Pacific Webinar Series
High engagement and powerful feedback show that TINZ’s Pacific Webinar Series is resonating deeply with communities across the region.
Our recent webinar Guardians of Moana and Land: Indigenous Governance for Pacific Sustainability looked at how indigenous Pacific communities protect their land and ocean and how traditional knowledge, relational leadership and cultural storytelling are shaping bold indigenous-led responses to climate and environmental challenges.
This webinar was most carefully facilitated by Fenton Lutunatabua, a Fijian based writer, photographer and climate change activist.
Alisi Rabukawaqa
The first speaker was Alisi Rabukawaqa a Fijian Indigenous Environmental Advocate and marine scientist. Alisi highlighted the lack of acknowledgement of the importance of traditional practices and knowledge in approaching environmental challenges and climate change. She identified knowledge around totems, kinship, identity development and veiqaravi (service) which provide a repository of ethics and practice for people to address tough challenges.
Professor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka
Tarcisius is an Academic & Customary Governance Leader from Solomon Islands based in Honolulu. He talked about networks of people, relationships and stories and how they govern relationships with each other and with the environment. Land registration, for example, is mainly about registration of stories of relationships and belongingness to particular land areas. He noted similar processes across the Pacific, in Solomon Islands, Samoa and nearly every Pacific country.
He emphasised the centrality of stories. When you erase names you erase these stories. Tarcisius gave Pearl Harbour as an example. Puʻuloa is its Hawaiian name and that name defines indigenous relationships to that place. But the dominant story of Pearl Harbour is now about US militarisation, which has morphed into a tourist product.
How do these stories relate to sustainability and dual systems of authority? Customary governance in Pacific Islands refers not only to organisational structures, but it is also embedded in the stories and practices that govern how people relate to the land and sea. It is not only the institutional structures that are important but the stories.
If those stories are lost, so are the social histories used to govern the relationships of people to land, forest, the ocean. For Pacific people there are rituals practiced from birth to death that connect them to place and give them the tools to apply conservation and use practices. He gave an example of the use of the age-old conservation method “bul’ in Palau as a basis for marine protection governance.
“The challenge is to find out or know what already exists so that it is worked with rather than building approaches to environmental protection that are different to what people are already doing. This is often challenging for international non-governmental organisations. But if we can do that it will strengthen customary practice and also help integrate customary and formal systems.”
Millicent Barty
Millicent Barty, founder of Kastom Keepers and Visual Storyteller from Solomon Islands was the third panellist. She uses cultural storytelling to support climate resilience. She works with climate affected communities to protect traditional knowledge across Melanesia.
Millicent used the teaching of weaving taught to her by her grandmothers who were keepers of kastom and knowledge “Weaving will help you understand the workings of the universe and your place in it”. This has shaped her personal journey and her academic work. She works at the intersection of contemporary and traditional knowledge. She says “Salt, soil and spirit were our ancestral foundations long before gold, gospel and glory.”
She talked about the importance for Pacific people of reclaiming the connections that have been damaged, and countering the erosion of indigeneity and severed relationships to place and purpose.
Since 2022 she has centred her work on ‘salt, soil and spirit system’. This describes one living consciousness which is the foundation of guardianship. She works with eight climate vulnerable communities across Solomon Islands. Her work supports climate vulnerable communities to support customary practice and governance that enables sustainability and self-determination.
Millicent talked about warps and wefts of weaving and the importance that is played by traditional roles such as memory keepers and genealogy keeping in firming the warps. These traditional roles are vital to customary structures and indigenous governance.
Her approach is co-design which works from inside out. Traditional knowledge is adaptive, relational and future facing. Millicent gave an example of work with the Lilisiana community which has lost 23 metres of shoreline in two decades and with that 200 graves. Whilst NGOs and agencies came to Lilisiana and took photos, nothing practical happened. Co-design helped the community solve its own challenges including rebuilding the fae’fae, or sacred house of learning, and the building of a seawall, using kastom knowledge in both.
Millicent returned to the philosophy of weaving.
She said “Weaving teaches us not to pull too hard in one direction, to recognise when the pattern is breaking, and to have courage to re-weave. We must protect the systems of meaning that once held these lands and seas in balance... Corruption and environmental crime or injustices continue to fray the edges of our collective mat, but the Pacific has always known how to repair, resist and remember. … Governance is not something we borrowed. Like guardianship it is something we carry in our stories, our reefs, in our hands. It predates the lines on any map. It is time to protect the Pacific, but also the Pacific way of protecting.”
There was much more in the discussion session and you can view this in the recording of this webinar available on the Transparency International YouTube site, along with the previous three webinars.
One of the attendees commented. “Alofa tele! The speakers today were amazing! They were absolutely flax roots.. I was inspired by the hands-on manner they presented their Talanoa, and absolutely identified with it.”
Next Sessions Coming Up
Coming up next week we have an equally information packed session entitled Her role, Their future: supporting Women in Pacific Governance. This will be held on July 16, 2025, running from 12pm to 1.30 pm Fiji/NZ time. Book here: https://events.humanitix.com/pacific-environmental-governance-series-voices-challenges-and-solutions
Again facilitated by Fenton, this session will look at why women’s leadership is vital for climate justice and environmental protection.
Speakers are Naima Taafaki-Fifita, a Tuvaluan environmental lawyer and Founder of the Moana Tasi Project; Flora Vano, Country Program Manager at ActionAid Vanuatu; and AnneMary Raduva, Fijian youth advocate known for her bold stance on climate justice and gender equality
There will be two further webinars in our current environmental governance series:
- 6 August – From the Pacific Shores to the Bay of Bengal: Building Resilience through Governance
- 27 August – Safeguarding Our Pacific: Tackling Corruption and Protecting Communities
