control soil erosion, responsibility for which was passed back and forth between individuals and the community until the nursery ceased operating. Another example was the training and support for honey-bee husbandry as a small enterprise development to diversify livelihoods, and one involving agroforestry and root crop nursery establishment; both these projects broke down and were perceived more as a trial of possible adaptation projects driven by the implementers. The difficulty of trialling is that people can feel fatigue and adaptation money can be wasted. Such a framing according to Titz et al. (2018) is captured by a mere technical solution at a local level. Such an approach stems from a potential perceived ‘expertise’ of implementers rather than a locally led approach underwritten by Indigenous knowledge.

No consideration of local norms and context

Potentially innovative approaches to tackling multiple problems are being implemented in a top-down way. One such initiative was a composting toilet as a solution to protect groundwater supplies and increase soil nutrients in the form of compost. The project failed for a number of reasons but at a fundamental level largely because of local cultural norms and context. Compost toilets have been pushed in the Pacific to combat multiple water and sanitation hygiene (WASH) issues and although not documented in the literature, the authors have anecdotal evidence to suggest that past failures have been around local misconceptions about the cleanliness of compost toilets and cultural and safety barriers to this technological adaptation.

The community stated that they were not comfortable from the outset with the concept and therefore encouraged the implementer to locate the composting toilet at a local school for children to use while in attendance. Its correct usage, including the application of appropriate dry waste, was not maintained by the teachers and, as a result, caused it to smell and eventually to become disused. People also generally did not feel comfortable using the fertiliser produced because of misconceptions and fears around safety and hygiene. The project’s ultimate demise, although it was not highly successful anyway, was when it was completely destroyed during tropical cyclone Pam in March 2015.

Concerns about ‘elite capture’

Concerns about the same individuals being prominent in many of the CBA projects rolled out by implementing agencies were noted throughout the fieldwork. Such ‘elite capture’, whereby project benefits are often ‘captured’ by more powerful people or groups in the community to the detriment of others (Dutta 2009), was prevalent throughout these communities. Often it was the same individuals who were the beneficiaries of training, resources, employment, direct financial gain or decision-making related to these external CBA initiatives. “As a consequence, socially embedded inequalities and vulnerabilities inherent to local power relations are reinforced” (Titz et al. 2018, p. 6).

The converse of this bore an example of entrepreneurship. A solar food dryer initiative involved training women to learn how to use a communal solar dryer and they each took turns using it to dry food to sell to tourists and at local markets. Participants and the broader collective, over time lost interest and an individual who was a part of this took it upon herself to purchase one of the dryers and pursue it as an individual business venture. Through this process she is now training and mobilising other women to use this technique on other islands to dry food items, increasing income and building resilience, especially by creating emergency food reserves in the event of extreme weather events.

Problems with limited or no ‘community’ ownership

A key insight that came through in discussions was the limited involvement in project design and implementation of projects by communities. One project involved overriding the community’s expressed need by the project donor, which designed and implemented a project based on its own determination of community need. A deficit mindset led the implementer to use no local knowledge or resources during the process. In fact, such was the case that the community expressed dismay at the project’s failure and felt disempowered to rectify or sustain it. Had the community been involved, participated in the implementation, then they stated they would have undertaken a completely different approach to meet that need. The failure of the composting toilet, described earlier, suggests the same mentality and model and its failure was similarly predestined by a lack of local ownership of the process.

Positive outcomes as communities strengthen their own assets

One of the most successful and sustainable projects utilised a strengths-based and asset-based approach. First, the ‘community’ had clear and in-depth knowledge of their strengths and assets, particularly in relation to marine resources. In fact what was unique about this project was rather than being one ‘community’ it was a whole-of-island approach. In 2010–2011, there was an outbreak of the crown-of-thorns starfish on important food-producing reefs and associated nearshore ecosystems. The implementing agency supported and trained the Islander members in the collection, land-based kill, and composting of the carcasses for fertiliser for the gardens. Clean-up competitions were used to incentivise the process involving women, men and children. The success was that it was a whole-of-island approach, which few other projects studied employed. Such an approach is a different scale of project implementation which according to Titz et al. (2018) might be more appropriate for CBA. The outbreak was contained, and no further outbreaks have since occurred. When discussing what drove the island to identify this project, a local poignantly stated: “We know our resources are the water, if the coral is dead there is no more fish, so we will collect and prevent, and we know how” (FG participant).

Varying success when projects are rooted in local institutions

Other more successful projects involved seawall construction, local coral restoration, poultry farming, fish farming, pollution and disease proofing existing rainwater harvesting. The common thing holding these more successful projects together is that local institutions were central to the process. One was undertaken by the Vanuatu government, one by a local NGO within the community, and three were undertaken in partnership with a local technical college. Local institutions ensured that, once funding ceased or people moved, the project continued to operate. The seawall construction, although its long-term viability might be questioned, met community needs and they have played an ongoing role in its maintenance since its subsequent construction by the government. The coral restoration project is also being sustained, and is bearing witness to the success of the local NGO and its ability to build community momentum. The three projects partnering with the local technical college were not successful to the same extent, having briefly ceased during staffing transitions, but are again being revived as evidence of their previous success becomes appreciated. Rooting projects in alternative scales might offer proper entry points for investigation or implementation, rather than the elusive ‘community’ (Titz et al. 2018).

Discussion: The future of CBA

The systemic cause of variable success of CBA projects we believe is driven first and foremost by a deficit discourse which filters down from donors, to implementers, to communities, and even into the psyche of community members. The deficit discourse is best articulated by Fogarty et al. (2018) in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context of Australia. They argue from Fforde et al. (2013) that the ‘deficit discourse’ “is a mode of thinking that frames and represents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity in a narrative of negativity, deficiency and failure” (Fforde et al. 2013 cited in Fogarty et al. 2018, p. 2). We build on that notion and suggest that the ‘Other’, referencing Said’s (1978) work, or ‘Global South’ peoples in general, and particularly Pacific Islanders, is framed in this ‘deficit discourse’ in the same way by outsiders as Fogarty et al. (2018) see the narrative framing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders identity. Discourse is powerful as it frames a whole mentality, and course of action and practice. Such notions conjure up images of ‘helping the poor’, victims, destitute, and those without self-efficacy, resources, and autonomy.

Donors, governments, practitioners and academics often uncritically focus on this and the enfolding deficiencies, what is missing in the locale; thus creating ‘problems’ to be ‘solved’ (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993). This directly leads to local efficacy and agency being undermined, local people’s autonomous capacity for problem solving to be undercut, and creativity and capabilities to be stymied (Mathie and Cunningham 2003). This deficit discourse is compounded by top-down structures that the mainstream international development community has been grappling with for decades and now too, the muddied waters of the adaptation and disaster management communities, are wrestling with. Building on Nunn’s (2013) work on diminishing adaptive capacity and resilience through growing dependence on donor agendas and funding, as well as Reid and Schipper’s (2014) work highlighting the pretext of bottom-up under the guise of ‘community-based’, we argue that the deficit discourse has corrupted adaptation (and also disaster relief, see Hagelsteen and Becker 2013).

We argue that such a model which focuses on weaknesses rather than strengths (Mathie and Cunningham 2003) is being repeated uncritically in the new wave of adaptation. We argue that by and large lessons have not been learnt from studies in critical development and decolonising methodologies, and as a consequence, climate adaptation is largely being “…done to a community…” (Barnett 2008, p. 45; Westoby and McNamara 2013). We further argue that external funding-led initiatives are time specific and success is measured on that short one-to-three year time frame (Conway and Mustelin 2014). Once that funding ceases and enthusiasm have waned, the project often collapses, and everyone moves on except the people on the ground who then have to deal with the outfall.

Moreover, our findings build on the working of Titz et al. (2018), and call into question the geographical scale of ‘community’ as the appropriate entry point for adaptation work. Whole-of-island or local ecosystem approaches, embedding projects in local institutions, or working with particular population groups such as women might be more appropriate scales/locales for intervention. Such findings point towards alternative scales of support and work and examples such as landscape approaches (ridge-to-reef), involving multi-sectoral and multi-partner show promise in the Pacific (Conway and Mustelin 2014).

The lessons documented here—poor and positive—point us towards borrowing initially from the World Bank’s approach that supports national governments implement community-driven development. According to the World Bank (2018), this type of development involves: “partnering with communities and local units of government, including putting resources under the direct control of community groups”. We borrow with caution. We need to go further. The critiques of this approach, still being project focused, falling into the traps of elite capture and other issues beg for more radical approaches (Mansuri and Rao 2004). We are putting forward a call to all involved in adaptation that it cannot be simply ‘based’ in communities, it needs to be wholly ‘led’ by local people and local institutions (The Movement for Community Led Development 2019) and it should build on traditional knowledge and coping mechanisms (Nunn and Kumar 2019). This is more than a shift in nomenclature, it is a re-framing around how adaptation needs to be pursued going forward. We propose that locally led climate adaptation is the next frontier. The project fighting the crown-of-thorns starfish outbreak across a whole island is a good example of this. This involves placing local agencies (whether that be people on the ground, local institutions or national governments, or regional partners) at the centre and ensuring practitioners develop capacity so that adaptation will be driven by local people across scale rather than by self-identified and often external technocratic experts.

Where to from here?

What we have been seeing for a decade or more in ‘developing’ country contexts is a long list of lessons in the growing CBA literature to improve CBA practice and outcomes for communities. The key arguments presented in this paper reiterate many of these lessons (importance of local context and knowledge, awareness of inequity issues, need for whole of community participation and so on). But our key point of departure from these studies is that, even with these well-meaning and insightful lessons, CBA initiatives continue to have limited success in the Pacific. We believe this is because of the way we normatively frame CBA to begin with: as the geographical scale at which adaptation ‘takes place’. It is problematic for these initiatives to be simply ‘based’ in communities, because communities are not homogenous, and our findings show that entry points for support need to shift. We believe this is the root of widespread and enduring project failure. When the entry point is not predestined by the construction of ‘community’ and resources and planning decisions are firmly in the hands of different local scales that are well thought out then local culture, local context, local dynamics, local resources, local knowledge and aspirations are immediate currency that can be utilised. This is a call to those at the top, at the donor/investor level, to break the shackles of framing adaptation around ‘community’ for its own security and longevity, and to allow for effective and sustainable locally led adaptation, in all its forms and scales.

Biographies

Ross Westoby

is a Research Fellow with Griffith Institute for Tourism (GIFT) at Griffith University specialising in the intersection between tourism, livelihoods and climate change. He is a social scientist whose research focus is grounded in placing ‘community’ at the centre of climate change adaptation and sustainable tourism destinations. Central to his work is understanding the complex cultural, social, political and economic forces at play in the adaptation and tourism spaces. He previously played a central role in evaluating 15 climate change adaptation projects in Vanuatu, has conducted numerous consultancies throughout the Pacific Islands and Torres Strait region, and has worked in research and evaluation for a social justice NGO in Brisbane.

Karen McNamara

is a human geographer in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at The University of Queensland (UQ). She undertakes research into the impacts of, and responses to, environmental change on people’s livelihoods, particularly in the Pacific Islands region and parts of Asia. She has been undertaking research in this area for over 15 years, partnering with numerous governments, and inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations throughout the Asia-Pacific region. She has published more than 70 academic papers and book chapters. She is currently involved in a number of projects on community-based climate change adaptation, human mobilities, loss and damage, and everyday experiences of climate change.

Roselyn Kumar

On completion of a postgraduate qualification in climate change and an undergraduate degree in Geography and Earth Sciences, she worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Applied Sciences in the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. During her assistantship, she worked with multicultural communities in Fiji, helping and empowering them to establish Marine Protected Areas to ensure sustainable approaches to food security measures. Part of her role extended to working on numerous archaeological sites in Fiji with international collaborators and the local institutions such as the Fiji Museum and the National Trust of Fiji. She was a co-coordinator of numerous archaeological excavations in Fiji. She is currently undertaking a PhD focused on reconstructing a 3,000-year-old environment at Bourewa, one of the oldest sites occupied by the Lapita people in Fiji, using climate proxy records in shells. She remains curious about past climatic changes and how they influenced societal evolution in the Asia-Pacific region and is passionate about empowering communities towards autonomy rather than dependency, consuming local grown foods and maintaining food security.

Patrick D. Nunn

is a Professor of Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Queensland). For more than 30 years, his research has focused on climate change issues in the Pacific Islands, understanding past and (likely) future human–climate interactions and their implications for coastal livelihoods. This work has seen the publication of several books including Oceanic Islands (Blackwell, 1994) and Climate, Environment and Society in the Pacific (Elsevier, 2007) and more than 260 peer-reviewed publications. A long involvement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) led to Patrick sharing its 2007 Nobel Peace Prize; he was a lead author on the chapter about ‘Sea Level Change’ in the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report and is currently a lead author on the chapter about ‘Small Islands’ for its 6th Assessment.