Dr. Shankar Aswani from the University of California visited SOCIB on 3 – 4 November, 2011

Shankar Aswani visited SOCIB and IMEDEA on 3 – 4 November by invitation from the SOCIB Director and members of the Division of Strategic Issues and Applications for Society. Aswani is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Marine Sciences at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Aswani has conducted research and developed interdisciplinary methods related to coastal and marine socio-ecological systems for over 20 years. His projects have focused on a diversity of subjects including climate change, local responses to natural disasters, property rights and common property resources, marine indigenous environmental knowledge, cultural ecology and human behavioral ecology of fishing, demography, ethnohistory, political ecology, economic anthropology, and applied anthropology. One of the central foci of his work has been his research program in the Solomon Islands of the Pacific, which he initiated in 1992. Here, he has developed a network of locally managed Marine Protected Areas (30 MPAs) and many small-scale rural development projects. As a result of this effort, a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation was awarded to Aswani in 2005, the first time in its 15-year history that the world’s premier award in marine conservation has been given to an anthropologist.

Amy Diedrich, the lead researcher of the SIAS Division will be collaborating with Dr. Aswani through a fieldwork project in the Solomon Islands in December aimed at developing tools and methods for assessing tourism and resilience to climate change, with a view to their implementation in the Balearic Islands. Although the Solomon Islands differ significantly from the Balearic Islands in cultural, environmental and economic terms, they represent a valuable site to develop and implement new methods for assessing the relationship between tourism and resilience to climate change. Tourism development is at a much earlier stage of development and there are fewer people and institutions which makes it an ideal location to build methodologies which can then be applied to more complex scenarios such as the Balearic Islands. Furthermore, communities in the Solomon Islands are intimately connected to their natural resources at a subsistence level and management of marine resources has evolved to incorporate traditional knowledge and management systems. This concept, of linking social and ecological systems in a management context by drawing upon existing knowledge and inherent connections between people and natural resources is seldom applied in more developed countries. Rather, environmental management regimes tend to be driven more from the top down, often resulting in challenges to their implementation on the ground. In this context, significant and relevant lessons can be learned from natural resource management in places such as the Solomon Islands which are applicable to future natural resource management regimes in the Balearic Islands.

Following a tour of the SOCIB facilities on November 3rd, on November 4th, Aswani presented a seminar on Customary Management for Protecting Coastal Ecosystems in the seminar room of IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB). A copy of the Dr. Aswani presentation is attached below.