Politics of rising tides: governments and nongovernmental organizations in small island developing states
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Climate Change And Ocean Governance, 2019, pp. 118 - 132
- Issue Date:
- 2019-02-21
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Much of the literature concerned with the politics of rising tides is about the involvement of states and others in the processes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its annual Conference of the Parties (COP). Although non-state actors, including international non-government organizations (NGOs), are acknowledged as being part of these processes, it has often been claimed that the voices of local NGOs are absent from debates on vulnerability and resilience, as though there were no debates taking place elsewhere. This chapter addresses this absence by explicitly acknowledging that rising sea levels and the consequent changes to local lives are the focus of discussions beyond the UNFCCC. It shows how the politics of vulnerability is clear in messages around mitigation of climate change, where the audiences are foreign governments, institutions at a transnational level, and activists and interested citizens from around the world. It explores the politics of resilience in messages about adaptation to climate change, disseminated by and through local NGOs, sometimes in collaboration with international NGOs, where the key audience is the population of island states. The focus here is on small island developing states (SIDS) in the Pacific, the engagement of their local NGOs with issues of sea level rise and their involvement with other organizations and alliances, including the international NGOs, specifically the Pacific Calling Partnership (PCP) and the Climate Action Network (CAN). CAN is a worldwide organization that aims to promote government and individual actions on climate change, through information flow and the coordination of strategies on climate issues from local to international levels. It operates at the regional level through hubs such as the Pacific Island Climate Action Network (PICAN) and through coordinating local NGOs, through organizations such Kiribati Climate Action Network (KiriCAN) and Tuvalu Climate Action network (TuCAN). Pacific Calling Partnership is a program of the Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education, an Australian development organization using community education to change the world, beginning with awareness raising and leading to advocacy and social action. PCP’s focus is Pacific peoples affected by climate change, particularly in the populations of Kiribati and Tuvalu. To understand how the politics of rising tides plays out, this chapter uses the framing of narratives to show the key messages communicated by the multiplicity of voices in the debates and actions. An analysis of the narratives of Pacific Island states shows that differing groups express differing understandings of what rising tides mean, that these narratives have specific audiences, and that they tend to exist in defined contexts, such as COP meetings, or local settings (Fairclough 2003). Unlike the perception of the outcomes of UNFCCC COP, where consensus is the expected outcome, in the broader context of local engagement with rising tides at a local level, it is apparent that there can be no consensus narrative. The messages embedded in these narratives of vulnerability and resilience are diverse, each competing for the attention of its audience and evolving as new voices enter the debate and new technologies are used.
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