Higher powers : negotiating climate change, religion and future in Oceania

Based on the cross-referencing of ethnographic materials collected in Fiji and Vanuatu, this article explores the diverse ways faith and climate change are connected together and how these connections are sustained and transformed over time. It does so through the prism of three 'practices of assemblage' identified by Tania Murray Li, namely forging alignments, authorising knowledge, and reassembling. It emphasises the partnership and combined efficacy of faith-based organisations and the Bible in these practices, while revealing the role of various other actants including God, NGOs, youth activists, cyclones, a Ni-Vanuatu canoe, and Fiji's Presidency of COP23. This approach highlights the coexistence, in both Fiji and Vanuatu, of a religiously informed and adaptation-oriented environmental stewardship narrative, stressing human responsibility in the face of climate change, with a counter-narrative considering climate change as God's business. This coexistence sometimes creates tensions between worldly and religious responses to climate change. These different religious perspectives of climate change can also be deployed as a political resource in nation-building processes, regional power relations, and international climate negotiations. In Oceania indeed, climate change appears as a new arena in which the inextricable entanglement of Christianity and politics is revealed