Mobilities and Immobilities in Tuvalu: an unexpected pandemic experience?

ABSTRACT

Tuvalu was the last country to experience Covid-19, with no community transmission prior to November 2022, yet remains most well-known for its exposure to climate change. The pandemic presents an opportunity to challenge narratives of both displacement and disease risk, and advance understanding of mobility justice. During the pandemic, Tuvaluan’s internal migration to cultural lands revived a sense of community, strengthened cultural relations and provided an opportunity to reinvigorate customary forms of self-sufficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Tuvalu
• climate change
• Covid-19
• mobilities
• fenua
• custom

Introduction

‘Climate change’ and ‘pandemics’ have narrative force as much as they are scientifically observed phenomena. Claims that a place or people may no longer exist due to climate change impacts, for instance, should not, for ethical reasons, be made lightly. Yet, such claims abound, and consequently many people now live with the idea of their home, village, island or even nation becoming uninhabitable. When the global pandemic arrived, there became two crisis narratives for populations of low-lying atolls, of displacement and disease vulnerability. This paper gives consideration to two key questions: when borders are closed in such places, what happens and what might be learned?

The population of the island nation of Tuvalu, a country of approximately 11,000 people in Oceania, has been living under a shadow of forced displacement from climate change for several decades. Tuvalu is often represented as the exemplar site of exodus of ‘climate migrants’ abroad, and it was also thought to have a health system highly vulnerable to infectious disease outbreaks prior to the Covid-19 pandemic (GHS Index 2019). At the onset of that pandemic, the Tuvalu government instituted extensive border closures and recommended internal migration to rural areas. The latter recommendation resulted in a reversal of decades of urban population expansion due to internal migration in 2020 (Kitara et al. 2020). By May 2022, long after most other countries had experienced several waves of the virus, Tuvalu’s first three cases of Covid-19 were recorded in quarantine, following one false positive about a year earlier. With no cases reported outside of quarantine until November 2022, Tuvalu was the last nation-state globally to have no community transmission of Covid-19. By this time the population was highly vaccinated, with zero Covid-19 deaths to date in February 2023. During the Covid-19 pandemic, neither displacement nor disease crises have actually occurred. Indeed, Tuvalu’s pandemic experience of new international immobilities and new rural mobilities are worth examining for their role in illuminating how cultural and family connections to rural places help in maintaining Indigenous practices that support livelihoods and wellbeing in times of crisis. It is also important to contrast Tuvalu’s pandemic mobilities with sensationalist narratives of Tuvaluans as inevitable climate migrants, an oft-implied solution equating crossing international borders with justice.

Tuvalu in the pandemic

Tuvalu, as with other atoll nation-states in the Pacific Islands, is often, but not necessarily accurately, characterised as highly vulnerable to external shocks because of limited resources and remoteness. Indeed, there is an orthodoxy in some areas of development research and practice that sees inherent vulnerability in atoll states to economic crises, climate change and disease alike. However, this orthodoxy is also regularly critiqued, most recently during the pandemic, when strong evidence of effective health governance in the Pacific emerged (Phillips et al. 2022.). Tuvalu, as with other atoll governments, very early in the outbreak recognised the risks associated with Covid-19 and leveraged both its remoteness and cultural values to maintain strong border closures, institute ambitious and effective responses, and avoid health, political and economic crises (Farbotko 2021).

It has been extremely rare for anyone to travel in or out of Tuvalu over the last few years. For most of 2020 and 2021 in particular there was almost no international mobility of people and only strictly quarantined cargo vessels. Members of parliament who were abroad when borders closed could not return home for several months, while for many Tuvaluan workers who were abroad in Australia and New Zealand, employed through seasonal worker programs, the months became years. Repatriation flights for returning citizens commenced in late 2020 and were few and far between. In mid-2022, it was still necessary to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival in Tuvalu, with an extra two weeks if a Covid-19 case was detected.

Such measures have been part of the ambitious suite of policies and plans developed by the Tuvalu government from the onset of the pandemic, including the Management and Minimisation of the Coronavirus Regulation and the Talaaliki Plan (Government of Tuvalu 2020a). The latter is a national plan developed with the ultimate goal of achieving self-sufficiency in Tuvalu: each island was to become its own cashless, subsistence closed economy should contact with the outside world need to be absolutely cut off to protect against the virus. The Talaaliki Plan recognised the importance of Tuvaluan customary practices, promoting an intensification of local food production, preservation, and distribution activities, along with additional measures such as fuel and imported food rationing. Indeed, the pandemic saw a revival of interest in customary knowledge exchange and practice in Tuvalu, focused particularly on growing and preserving food. Elders and youth became engaged, for example, in workshops focused on building skills in planting taro and drying fishing (Kitara and Farbotko 2020).

Another part of the ambitious Covid-19 plan saw the national government, at the outset of the pandemic, call for people in the capital to voluntarily relocate to rural outer islands, in order to create physical distance, as an outbreak would be most likely to occur in the capital, Funafuti, the site of the international port and airport. This measure accorded with a history of Tuvaluan people moving to different islands to seek security in times of war, drought and cyclone: internal mobility had an already well-established role in times of crisis (Farbotko 2021). By mid-2020 about 1500 of the capital’s 6500 population had indeed voluntarily moved to the outer islands, resulting in a decrease in the capital’s population of about one quarter and reversing decades of a trend of declining rural population (Kitara et al. 2020).

The successful movement to rural areas also needs to be understood as part of the way land, culture and mobilities intertwine in Tuvalu, in both everyday moments and times of crisis – there were no reports of significant declines in human security or conflict as people moved to the outer islands (Kitara et al. 2020). Relations between land and people constituted in customary values and practices are strong: land is held communally and resources of the land shared among family members. An enduring sense of home is felt towards one’s fenua – the island of one’s ancestors and its community, in addition to a customary responsibility to the fenua, particularly extended family. It is to the island of their fenua that people moved to during the pandemic from the capital. The concept of kaitasi, for example, which means ‘eat as one’ is defined with reference to an extended family group who all have access to parts of shared land from which to grow food, build houses and otherwise sustain life. Such practices can be adaptive in times of crisis (Farbotko and Kitara 2021). In accordance with the concept of fale pili, meaning looking after one’s neighbour as if they were family, Indigenous leaders among the Funafuti people on the capital island made the decision to share their long-treasured rural land, for the first time, with other Indigenous groups from other islands. This decision supported the peaceful rural relocation of a proportion of the urban population during the pandemic (Farbotko and Kitara 2021). It was these customary forms of governance and resource use that authorised and enabled urban family members to move back to family lands in rural areas. Both mobility and rural space, long embedded in and valued in Tuvaluan culture, emerged as newly significant in understanding the sense of security that mobile Tuvaluan people have found in moving back to often rural places where they can rely on their family and their land, particularly in difficult times such as the pandemic.

Unsettling ‘displacement and disease’ crisis narratives

Tuvalu has long been subject of a ‘disappearing islands’, narrative associated with climate change impacts. Against this backdrop, studying pandemic-era governance and social change in Tuvalu reveals the important role of Indigenous practices in a specifically Tuvaluan form of human security in the face of the global threat of Covid-19.

While implementing successful governance during the pandemic, the Tuvalu government simultaneously and vigorously pursued a new, Indigenised form of engagement in international affairs, articulating the Tuvaluan values that were central to its new foreign policy (Government of Tuvalu 2020b; Kofe 2021). Indeed, the pandemic was a time for Tuvaluan people to reflect on their identity and their position in the international community, as observed by Tuvaluan scholar Taukiei Kitara:

COVID-19 might seem to be negatively impacting on most countries around the world, but for some, such as Tuvalu, it is also about rediscovering who we really are and how we interact with our people and our neighbouring countries, especially in the Pacific region (Kitara 2020, np).

While it is not new that there exists strong recognition of Indigenous-led sustainable development as key to the flourishing of Pacific Island communities (Thaman 2002; Lagi 2017; Lumā Vaai 2017; Kitara et al. 2021), innovations in governance and practice in the pandemic era, such as those in Tuvalu, can offer new lessons about the cultural and livelihood value of such practices in the face of global shocks (Aqorau 2020; Movono, Scheyvens, and Auckram 2022). Within Tuvalu, customary practices were central to pandemic governance, such as migration back to rural villages and elder-led education in customary knowledge, highlighting the importance of, and future potential for, Indigenous sustainable development.

Historical and contemporary Pacific Island Indigeneity foregrounds mobility and relationships across space in its theorising of Indigenous worlds and futures, particularly in a changing climate (Kitara et al. 2021). Indigeneity in many Pacific Island cultures, not only Tuvalu, is constituted through both rootedness in a particular land and sea place, and by social relations and mobility across space, including transnationally (Jolly 2001). Once the significance of well-established customary practices, including human mobility, is understood, it becomes clear that responses to externally produced challenges, such as a global pandemic should be reframed. Beyond the vulnerability stereotypes of small, resource-poor atoll communities, more respectful, nuanced narratives can gain greater traction: that elucidate complex and often empowering relationships between people, land, and mobility enacted through culturally specific leadership, knowledge and practices.

When the opportunity to cross a border is framed as, inherently, a ‘justice’ solution to Tuvalu’s climate change challenges, what place is there for valuing the rural migration and customary practices that became part of a pandemic-era sense of human security when borders to Tuvalu were closed? Alternative, crisis-resistant futures were mapped and brought into being through narratives and practices of Tuvaluan people and their government during the pandemic, and these deserve to be known and circulated widely (Kitara 2019).

Conclusion

Tuvalu’s status as the last country to remain free of community transmission of Covid-19 has received little attention, certainly in contrast to attention paid to Tuvalu’s exposure to climate change. Why Tuvalu’s successful pandemic response is not seen as particularly newsworthy is an important issue, perhaps deserving of more research attention. In particular, urban-rural migration that occurred during the pandemic is instructive for understanding the strength of cultural and family connections to place for Tuvaluans. The sense of security that mobile Tuvaluan people found in moving to often rural places where they could rely on their family and their land is important: people wanted to move to a culturally valued place and felt empowered by the choices they could make. These mobility practices are worthy of further research because of how they evoked a sense of material and ontological security for Tuvaluan people in a time of crisis. In terms of mobility justice, particularly when it comes to ‘solutions’ to the risks such as climate change or disease, we need to reflect on the value of these cultural practices and how they counter narratives of vulnerability and the inevitability of international climate migration. For many Tuvaluans internal migration to culturally important lands revived a sense of community, strengthened cultural relations and provided an opportunity to reinvigorate customary forms of self-sufficiency which are surely valuable for facing an uncertain future of climate variability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number FT210100512].