COVID-19 is unique in the scope of its effects on morbidity and mortality. However, the factors contributing to its disparate racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic effects are part of an expansive and continuous history of oppressive social policy and marginalising geopolitics. This history is characterised by institutionally generated spatial inequalities forged through processes of residential segregation and neglectful urban planning. In the USA, aspects of COVID-19's manifestation closely mirror elements of the build-up and response to the Flint crisis, Michigan's racially and class-contoured water crisis that began in 2014, and to other prominent environmental injustice cases, such as the 1995 Chicago (IL, USA) heatwave that severely affected the city's south and west sides, predominantly inhabited by Black people. Each case shares common macrosocial and spatial characteristics and is instructive in showing how civic trust suffers in the aftermath of public health disasters, becoming especially degenerative among historically and spatially marginalised populations. Offering a commentary on the sociogeographical dynamics that gave rise to these crises and this institutional distrust, we discuss how COVID-19 has both inherited and augmented patterns of spatial inequality. We conclude by outlining particular steps that can be taken to prevent and reduce spatial inequalities generated by COVID-19, and by discussing the preliminary steps to restore trust between historically disenfranchised communities and the public officials and institutions tasked with responding to COVID-19.

In both media and policy, climate change is broadly framed as the promise of catastrophe for small island states such as Fiji. This framing is often used to attract adaptation investment in islands, the targets and directives of which are frequently market-based and oriented toward economic-growth development models. In Fiji, this takes the form of land tenure policy and efforts to attract investment to support agricultural modernization. Such a pattern is the source of scholarly and activist critique that climate change adaptation is nothing more than a repackaging of neoliberal development. This paper seeks to situate such critique alongside parallel attention to climate change adaptation practices emerging from alternative, hopeful frames and aimed at less national development driven efforts. In doing so, it centers adaptation as a space of unsettled struggle and asks, in what ways do climate change adaptation practices in Fiji align and conflict with dominant framing of island vulnerability and climate catastrophe, and how might they suggest alternative adaptive interventions that renegotiate these frames? Specifically, this paper focuses on efforts to promote ‘traditional’ agriculture throughout Fiji as an endogenous and hopeful form of adaptation, and one consistently opposed to efforts at agricultural modernization as an adaptation strategy.

No abstract

No abstract