A study of various defining aspects of 11 rural communities along the cross-island road on Viti Levu (Fiji) shows diversity attributable largely to their peripherality, proxied by distance along this 200-km long road. Strong relationships are found between peripherality and both community size and the dependency ratio (percent of young/old dependents), as well as traditional medicine usage (and percent traditional healers), and autonomous community coping after disasters. Two measures are calculated to capture community autonomy, both of which proxy peripherality. Results show the usefulness of peripherality as a way of measuring community diversity in developingcountry contexts. Peripherality also correlates with community autonomy, more-peripheral communities having greater autonomous coping abilities/capacity than near-core (less-peripheral) communities. Results also show the unhelpfulness of the default '"one-size-fits-all'" approach to communities implicit in many external assistance programs. Yet while traditional coping in such communities may not be able to fully overcome future climate-change challenges, the conservation of the traditional knowledge underpinning this should be encouraged, mainly because of the likelihood that external funding for future adaptation in such communities will be inadequate. The best hope for effective and sustainable adaptation to future climate change, focused on sustaining livelihoods, lies in strengthening autonomous community coping.
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Calls for science to innovate by including stakeholders' in the creation of marine knowledge have been rising, to create impact beyond laboratories and to contribute to the empowerment of local communities when interacting with marine and coastal ecosystems. As a transdisciplinary group of scientists working on co-designing research projects, this paper draws upon our experiences to further define the concept and seek to improve the process of co-design. We highlight the key barriers for co-design processes to contribute to increasing stakeholders' capacity to produce intended effects on marine policy. We suggest that stakeholder engagement requires overcoming the resistance to non-scientific knowledge sources and considering power asymmetries in the governance and management of the ocean. We argue that power and politics must be placed at the very heart of the production of a co-designed marine science and must be an aspect of the facilitation itself. In this paper, we aim to provide insights to navigate throughout the journey of stakeholder engagement, with the critical perspective necessary to make this process socially and environmentally effective.
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