“Going back to what really held us together”: re-adaptation as resilience in the Torres Strait Islands, Australia

In the Torres Strait Islands (TSI), Indigenous Australian communities are negotiating the challenge of maintaining their identities and cultures in the face of rapid change. These identities and cultures are seen as vital to the region’s resilience, and yet to be resilient may mean making difficult choices about change, specifying which aspects need changing, under what conditions, and by and for whom. TSI communities have a long history of conceptualizing relationships with change that have enabled them to build resilience to navigate these. As such local, indigenous-led conceptualizations of resilience are needed as alternatives to generic, externally defined ones, and participatory co-research processes can be key to surfacing and probing these. We consider “re-adaptation” as an articulation of resilience that emerged through such a process that we undertook in the TSI to explore and build community and regional stakeholders’ capacities to deal with diverse drivers of change. Re-adaptation was proposed in this process to describe how communities might turn to past cultural practices and knowledge to address contemporary and possible future challenges. The concept suggests connections to resilience theory through three inter-related features: first, it entails a weaving of old and new, or past and future; second, it suggests a dynamic view of resilience, and pathways to achieve it; third, it represents an Indigenous, place-based relationship with change. Existing research on the importance of Indigenous knowledge in decision making for resilience supports this, and recent developments in climate policy and Indigenous rights in the TSI make it timely to give more consideration to meanings of re-adaptation. Re-adaptation reflects the “scaling deep” mode of impact, by enriching the discursive landscape through more pluralistic conversations about resilience.