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For the last 15 years and across Fiji's three universities, over 40,000 students have completed mandatory courses in Ethics and Governance. Emerging from growing perceptions of graduate misconduct, Fiji's 2006 'clean-up' military coup and corporate scandals from Enron to the Fiji National Bank, these courses explore personal, political and corporate governance and topics ranging from religion, human rights, cultural relativism and gender, to the environment, business ethics, personal integrity and the meaning of work. This article reports on intra-university contests regarding the merits, costs, values and efficacy of these courses. Frequently mischaracterised as moral instruction, and ineffective at producing the 'good employee', some courses have been replaced with program-specific professional ethics courses. The andragogic philosophy of these courses, however, targets moral autonomy and ethical literacy, skills aimed more for the 'good citizen'. Whether the remaining mandatory, holistic Ethics courses continue may depend on what student outcomes Fiji's universities prioritise most.

Development studies are ambivalent about the relationship between climate change adaption and Pacific Christianity. Biblical belief about Noah's covenant and the End Times are understood to undermine risk perception, while church membership is seen to threaten cross-denominational cooperation, hampering adaptive capacity. Yet the communicative reach and charismatic authority of Pacific churches remain the envy of development specialists working on climate change. This focus on belief and institutional capital, however, neglects how Christian ritual practice can orientate and stabilise faith communities. Drawing on fieldwork in rural Fiji investigating village migration due to coastal flooding from sea-level rise, this paper shows how ritual practice strengthens community resilience when responding to climate change. In Vunidogoloa, villagers employed the Old Testament myth of Exodus to (re)create ritual responses to vent the emotional/spiritual trauma of leaving their ancestral home. Whereas in the nearby village Vunisavisavi, such ritual responses have been lacking and village relocation remained problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social desirability reporting leads to over estimations of church attendance. To date, researchers have treated over-reporting of church attendance as a general phenomenon, and have been unable to determine the demographic correlates of inaccuracy in these self-reports. By comparing over eight months of observational data on church attendance (n = 48 services) to self-report in a rural Fijian village, we find that 1) self-report does not reliably predict observed attendance, 2) women with two or more children (≥ 2) are more likely to over-report their attendance than women with fewer children (≤ 1), and 3) self-report of religiosity more reliably predicts observed church attendance than does self-report of church attendance. Further, we find that third-party judgements of church attendance by fellow villagers are more reliably associated with observed church attendance than self-report. Our findings suggest that researchers interested in estimating behavioral variation, particularly in domains susceptible to social desirability effects, should consider developing and employing third-party methods to mitigate biases inherent to self-report., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.