ABSTRACT
The future of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) has been declared and treated as finite by scientists and policymakers. Islands are assumed to become uninhabitable, and the relocation of their populations is often thought of as an adaptation strategy. Operating under a deterministic future leads to reductive understandings of key climate justice concepts such as resilience and adaptation where islanders ought to develop a set of skills and abilities that will allow them to settle in a potential new host country. This chapter positions itself against future foreclosure, instead it attempts to hold the future open and explore within it alternative emerging understandings of such key concepts. What meanings might adaptation and resilience adopt if we conceive of the possibility of a future on the islands? Drawing from empirical data generated on two islands in the Maldives, this chapter develops an understanding of resilience and adaptation grounded in the physical and tailored towards islanders’ own visions of the future. Based on drawings made by students at the Maldives National University and a participatory photography methodology, this chapter offers a visual take on resilience and adaptation. In doing so, it sheds further light on the significant disjuncture between the way policymakers think of these concepts and the way they are interpreted on the islands. While the former shifts attention away from important questions of justice, the latter forces the foregrounding of islanders’ rights to remain at home. In pursuing climate justice, this chapter argues there is a need to embrace a plurality of understandings of resilience and adaptation in which affected populations’ interpretations hold equal value to that of scientists and policymakers.
