The cultural politics of climate change adaptation: an analysis of the tourism sector in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

A huge number of climate change adaptation projects are underway to manage risk and minimise vulnerability for communities and businesses. Yet, adaptation processes are often ineffective because of deeply entrenched structures of power and different value systems leading to conflicting priorities for action. This paper draws on the notion of cultural politics to understand climate change adaptation in the tourism sector of Aotearoa New Zealand, a sector that depends on the environment for its survival but neglects it for short-term gains, often precipitating maladaptation in the process. Building on insights into how and why the tourism industry – in a pre-COVID19 context – struggled to adapt to the urgent imperatives of climate change, the paper goes on to show how a culture-centred, deliberative democratic approach can be applied to identify pathways for a transition to an environmentally sustainable tourism sector that can adapt to a climate-changed and pandemic-affected world.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change adaptation
• cultural politics
• adaptation politics
• tourism sector
• māori tourism
• deliberative democracy

Acknowledgments

We thank Jacqui Dixon, Malcolm Doo, Thea King, and Jess Pasisi for research assistance in the larger project on which this paper is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment [Deep South NSC Grant No. C01X1412].

Notes on contributors

Priya Kurian

Priya Kurian is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research is interdisciplinary and spans environmental politics and policy; science and technology studies; gender, ethnicity and diversity; and environmental communication. She is the author, co-author or co-editor of six books, including most recently of Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship: Representing the Unrepresented (2021) and HYPERLINK ”https://sites.google.com/a/waikato.ac.nz/climate-futures/home” Climate Futures: Re-imagining Global Climate Justice (2019). Her work has also appeared in journals such as Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, Environmental Communication, Nature Climate Change, Public Understanding of Science, Citizenship Studies, and Global Environmental Politics.

Debashish Munshi

Debashish Munshi is Professor of Management Communication at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research interests lie at the intersections of communication, diversity, sustainability, social change, and citizenship. He has co-authored/co-edited a number of books including Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship: Representing the Unrepresented (2021); HYPERLINK ”https://sites.google.com/a/waikato.ac.nz/climate-futures/home” Climate Futures: Re-imagining Global Climate Justice (2019); Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture, and Development (2016); The Handbook of Communication Ethics (2011); On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions (2009); and Reconfiguring Public Relations: Ecology, Equity, and Enterprise (2007).

Raven Cretney

Raven Cretney is a social scientist working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waikato. Her research focuses on the role of community participation in policy change and decision-making in relation to environmental issues and post-disaster politics.

Sandra Morrison

Sandra Morrison is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies, University of Waikato. Hamilton. She is indigenous Māori from the Te Arawa and Tainui peoples and her research seeks to apply indigenous models in addressing developmental issues to improve livelihoods for indigenous peoples and peoples of the Pacific. She leads the Vision Mātauranga programme for the Deep South National Science Challenge: Changing With Our Climate. She has also held global civil society roles in adult education which advocate for the right of all adults to education and lifelong learning and is the Past President of the International Council for Adult Education.

Lyn Kathlene

Lyn Kathlene is the founder and CEO of LK Consulting, a research and evaluation firm specializing in complex, multi-system change efforts. Previously, she was a Director at Spark Policy Institute, and the founding director of the Colorado Institute of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University. Her work combines research with evaluation to inform public policy across a number of different areas, including multiple cross-system efforts in local food systems, natural resources, climate change, health equity, and new technologies. She has over 25 years of experience in academic and applied public policy research, directing multi-system policy research processes, and facilitating community action projects with a particular focus on engaging underrepresented populations in policy-relevant research.