Informal Session: Small Islands in Peril or under Pressure
Organizers: Colin Filer and Simon Foale

The session was well attended (about 20-25 people) with a good geographical spread of expertise. Colin introduced the session with some history of the original SMIP project, and Simon gave some case studies from Milne Bay and Tikopia to illustrate the political ecology and political economy issues that were central to the original project.

We now plan to move to a working session and will circulate a manifesto shortly as a guide for pre-circulated papers. We will also compile a preliminary ‘taxonomy’ of SMIPs using demography data that we hope to extract from SPC. Key thematic threads include:

1. How the society-environment relationship on small islands changes over various time frames (including pre-historic) and how social and economic changes at various geographic scales, from local to global, have affected this relationship. How does this help us think about options, strategies, thresholds and scenarios?
2. The extent to which islands are not really islands but nodes in economic, social and political networks, and how society-environment changes affect the functioning of these networks. Is isolation from the network the main factor implicated in the imperilment of islands?
3. How is traditional environmental and cultural knowledge affected by the observed changes in society-environment relationships?
4. An interrogation (rather than criticism) of terms such as “sustainability,” “adaptation,” “resilience,” “innovation,” “complexity,” “biodiversity,” “degradation,” “imperilment,” “environmental refugees,” might help us construct a critical framework for analysis of society-environment relationships on small islands in different parts of the Pacific. How can anthropologists intervene in the global and national debates that deploy these concepts?
5. While not losing sight of political economy (e.g. prices of rice, fuel, and copra) studies of small islands should also avoid the assumption of rational economic behavior as an adaptive response. Changes to the viability of remittance economies add further complexity to interpretations of local economic strategies on small islands.

Informal session participants who may be interested in being part of the working session: Zag Puas, Michael French Smith, Kathleen Barlow, Jaime Bach, Ingrid Ahlgren, Fred Damon, Carlos Mondragon, Sergio Jarillo de la Torre, Andrew Connelly, Ana Diaz, Toon van Meijl, Tim Sharp, George Curry, Elfriede Hermann, Nancy Pollock, Edvard Hviding, Kate Barclay. Others we would like to join us include Rick Feinberg, Katharina Schneider, Steffen Dalsgaard, Paige West, and Martha Macintyre.

Colin Filer, Convenor, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, Crawford School of Economics and Government, Coombs Building, Fellows Road, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, AUSTRALIA; tel: +61 2-6125-3039, fax: +61 2-6125-1635, colin.filer@anu.edu.au

Simon Foale, Principal Research Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, Building DB44, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland 4811, AUSTRALIA; tel. +61 7-4781-6785, fax +61 7-4781-6722; simon.foale@icu.edu.au