Memorandum of Understanding – Resilience: A climate for change

The Memorandum of Understanding podcast documentary series was formerly separate from Devpolicy Talks. Its back catalogue has now been merged into Devpolicy Talks Season 10. 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”.  Memorandum of Understanding production team: Host, Gordon Peake Producer, Julia Bergin Sound Design: Luther Canute Visual credits: Vanuatu’s northern province post Tropical Cyclone Donna in 2018. Photo courtesy of Jocelyn Loughman. Devpolicy Talks is the podcast of the Australian National University's Development Policy Centre. Read and subscribe to our daily blogs at devpolicy.org.Learn more about our research and join our public events at devpolicy.anu.edu.au.Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram for latest updates on our blogs, research and events.You can send us feedback, and ideas for episodes too, to [email protected].