How seasonal cultures shape adaptation on Aotearoa – New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula
There is a growing literature on the cultural capacities influencing communities’ adaptation to environmental and social change, including the temporal frameworks they draw on for timely action. This paper focuses on seasonal cultures and calendars, and how they enable modern, heterogenous communities on the Coromandel Peninsula to interpret and respond to changing seasonality. The paper develops and tests out a conceptual framework of seasons as perceived rhythmic patterns enacted by communities as cultural repertoires for action, emphasising the ways seasonal cultures evolve as patterns are contested and change. This concept steered critical, mixed-method ethnographic study with communities on the peninsula over two years. The research found that Coromandel communities’ cultures make seasonal change visible as departures from long-held patterns, which they linked to climatic change, environmental degradation, colonisation and globalisation, and shifting relations between society and the environment. With seasonal patterns no longer holding, these communities are deploying different coping strategies: (i) maintaining established, institutionalised schemas of activity; (ii) season-proofing activities from environmental rhythms; or (iii) re-learning and recalibrating cultures to mutable configurations of rhythms in a highly modified environment. Coromandel actors argue that recalibrating seasonal cultures is the most adaptable and sustainable strategy.
Biography
Scott Bremer is a senior researcher at the Centre for Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Bergen, and a research associate at NORCE Climate. With a background in planning, policy and public administration, Bremer’s works broadly as an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, with a current focus on climate adaptation governance. More particularly, he is interested in how science and other ways of knowing (such as local, traditional or cultural knowledges) are drawn on for decision-making in institutional settings, across the so-called science-policy interface. This has seen Bremer conceptualise and empirically test out extended modes of science – building on traditions of post-normal science and transdisciplinarity – as collaborative enquiries with all concerned by an issue, with normative ambitions to co-produce knowledge and action. He currently leads a research group, under the ERC-funded CALENDERS project, undertaking research internationally into how taken-for-granted temporal frameworks influence the ways groups time and coordinate activities under environmental and social change. Through his research Bremer is active on both sides of the science-policy interface. At NORCE Climate, he works with climate scientists in thinking about how to link their science to governance processes, including at the new 'Climate Futures' centre. On the policy side, Bremer is co-vice-chair of the Young Academy of Europe, active in the network of organisations promoting science policy and science for policy.