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Over the last decades, the Pacific Ocean has been the locus of an unequalled rush for space and resources involving intertwined public and corporate interests, external powers, and Pacific Island states and territories. This rush is driven by three intersecting motivations aiming to: (1) exploit marine resources; (2) protect marine biodiversity and mitigate the effects of climate change; and (3) establish sovereignties over marine spaces. In this context, the fluidity of saltwater environments gives rise to specific issues of enforcement, control, and governance. This special issue examines these reconfigurations of/in the Pacific Ocean, stressing potentially conflicting frontier processes, in the light of a structuring tension between trends of ocean grabbing and ocean commoning.

Recognition of the multiple types of value of marine resources is crucial to help design locally meaningful and sustainable management approaches for marine and coastal habitats. There is a lack of information on the amount of living marine resources harvested by coastal communities in many Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs), as well as on their economic and non-economic value. This paper explores the monetary, subsistence, and sociocultural value of selected marine resources (finfish and invertebrates) in Kadavu province, Fiji, based on a household survey and semi-structured interviews conducted in 2019 within one specific district. The paper provides estimates of the annual catch and monetary value of marine resources harvested by local communities at both the district and provincial levels, derived from catch and effort information collected from fishers and gleaners in situ. It also highlights the importance of integrating the sociocultural significance of marine resources into future value assessments.

Healthy and protected coral reefs help island systems in the tropics thrive and survive. Reef passages link the open ocean to lagoon and coastal areas in these ecosystems and are home to an exceptionally diverse and abundant marine life, hosting emblematic species and fish spawning aggregations. Their multiple benefits for the islands and their peoples (e.g., for transport, fishing, socio-cultural aspects) remain yet understudied. Drawing from qualitative interviews with fishers, scuba divers, and surfers along the coast of Grande Terre in New Caledonia, this study highlights the multi-faceted importance of these keystone places. It shows that reef passages are locally deemed ‘communication zones’ between coastal and oceanic spaces and species, and have significant un(der)explored ecological and socio-cultural roles. Understanding and protecting these ecological and cultural keystone places will strengthen both the reef ecosystems and the people dependent on them.

In the South Pacific region, marine territories and resources play a crucial role for local communities. Children engage with these territories and resources from an early age onwards. As the next ocean stewards, they are a stakeholder group whose understandings of ocean connectivity and fisheries should be given serious consideration in decision-making processes towards the sustainable use and management of coastal seas. This paper analyses 290 children's drawings from Fiji and New Caledonia, created in 2019 in spontaneous response to the instruction: "Draw the sea and what you and others do in the sea". Exploring the webs of connections with and within the sea revealed by these children's drawings and their own interpretations leads us to discuss children's representations of the sea: (1) beyond a land-sea compartmentation, (2) as a locus of both exploitation and conservation of marine life, and (3) as a 'place-full' space connecting human and more-than-human realms.

International audience; While categorized as Small Island Developing States, South Pacific Island nations are the custodians of major ocean areas containing marine resources of high commercial and environmental significance. Yet, these resources are threatened by climate change, overfishing, Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, as well as habitat destruction. The study, carried out in the early stage of the interdisciplinary research project SOCPacific (https://socpacific.net), aims to: a) identify the main policies on which fisheries management is currently based in the South Pacific, particularly in Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu; b) investigate the evolution over time of key issues covered in these policies and related to coastal and/or offshore fisheries sectors; c) trace disconnections on the matter between legally binding instruments and non-binding strategies. A list of more than 200 documents relevant to regional fisheries management was gathered and separated into legally binding instruments and non-binding strategies. Legal instruments focused more on offshore issues (tuna fisheries and IUU fishing) and increasingly covered IUU fishing issues, confirming that tuna fisheries have an established hard policy arena. In strategies pertaining to coastal fisheries, community involvement appears as a key topic and a clear overall trend towards increasingly addressing climate change was spotlighted. Sustainability, community involvement, climate change, and food security issues are more covered in strategies than in legal instruments. Topics mostly addressed in relation to coastal areas are not substantially covered in legal instruments, suggesting that establishing binding measures might not be deemed as beneficial as strategies in coastal fields.

Based on the cross-referencing of ethnographic materials collected in Fiji and Vanuatu, this article explores the diverse ways faith and climate change are connected together and how these connections are sustained and transformed over time. It does so through the prism of three 'practices of assemblage' identified by Tania Murray Li, namely forging alignments, authorising knowledge, and reassembling. It emphasises the partnership and combined efficacy of faith-based organisations and the Bible in these practices, while revealing the role of various other actants including God, NGOs, youth activists, cyclones, a Ni-Vanuatu canoe, and Fiji's Presidency of COP23. This approach highlights the coexistence, in both Fiji and Vanuatu, of a religiously informed and adaptation-oriented environmental stewardship narrative, stressing human responsibility in the face of climate change, with a counter-narrative considering climate change as God's business. This coexistence sometimes creates tensions between worldly and religious responses to climate change. These different religious perspectives of climate change can also be deployed as a political resource in nation-building processes, regional power relations, and international climate negotiations. In Oceania indeed, climate change appears as a new arena in which the inextricable entanglement of Christianity and politics is revealed.

International audience

International audience; Since the 1990s, natural resource management programmes are expected to integrate the holistic environmental knowledge of the indigenous people concerned, and this is supposed to significantly contribute to the empowerment of the latter. Yet, social science studies have established that, in practice, this is not automatically the case. Based on anthropological research in Fiji (South Pacific), this paper aims to contribute, through a specific focus on fisheries management, to the challenging of the power asymmetries still underlying most endeavours to combine indigenous knowledge systems and western ecological science. In particular, it highlights that the concept of 'overfishing'-a decisive driver of today's coastal and reef fisheries management efforts in Fiji and beyond-tends to veil the 'connectedness in all things' that is at the core of the indigenous Fijian (iTaukei) epistemology, articulated around the vernacular concept of vanua. In the frame of this concept, human and fish behaviours are intrinsically interrelated, not only from ecological and economic perspectives, but also through fundamental sociocultural, spiritual and political relationships. The authors therefore advocate for a framing of coastal and reef fisheries management efforts that systematically (1) builds upon the iTaukei relational ontology and knowledge system, and (2) involves the local customary and religious leaders in accordance with their own worldview and values.

Cette synthèse met en question l’idée généralement acceptée selon laquelle les sociétés du Pacifique sont toutes condamnées, à plus ou moins brève échéance, à un avenir incertain malgré leurs expositions, expériences et attitudes fondamentalement différentes face au changement climatique. Le discours scientifique sur le changement climatique sert de catalyseur à la création, au niveau régional, de nouvelles alliances et de nouveaux mouvements visant à prendre des mesures proactives face au changement climatique, de l’échelle locale à l’échelle globale. Nous préconisons donc une vision nuancée des changements liés au climat qui se produisent actuellement dans le Pacifique ; une vision fondée sur une approche multi-échelle intégrant les dimensions écologiques, socioculturelles, économiques et politiques de ces changements. Cela nécessite la construction de passerelles, encore trop peu nombreuses et fragiles, entre les approches proposées par les sciences environnementales et par les sciences sociales. Nous proposons de contribuer à ces efforts en mettant en relation certaines des recherches et projections scientifiques avec la diversité des perceptions, des discours et des stratégies d’adaptation développées localement. This overview challenges the commonly accepted notion that Pacific societies are all doomed to an uncertain near and distant future despite their inherently different exposures to, experiences of, and attitudes to climate change. It also recognizes that the scientific narrative of climate change acts as a catalyst for new regional alliances and movements aiming to take proactive climate action, from the global to the local levels. We therefore advocate for nuanced views of the climate-related changes that are occurring in the Pacific region, based on a multi-scalar approach that integrates the ecological, sociocultural, economic and political dimensions of these changes. This would require the building of bridges, still too few and fragile, between the environmental and social science approaches. We intend to contribute to these efforts by connecting some of the most recent scientific research and projections concerning global climate change and its effects in the Pacific region, alongside the diversity of local perceptions, narratives and adaptation pathways.

International audience; Cet ouvrage présente une étude originale du rôle des rangers aborigènes en Australie, au cœur du mouvement social ou projet de vie Caring for Country. Cette fonction est supposée contribuer à maintenir les modalités traditionnelles d’interaction avec la terre et la mer dans les communautés concernées, en tant que reformulation contemporaine d’un rôle coutumier. L’auteure montre qu’elle relève d’un processus de professionnalisation, de bureaucratisation et de redistribution des responsabilités envers la terre et la mer transmises par les précédentes générations.Au fil de ses quatre chapitres, l’ouvrage révèle l’importance d’examiner comment divers niveaux d’influence s’imbriquent et se reflètent dans les activités des rangers et de quelles façons ces processus se traduisent dans le domaine des relations avec la terre et la mer tout comme dans celui des relations sociales internes à ce qui est appelé la « communauté ». L’auteure met également en évidence les tensions inhérentes au fait d’être simultanément un professionnel de la « gestion des ressources naturelles » et un homme ou une femme aborigène impliqué(e) dans des relations de parenté et dans les logiques d’obligation et d’évitement associées. Le cas d’étude présenté illustre, plus généralement, les transformations des formes concrètes de gouvernance des territoires à l’œuvre en Australie, à l’interface de dynamiques exogènes et endogènes intrinsèquement enchevêtrées. Il invite à considérer la complexité des processus visant à articuler les manières aborigènes de penser/panser l’environnement avec des dispositifs scientifiques et bureaucratiques de conservation.

This overview challenges the commonly accepted notion that Pacific societies are all doomed to an uncertain near and distant future despite their inherently different exposures to, experiences of, and attitudes to climate change. It also recognizes that the scientific narrative of climate change acts as a catalyst for new regional alliances and movements aiming to take proactive climate action, from the global to the local levels. We therefore advocate for nuanced views of the climate-related changes that are occurring in the Pacific region, based on a multi-scalar approach that integrates the ecological, sociocultural, economic and political dimensions of these changes. This would require the building of bridges, still too few and fragile, between the environmental and social science approaches. We intend to contribute to these efforts by connecting some of the most recent scientific research and projections concerning global climate change and its effects in the Pacific region, alongside the diversity of local perceptions, narratives and adaptation pathways. Cette synthèse met en question l’idée généralement acceptée selon laquelle les sociétés du Pacifique sont toutes condamnées, à plus ou moins brève échéance, à un avenir incertain malgré leurs expositions, expériences et attitudes fondamentalement différentes face au changement climatique. Le discours scientifique sur le changement climatique sert de catalyseur à la création, au niveau régional, de nouvelles alliances et de nouveaux mouvements visant à prendre des mesures proactives face au changement climatique, de l’échelle locale à l’échelle globale. Nous préconisons donc une vision nuancée des changements liés au climat qui se produisent actuellement dans le Pacifique ; une vision fondée sur une approche multi-échelle intégrant les dimensions écologiques, socioculturelles, économiques et politiques de ces changements. Cela nécessite la construction de passerelles, encore trop peu nombreuses et fragiles, entre les approches proposées par les sciences environnementales et par les sciences sociales. Nous proposons de contribuer à ces efforts en mettant en relation certaines des recherches et projections scientifiques avec la diversité des perceptions, des discours et des stratégies d’adaptation développées localement.

1. Les droits fonciers aborigènes et la notion de « reconnaissance » En Australie, depuis les années 1970, les processus de revendications et de restitutions foncières par et pour des groupes autochtones spécifiques ont progressivement permis aux Aborigènes de récupérer environ 1,7 million de km², soit plus de 20 % du territoire national (Altman 2011 : 2). Ce qui est parfois appelé le « domaine foncier autochtone » (Indigenous estate, Altman et al. 2007) correspond à un patchwork d’ét...

This paper investigates the Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) approach through looking at developments and challenges of community-based marine resource management over time, with a particular focus on Fiji in the South Pacific region. A diachronic perspective, based on two multi-method empirical studies, is used to exemplify the social complexities of the implementation of this LMMA approach in a specific island setting. This perspective connects local stakeholders' establishment and management of a LMMA covering their entire customary fishing rights area (iqoliqoli) with the national context articulated around the Fiji Locally Managed Marine Area (FLMMA) network, as well as with regional networking and international conservation dynamics. It especially explores the impacts of a small-scale marine closure (so-called tabu area) on the harvesting patterns in a portion of this LMMA, related aspects of formal and informal enforcement, and villagers' views of the health of their reef fishery. This case study reveals a lack of consensus on the current management of this closure as a conditionally-opened no-take area, whose temporary openings (re)produce social tensions, as well as a lack of consensus on the effects of this closure on the reef fishery, which is subject to poaching. The paper highlights that the articulation between conservation and extraction of marine resources, as well as between short-term and longer-term objectives of the community-based marine resource management in place, is a complex sociopolitical process even at the most local level. The discussion also points out that local observations and interpretations of coastal resource dynamics, and of the interplay between fishery and community changes, might be instrumental in addressing the limits of the area-based system of management inherent in the LMMA approach. These insights into both the development process of the LMMA approach and the challenges of its local implementation and maintenance efforts can be useful to consider the adjustments necessary for Fiji's achievement of its national coastal fisheries management strategy and its international ocean governance commitments.

http://books.openedition.org/pacific/395; International audience

"Fisheries in the Pacific : The Challenges of Governance and Sustainability" is a multidisciplinary book, which examines various aspects of coastal and oceanic fisheries in Pacific waters. These interrelated fisheries sectors are critical for regional food security and also represent a reserve of food resources for the rest of the world. The introduction and eight chapters highlight that both these sectors raise major economic and ecological issues while revealing significant social changes, political asymmetries and alliances, geostrategic rationales, developments in legislation, customary dynamics, and conservation challenges. Through complementary approaches and interpretations of both quantitative and qualitative data, this book aims to contribute to a better understanding of the current situation of fisheries in the Pacific. It also responds to the compelling need to establish a constructive and ongoing dialogue on the matter between social scientists and environmental scientists, based in Europe and in the Pacific Islands, and between these experts and the various stakeholders and policy-making institutions involved in the Pacific region.

International audience

International audience; Since the mid-1990s, natural resource management or ‘‘ranger’’ jobs have been established in manyIndigenous communities of northern Australia. These jobs are based on the formalization and professionalizationof ‘‘traditional’’ responsibilities for the land and the sea referred to as ‘‘caring for country.’’ They arepredominantly funded by the Australian government through policies and programs that combineenvironmental conservation and Indigenous economic development objectives. Fire management is usually oneof the Indigenous rangers’ main activities. This paper endeavors to analyze the power relations and ambivalencesinherent in these rangers’ burning practices, described in the scientific literature as ‘‘community-based.’’ The jointor integrated use of ‘‘traditional ecological knowledge’’ and Western science is widely advocated for programsusing anthropogenic fires for conservation purposes. We argue that in northern Australia, attempts to integratethese two systems of knowledge have resulted in a de facto transfer of the social and ritual responsibility of burningthe country from specific Indigenous custodians (traditional owners and managers) to Indigenous rangers, non-Indigenous fire ecologists, and other non-Indigenous actors.While traditional owners and local people are supposedto define and control their rangers’ fire management activities, local involvement is impeded by the role of externalexperts. Furthermore, attempts to combine Indigenous and non-Indigenous fire knowledge entangle differentunderstandings of what a ‘‘traditional’’ fire regime was and should be, and often prioritize Western viewssupported by funding bodies. Consequently, the burning practices implemented by Indigenous rangers can be asource of controversy within local communities and among rangers themselves.

International audience; 'Conservation-as-development' policies are increasingly implemented for and by Indigenous peoples across the world. In particular, such policies have been introduced and adopted in many Indigenous communities of northern Australia since the 1990s. In this context, the transnational model of community-based natural (and cultural) resource management has produced the 'ranger system': a multi-actor, multi-rationale, and multi-level system articulated around job opportunities in the domain of 'caring for country'. In this paper, I explore how the ranger system reflects and extends a process of neoliberal bureaucratisation into Indigenous communities, and to what extent this process can be described as a form of 'bureaucratic participation'. I argue that the notion of 'bureaucratic participation' contributes to the investigation of existing entanglements between rationales of empowerment and neoliberal principles in Australia and beyond. My analysis is based on the ethnography of the daily work of the Indigenous rangers operating from a remote community in Arnhem Land in 2009 and 2010. I examine the complex relationships between local practices and bureaucratic requirements imposed by the Australian state at the core of the Indigenous ranger jobs.

Cet article porte sur les effets de la formalisation récente de responsabilités coutumières aborigènes relatives à l’environnement naturel sous la forme d’emplois (au sens occidental du terme) de rangers aborigènes dans le nord de l’Australie. Il vise à décrire et discuter la position et la fonction de médiation de cette nouvelle catégorie d’acteurs dans les communautés indigènes du Top End australien. Cet article avance que le statut empreint d’ambiguïté de ces rangers, situés à l’interface entre les aspirations de leurs communautés aborigènes locales et des enjeux nationaux et globaux d’ordres économique et écologique, peut mener à une remise en question de leur « aboriginalité ». S’appuyant sur un cas d’étude ethnographique, il analyse les pratiques de gestion de l’environnement par le feu mises en œuvre par les rangers de Ngukurr, une communauté indigène de la Terre d’Arnhem. This paper focuses on the effects of the recent formalisation of indigenous customary responsibilities in relation to the natural environment in the form of mainstream jobs for Aboriginal rangers in northern Australia. It endeavours to describe and discuss the mediating position and role of this new category of actors in the Australian Top End’s indigenous communities. The paper argues that the ambiguous status of these rangers, who are at the interface between their local indigenous communities’ aspirations and economic and ecological national and global stakes, may cause their « Aboriginality » to come under scrutiny. Based on an ethnographic case study, it analyses practices of fire management as undertaken by rangers in Ngukurr, an indigenous community in Arnhem Land.

International audience; https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/canf20/current

International audience

Introduction Commodities are defined in economics as marketable and interchangeable goods or services produced to satisfy wants or needs; they can also be inputs in the production of other goods and services with commodity prices determined by supply and demand. This chapter questions if fisheries should be considered as just economic commodities or something broader which we refer to as “natural heritage”. “Natural heritage” refers to the biodiversity inherited from past generations,...

International audience