Across the Pacific, communities are labelled as vulnerable because of the threats posed by climate change. And what do international development programs believe is needed to address this vulnerability? Resilience. 

This is a memorandum of understanding the unreasonable expectations aid places on local communities to deal with what are really global problems. We turn to Vanuatu where these buzzwords have been siphoned into a set of committees called CDCs ­– community disaster and climate change committees – and explore the issue with Dr Siobhan McDonnell, scholar at the Crawford School of the ANU, anthropologist, and legal adviser to the government of Vanuatu, and Jocelyn Loughman, a graduate student at the ANU and formerly a senior bureaucrat in the Vanuatu government. 

Recommended reading: For more words on CDCs, read Siobhan’s article “Other Dark Sides of Resilience”. 

Help feed flood victims in Timor-Leste: Support the pop-up kitchen of Timor Leste Agora chefs from MoU food.

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: Vanuatu’s northern province post Tropical Cyclone Donna in 2018. Photo courtesy of Jocelyn Loughman.