The Land Is Life: Contesting Food Security and Development Initiatives Through Gendered Narratives of Wellbeing in Urban and Peri-urban Vanuatu

After the devastation of Tropical Cyclone (TC) Pam in 2015, Vanuatu was the subject of numerous development interventions that used urban agriculture initiatives designed to improve ‘resilience’. Based on ethnographic research, this chapter examines the gendered ways in which these food security interventions conceptualised and impacted on wellbeing. While the gardens cultivated as the primary focus of such interventions were very successful in addressing material wellbeing aims, their benefits were not conceptualised in linear or universal ways. Reflecting on a cultural context that operates around paradigms of personhood, reciprocity, and relational wellbeing, ni-Vanuatu research participants, and women in particular, noted that core community values are often expressed through food culture. They suggested that the cultivation of gardens sometimes forced them to interrogate their relative positionality to both exogenous forces and the internal power structures of ni-Vanuatu society. Interrogating such discourses, this chapter contributes to understandings of the role of cultural contextualisation and ambivalence in wellbeing discourses.