"It's In Our Hands" - Communities, Climate Change, & Agency in Island States

For small-island developing states (SIDS), climate change poses an existential threat. Their efforts, at the state/international-level (i.e., IOs, NGOs, non-profits), are, while necessary, set to be outpaced by the intensifying climate crisis. At the community level in SIDS, the most vulnerable (i.e., coastal, rural) maintain a preexisting, but climate-exacerbated, perception of the state as being ineffective and lacking authority. This perception is attributable to complex histories of state failure, abuse, and negligence, often originating from colonial and state-building experiments. Yet, in the midst of the severity of the climate crisis, where state-executed adaptation/mitigation strategies dominate the discourse and recognizing the superiority of the state over civil society, an inquiry arises: why would/should these communities comply? I conclude they increasingly are not. Drawing on interviews and (in)formal community-government discourses on climate strategy/policy from Jamaica, Cabo Verde, and Dominica, I argue the need for a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing and characterizing these current tensions of community vs state authority in the current climate situation. A community-centered analysis of this behavior, which centers the agency of the community rather than the state, constructs my theoretical conception of agency operating on a spectrum: the agency continuum. The utilization of this continuum, as demonstrated from my ethnographic engagements, offers a compelling proposal to understand these misunderstood, frequent moments of collective defiance or indifference that threaten the ideas of state sovereignty and community, and contribute to the growing discourse of the climate change-state sovereignty nexus.