EXPRESSING “LOCAL CULTURE” IN HAWAI'I*

ABSTRACT. Detached from the mainland and with a distinct historical ethnic geography, the conquered kingdom of Hawai'i, now the fiftieth state, is the only U.S. state with an Asian and Pacific Islander majority as well as the highest percentage of racial and ethnic intermarriage. Hawai'i's population reflects the tensions between the culturally pluralistic “spirit of aloha” and the ethnic‐cum‐social stratification that has evolved from its historical economic geographies. In this article I focus on one of these strata—what is referred to as “local” culture—discussing its ethnogenesis and contemporary manifestations, and I apply Jonathan Okamura's 1981 model of situational ethnicity to examine how locals and new immigrants negotiate the ethnic dynamics and social expectations of their daily lives. I also discuss various ways in which “localness” is represented on O'ahu's economic landscape, with an analysis of the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet, as a holistic expression of local culture.     

What happens after climate change adaptation projects end: A community-based approach to ex-post assessment of adaptation projects

Over the last decade, hundreds of climate change adaptation projects have been funded and implemented. Despite the importance of these first-generation adaptation projects for establishing funders and implementors’ “best practices,” very little is known about how early adaptation projects have endured, to what ends, and for whom. In this article, I propose a community-based methodology for ex-post assessment of climate change adaptation projects. This methodology contributes to recognitional justice by asking the individuals and collectives tasked with sustaining adaptation initiatives to define adaptation success and what criteria for success should be assessed. I apply this subjective assessment approach in 10 communities across Ecuador that participated in an internationally funded adaptation project that concluded in 2015. My analysis draws together participatory mapping, walking interviews with local leaders, participant observation, and surveys with former project participants. The results highlight that even adaptation projects that were deemed highly successful at their closure have uncertain futures. I find that the sustainability mechanisms that were envisioned by project implementors have not functioned, and communities are shouldering the burden of reviving failing adaptation interventions. These findings highlight that the current model of episodic funding for climate change adaptation projects and evaluation processes needs to be revisited to acknowledge the long-term challenges faced by communities. This analysis also calls attention to the importance of ex-post assessment for adaptation projects and the potential of subjective assessment approaches for building more ontological and epistemological pluralism in understandings of successful climate change adaptation.     

The impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on a network of 276 international organizations

Global sustainability governance is marked by a highly fragmented system of distinct clusters of international organizations, along with states and other actors. Enhancing inter-organizational coordination and cooperation is thus often recognized as an important reform challenge in global sustainability governance. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by the United Nations in 2015, thus explicitly aim at advancing policy coherence and institutional integration among the myriad international institutions. Yet, have these goals been effective in this regard? We assess here the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on the network structure of 276 international organizations in the period 2012–2019, that is, four years before and four years after the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals. The network structure was approximated by analyzing data from the websites of these 276 international organizations that were joined by more than 1.5 million hyperlinks, which we collected using a custom-made web crawler. Our findings are contrary to what is widely expected from the Sustainable Development Goals: we find that fragmentation has in fact increased after the Sustainable Development Goals came into effect. In addition, silos are increasing around the 17 SDGs as well as around the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.