• Energy Research

Development studies have often evolved amidst a tension between the tendency to declare all forms of communal management archaic and in need of modernisation via privatisation and market integration, and the temptation to essentialise indigenous management with nostalgia while vilifying market impacts. Closer examination suggests that common property systems will not simply collapse under market pressure, or create defensive bulwarks to maintain market-free enclaves, but can strategically engage with market systems and global trade. This offers opportunity for the design of sustainable environmental policies. Ethnographic examples open discussion of an often dismissed possibility: sometimes the connection of small-scale societies to market systems has created a productive opportunity that has allowed these communities to survive. Peer reviewed

Local perceptions of environmental and climate change, as well as associated adaptations made by local populations, are fundamental for designing comprehensive and inclusive mitigation and adaptation plans both locally and nationally. In this paper, we analyze people's perceptions of environmental and climate-related transformations in communities across the Western Solomon Islands through ethnographic and geospatial methods. Specifically, we documented people's observed changes over the past decades across various environmental domains, and for each change, we asked respondents to identify the causes, timing, and people's adaptive responses. We also incorporated this information into a geographical information system database to produce broad-scale base maps of local perceptions of environmental change. Results suggest that people detected changes that tended to be acute (e.g., water clarity, logging intensity, and agricultural diseases). We inferred from these results that most local observations of and adaptations to change were related to parts of environment/ecosystem that are most directly or indirectly related to harvesting strategies. On the other hand, people were less aware of slower insidious/chronic changes identified by scientific studies. For the Solomon Islands and similar contexts in the insular tropics, a broader anticipatory adaptation planning strategy to climate change should include a mix of local scientific studies and local observations of ongoing ecological changes.

Community-based approaches are pursued in recognition of the need for place-based responses to environmental change that integrate local understandings of risk and vulnerability. Yet the potential for fair adaptation is intimately linked to how variations in perceptions of environmental change and risk are treated. There is, however, little empirical evidence of the extent and nature of variations in risk perception in and between multiple community settings. Here, we rely on data from 231 semi-structured interviews conducted in nine communities in Western Province, Solomon Islands, to statistically model different perceptions of risk and change within and between communities. Overall, people were found to be less likely to perceive environmental changes in the marine environment than they were for terrestrial systems. The distance to the nearest market town (which may be a proxy for exposure to commercial logging and degree of involvement with the market economy), and gender had the greatest overall statistical effects on perceptions of risk. Yet, we also find that significant environmental change is underreported in communities, while variations in perception are not always easily related to commonly assumed fault lines of vulnerability. The findings suggest that there is an urgent need for methods that engage with the drivers of perceptions as part of community-based approaches. In particular, it is important to explicitly account for place, complexity and diversity of environmental risk perceptions, and we reinforce calls to engage seriously with underlying questions of power, culture, identity and practice that influence adaptive capacity and risk perception.

SUMMARYBecause the Anthropocene by definition is an epoch during which environmental change is largely anthropogenic and driven by social, economic, psychological and political forces, environmental social scientists can effectively analyse human behaviour and knowledge systems in this context. In this subject review, we summarize key ways in which the environmental social sciences can better inform fisheries management policy and practice and marine conservation in the Anthropocene. We argue that environmental social scientists are particularly well positioned to synergize research to fill the gaps between: (1) local behaviours/needs/worldviews and marine resource management and biological conservation concerns; and (2) large-scale drivers of planetary environmental change (globalization, affluence, technological change, etc.) and local cognitive, socioeconomic, cultural and historical processes that shape human behaviour in the marine environment. To illustrate this, we synthesize the roles of various environmental social science disciplines in better understanding the interaction between humans and tropical marine ecosystems in developing nations where issues arising from human–coastal interactions are particularly pronounced. We focus on: (1) the application of the environmental social sciences in marine resource management and conservation; (2) the development of ‘new’ socially equitable marine conservation; (3) repopulating the seascape; (4) incorporating multi-scale dynamics of marine social–ecological systems; and (5) envisioning the future of marine resource management and conservation for producing policies and projects for comprehensive and successful resource management and conservation in the Anthropocene.