By Ilan Kelman, University College London and Simon Hollis, Swedish Defence University
Climate change is affecting Pacific Islanders who are often advised from outside the Pacific to respond through justice and transformation. Yet these concepts are vague, leading to a variety of interpretations within a geographically and culturally diverse Pacific. In our research, we stepped back from the ‘justice’ and ‘transformation’ rhetoric of climate change lingo to examine possible implications and alternatives for Pacific islanders.
Fatigue, justice, and transformation
The imposition of ‘development’ to respond to climate change has led to four idealised types of fatigue for the Pacific:
1. Conceptual fatigue: External concepts are foisted onto Pacific Islanders, such as ‘resilience’ and unevidenced presumptions that climate change must lead to mass migration, island disappearance, and worsening disasters.
2. Money fatigue: External financing exceeds the region’s ability to manage projects and is used to further funders’ geopolitical aims.
3. Research fatigue: External researchers extract data and return little.
4. Advice fatigue: Advice is delivered with limited recourse to local agency and custom.
Exemplifying these four idealised types of fatigue are ‘transformation’ and ‘justice’ for climate change responses. To avoid contributing to the fatigue we critique, our recommendations are not for Pacific Islanders, but are for those seeking to engage with the peoples, the communities, and the region. Certainly, neither transformation nor justice, as words and as concepts, translate readily into many Pacific languages or cultures.
This situation does not mean that justice and transformation are unimportant. Rather, it is about presuming that external conceptualisations of these terms can be unreflexively pushed onto Pacific Islanders without equitable dialogue.
External conceptualisations of transformation and justice are not always positive or desirable. Kiribati has, at times, led the world in seeking to stop human-caused climate change. Are the country’s fossil fuel subsidies just? Is it a useful transformation for the Pacific’s tourism sector to adapt to the climate change impacts that the tourism sector has partly created? Human-caused climate change is, in effect, ‘climate transformation’ which is hardly ‘climate justice’. Adopting terms uncritically could lead to difficulties or retrogressions, such as amplifying the fatigues, for climate change responses in the Pacific.
Moving forward through talanoa
To move forward, donor-recipient/beneficiary language should be dropped and more funding should be channelled into existing and future initiatives that facilitate learning from each other on each other’s terms. Using various mediums, from poetry to performing arts, would garner a deeper understanding and appreciation for Pacific Islander viewpoints, representations, and worldviews.
For Pacific Islanders, this task might be facilitated through talanoa, or related types of dialogue such as hui, tutala, and tok stori. For talanoa, tala refers to story/talking and noa refers to equilibrium/balance and space. Pacific Islanders offer many local varieties and understandings of talanoa, which can be summarised through four defining, overlapping characteristics:
1. Justice: All our stories have an equal amount of space. No participant should feel excluded or unheard.
2. Space: Being creative and engaging for all, our commonalities are emphasised, understanding the context of difference and honouring what is yet to be understood.
3. Listening: This action is relational in that it reveals who we are and the role of other perspectives.
4. Dialogue: Enter into a sacred space where we acknowledge that everyone has profound contributions to offer.
Learn from Pacific Islanders
Engaging with and employing talanoa as a practice and as an epistemology allows for equal and equitable dialogue and exchange without preconceived outcomes. It can accommodate and produce diverse external and Pacific climate change related epistemologies, detailing differences and similarities, with an openness for multiple and new potentialities.
This approach avoids external impositions without bypassing what non-Pacific approaches offer the Pacific—and, most importantly, vice versa. Accepting and learning from Pacific Islanders regarding the (lack of) meanings and applications of ‘transformation’ and ‘justice’ means learning how they use and define terms for themselves, their homes, their islands, their oceans, and their cultures. Pacific Islander lessons highlight that transformation is not necessarily just (nor necessarily needs to be just) and that justice is not necessarily transformative (nor necessarily needs to be transformative).
About the authors:
Ilan Kelman https://www.ilankelman.org and Instagram/Threads/X @ILANKELMAN is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, integrating climate change into both.
Simon Hollis is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University. His general research interest concerns how we imagine climate and environmental change and what this means for quality of life, especially as it relates to (1) inter-regional politics; (2) development aid; and (3) the Pacific region.
Suggested further reading
Kelman, I. and S. Hollis. (2026) Climate change responses in the Pacific: Just transformation or transforming justice? Geo: Geography and Environment. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.70058
Nost, E. (2024) Governing AI, governing climate change? Geo: Geography and Environment. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.138
Weatherill, C. K. ( 2025) “ ‘Operation Hurricane’: Narrating Climate Change as Imperial Mess.” Geo: Geography and Environment. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.70037.
How to cite
Kelman, I. and S. Hollis. (2026, February) Climate change responses in the Pacific: just transformation or transforming justice? Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/SWUU511
Geography Directions 