Culture Shock Philippines (though not the 1988 version) was actually the last book I picked up. It’s still prescribed reading for Aussie vollies in the Philippines, and it’s being stored in the now empty maid’s quarter’s where I stay when transiting through Manila, rejected by successive waves of young Australians who discover Filipinos can never be boxed into the ‘smooth interpersonal relations’ box that (Westernised) culture commentators insist on.

Small world marvelling has been the theme of my week, and the giggles that spread across the room when the Dean of Asia Pacific studies hauled out a ‘Kate and William’ tea towel from the mystery blogging box, reminded us again that our shared knowledge allows us to laugh at the same things like no other time.

I’m reminded again of Harvey Cox’s words ‘the comic, more than the tragic, because it inspires hope, and leads to more not less participation in the struggle for a just world’. So let’s laugh together, learn together and then drink Japanese beer together and make the most of the final two days of APW2011.

He was referring to the Filipino artesanal fishers that we were to invite to a workshop on how addressing the fact that it often costs the fishers more to go fishing than to stay at home. Fishing is not very profitable  in the now sparsely populated coastal waters of northern Luzon, especially if you’re sticking to the legal handlines and traps rather than the illegal cyanide and dynamite.

Very soon after, another colleague took a photo of the fish we had been served for dinner, with his wedding ring as a reference point. Yes, the fish were increasingly small, and the incomes of the usually poorly educated fishers, even smaller. Words like intractable and insurmountable came far more easily to mind than hope and encouragement.

But Perry’s words have often come back to me, and I think they apply as much to the fishers as it does to  the countless development, disaster and research practitioners who are looking to improve the depressing trajectories that confront us every time we string a time series graph together. If we can’t hope, if our clients, participants and patients can’t hope, what will we have left? Philip Prett calls hope – substantial hope – ‘cognitive resolve’, and Braihwaite, Courville and Piper talk about the “bootstrapping that takes place between hope,
empowerment, ideas for change, and action”,  writing “hope is the most enduring of these,
lying in wait through cycles of adversity and resistance to change.”

Time to plot out a framework of the enabling role of hope in sustainability.

<<Thanks to a timely suggestion from our resident super star Lorrae Van Kerkoff,  I have been delving into the hope literature inspired by work of Val Braithwaite and colleagues.  See the special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2004; 592; 6 – the quotes are from Val Braithwaite’s preface “collective hope”.>>

Special saludo to Ines of Lisbon, who wants to join our community of practice through her work on sustainability and migration. Welcome Ines!