Land tenure, climate adaptation and legal pluralism in a Pacific town: ‘This is the real story’

Abstract

Existing scholarship on urban land tenure and climate adaptation in the Pacific has fruitfully exposed multiple threads of law and disrupted state-centric approaches, but its grounding in resilience thinking and social-ecological systems frameworks has contributed to a neglect of the dynamism of land governance and the social and material power that shapes trajectories of adaptation. Drawing on the experiences of Gilbertese people in the aftermath of a tsunami striking Ghizo in Solomon Islands, I demonstrate that abstract structural accounts of land governance are inadequate for understanding how legal pluralism may sustain insecurity for some people while providing multiple avenues for others to secure access to land. In the case of Ghizo, understanding the direction of adaptation in landholding requires attention to histories of racialized land control; the ways land governance reproduces socio-legal identities; and the geopolitics of humanitarian aid and development. Further, urban adaptation must be understood as a contested and multiscalar process in which securing land rights at one social and legal scale may have different and even contradictory effects at different scales.