Staying in Place: Building Cultural Security in a Changing Climate

Image: Women on Qoma doing the solesolevaki by the sea / Claudia Fry

As the Pacific prepares to host pre-COP31, the region has a unique opportunity to advance dialogue on peace and security through a Pacific-led climate-peace nexus. Here, the concept of cultural security is gaining prominence, referring to the maintenance and restoration of interrelated elements of cultural identity, social cohesion, and people–place relationships in the face of profound environmental and societal change. This builds on longstanding advocacy from Pacific scholars, activists, and community leaders calling for the centring of Indigenous and local relational knowledge, philosophies, and cultural practices in climate policy.

Yet, due to issues like institutionalized colonialism and lack of understanding of the value of Indigenous and local systems, references to culture and Indigenous knowledge in climate policy often remain tokenistic, reducing complex knowledge and governance systems into frameworks shaped by Western donor-centric worldviews, formulated outside the Pacific region.

Communities choosing to stay on their ancestral lands rather than engaging in climate-related planned relocation offer an important perspective—one that recentres cultural security as fundamental to climate security.

Here, we highlight how cultural security is about more than protecting culture from the impacts of climate change—it is about engaging with the ways that longstanding cultural systems are central to the processes through which communities build peace and security in a changing climate.

Drawing on our work as researchers and practitioners in Fiji, we share knowledge and experiences from two iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) communities who are drawing on their culture to adapt in place. We demonstrate how the Vanua—which within iTaukei communities encompasses people, land, sea, spirituality, ethics, governance, kinship, and ancestors (Tuwere, 2002; Yee et al., 2022) —underpins these strategies. A cultural security approach therefore shifts the focus from community vulnerabilities and dependencies to shared strengths, gifts, and lived knowledges.

We highlight three key elements of cultural security grounded in the Vanua—traditional healing and spirituality; traditional governance structures; and kinship and storytelling—to show how these work together to build resilience in a changing climate.

Traditional healing and reconciliation practices foster peace and security

Climate adaptation policy, and particularly planned relocation, tends to focus on practical aspects of moving and decision-making, overlooking processes of emotional healing as central to the wellbeing of people, land, and sea. Within Indigenous Fijian iTaukei cosmology, all life is understood as relational and interconnected. Healing oneself is therefore inseparable from healing the environment.

Through the Vakabula Vanua project, the Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS) has worked alongside community members in Waikalou, Serea, in the province of Naitasiri, to revive ancestral practices of emotional healing and cleansing called Tolo as part of broader efforts to adapt in place. At the beginning of the project, community members shared that breadfruit trees along the eroding riverbanks were no longer bearing fruit, threatening local food security.

Responding to this and guided by iTaukei relational philosophy, the community undertook the process of Tolo to strengthen kinship ties. As the project concludes, community members describe their breadfruit trees as once again bearing fruit, reflecting that the restoration of kin relations extend beyond people to also include the land, fostering abundance and strengthening food security.

A similar understanding emerges in Qoma island in the province of Tailevu, where community members are choosing to remain on their ancestral lands instead of relocating, despite increasing climate risk. Community members describe that staying in place allows them to maintain and restore relations with their qoliqoli (fishing grounds). As one elder explains: “It depends on how we live on land. If everything is respected and followed, we can feel it when we go out to sea. Our fishing grounds will be plentiful” (Fry, C., and Waqa-Kaitani., forthcoming, Kai Wai: Enacting Resilience and Negotiating Adaptation Governance for Staying in Place in Oceanic Worlds. Geoforum). Here, processes of healing relations within the Vanua is part and parcel of building climate security across interconnected land-sea worlds.

These experiences highlight an opportunity for climate security policy to focus efforts on cultural processes for healing and reconciliation. Such processes have the potential to strengthen relations across interconnected social, environmental, and spiritual worlds, fostering not only relational harmony but food security and social cohesion.

Traditional governance roles guide climate security

Traditional governance structures have guided island communities for hundreds and even thousands of years yet are often sidelined in State-centric policies. This represents not only an injustice arising from ongoing colonialities within climate governance, but a missed opportunity.

Through the Vakabula Vanua project*, Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS) worked with community members to reconnect traditional roles and responsibilities with climate resilience. Each role carries specific responsibilities responding to climate resilience: the gonedau (fisherfolk) care for marine ecosystems; the bati (warriors) safeguard land; sauturaga (king maker) resolve disputes; carpenters provide skills for rebuilding homes after disaster or during relocation; Turaga (chiefs) guide community decision-making, and bete (food priests) looks after food security. Reaffirming these roles strengthened people’s self-identity and enabled the community to organise and respond autonomously to the challenges of climate change.

Community members on Qoma island similarly describe their resilience as embedded within their social structures, maintained under the leadership of Tui Nabulebulewa. For example, rather than waiting for external support, the community draws on strong traditions of solesolevaki (collective work) to enact in-situ adaptation and on soli ni vanua (community fundraising) to build their cyclone proof village hall. In the absence of formal funding for communities choosing to remain, these traditional channels play a critical role.

This reaffirms what Pacific scholars, activists, and leaders have long said: solutions and strategies already exist within communities, embedded within longstanding governance systems. Climate security policy can build from the traditional roles, responsibilities and related knowledges of communities and with that also strengthen cultural identity and reinforce the authority of Indigenous knowledge holders.

Kinship and storytelling enable food security, land access and climate mobilities.

In Fiji, access to land is traditionally governed through kinship systems sustained by oral histories passed down across generations. Instead of relocating, community members on Qoma island manage climate impacts by travelling regularly to land elsewhere to plant their crops. They can access this land through agreements established by their forefathers, held alive through storytelling. At sea, their role as gonedau (fisherfolk) provides access to large fishing grounds through local governance arrangements known locally as Kana Veicurumaki (buffet table), promoting the sharing of marine resources as fishing grounds are degrading. Rather than relocating, these culturally grounded mobilities across lands and reefs allow community members to strengthen their resilience, reinforce kin relations, and with that stay in place.

As another example, through the Vakabula Vanua project, FCOSS worked with Waikalou, Serea to strengthen preparedness for future climate impacts through identifying customary pathways to land access for those without mataqali (clan) land available for future relocation. Specifically, the community draws on Cara sala—an iTaukei process  of tracing kinship between communities to identify land access. Although the community has chosen to remain in place, identifying land through this process provides a culturally grounded approach to planning for future scenarios and securing alternative land should relocation ever become necessary.

Rather than imposing climate mobility frameworks from the outside, these kinship agreements and related mobilities demonstrate an opportunity for climate mobility policy, as a key element of climate security, to build from already long-established  Indigenous ways of knowing and doing mobilities.

Cultural security is foundational to climate security

As the Pacific prepares to shape global thinking on climate security at COP31 and beyond, we provide practical insights on how culture underpins climate security in two Fijian communities.

The experiences of Qoma and Waikalou, Serea demonstrate that cultural security is not simply something to be protected. Traditional healing and spirituality, traditional governance structures, and kinship and storytelling practices, are just a few examples of cultural practices and systems that enable the communities to build security whilst navigating uncertain futures.

This highlights an opportunity for climate security frameworks to focus efforts on supporting, strengthening and sustaining the social and cultural structures of communities who face increasingly severe climate impacts, positioning cultural security as central to climate security.

*This project received funding from Bread for the World and German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, BMZ.

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