Speakers:
Andreas Neef is Professor of Global Development and Dean (Research) for the Arts, Education and Law Group at Griffith University, Australia. He has researched and published in the areas of global land and resource grabbing, climate mobilities and mobility justice, climate change adaptation, post-disaster response and recovery, and community resilience. He authored the monograph Tourism, Land Grabs and Displacement: The Darker Side of the Feel-Good Industry (Routledge, 2021) and is lead editor of Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing (2023) and the De Gruyter Handbook of Climate Migration and Climate Mobility Justice (2024).
Anita Latai-Niusulu is a human geographer and an Associate Professor at the National University of Samoa, where she serves as Head of Department of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Arts. Her research includes works in the areas of climate change, urbanization, children’s geographies, nature-based solutions and climate mobilities. She is the lead author of Climate micro-mobilities as adaptation practice in the Pacific: the case of Samoa, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (with Masami Tsujita and Andreas Neef).
Abstract:
This talk presents findings from collaborative commons research in the Pacific Island countries Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa conducted over the past 12 years. In the first part, Andreas Neef will discuss the ambiguous role of corporate and community-based tourism in supporting disaster response and recovery following major cyclone events in Fiji and Vanuatu. Many Indigenous Fijians and Ni-Vanuatu have seen their communal access to natural resources lost or reduced as a consequence of foreign investment in the tourism industry and associated land leases, while few community members found secure employment in the tourism sector to compensate for those losses. Findings suggest that tourism can be a double-edged sword for disaster-prone communities. The focus will then shift to the case study of a foreign iron-ore mining project in the Ba River Delta of Fiji’s main island Viti Levu. The coastal area being mined intersects with customary inshore fishing rights and mangrove areas under a legal pluralist regime. The mining regime has produced new configurations of capitalist spaces in which the government redistributes wealth and resource sovereignty from communities to corporations and the state through means of deception and appropriation by dispossession. In the final part of the talk, Anita Latai-Niusulu will present findings from a joint project on climate micro-mobilities in coastal areas of Samoa’s Upolu Island. She will discuss the importance of collective action and communal land ownership in facilitating short-term and short-distance mobility strategies to remain in coastal areas despite increased climatic risks, such as sea-level rise and coastal flooding.
