Maintaining land and life in Vanuatu: Indigenous alter-natives of recovery following the Manaro eruption on Ambae, Vanuatu | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Volume 2 Number Supplement 1
  • ISSN: 2632-2463
  • E-ISSN: 2632-2471

Abstract

Between 2017 and 2019, the Manaro volcano on the island of Ambae in Vanuatu erupted consistently, leading to two compulsory evacuations of the island’s communities. The eruption was only one of many ecological emergencies unfolding in Vanuatu as climate change continues to affect the islands. Amidst these overlapping crises, community leaders and the national government leveraged customary tenure practices to develop a system of customary reunion and secondary homes for evacuees. An analysis of 54 articles from the ’s media coverage of the Manaro eruption and disaster recovery from 2017 to 2019 reveals the centrality of customary tenure. While political ecologists have illustrated how disaster recovery policies can become disastrous in and of themselves, this article elaborates upon alter-native disaster recovery practices in Vanuatu and affirms the centrality of land control to Indigenous and settler futures.

This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND), which allows users to copy, distribute and transmit the article as long as the author is attributed, the article is not used for commercial purposes, and the work is not modified or adapted in any way. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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2021-11-02
2024-04-20
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