This thesis describes how politics shape vulnerability to climate change at the local level, based on an ethnography in Cortez, Florida. Focusing on a “traditional” commercial fishing village on the Florida Gulf Coast, my research indicates that such vulnerabilities are created at multiple scales of the nexus between governance and commerce. Moreover, a key finding is that, as a community closely linked to the health of local environments, the village in Cortez is largely organized to protect their commercial industry from regional economic overdevelopment; not in recognition of its role in contributing to global climate change, but because such overdevelopment is perceived as unjust and destructive to local environments. Further, through qualitatively examining the environmental values of a “traditional” fishing community located in a large metropolitan coastal area, my thesis confronts the responsibility that broader society may have to reevaluate economic growth in effort to truly foster sustainability and justice. Finally, the thesis describes how communities like Cortez may be repositories for locally developed, ecologically grounded resilience strategies, rendering their voice all the more crucial, beyond conventional stakeholder approaches, in public discussions about regional economic development and marine resource management.

This thesis argues that local ‘neighbourhoods’ of shared understanding are not conceived solely through reference to an imaginary ‘other’ but, instead, may inhere in and be rejuvenated by a tension between internally generated and contradictory ways of understanding collectivity. Among commercial fishermen of the Gippsland Lakes in Victoria (Australia), I show that social facts are generated by agents-acting-in-settings, and that aspects of fishermen’s collective practice and representation are informed by such local contingencies as ‘who you are, what you are up to, and with whom’. The neighbourhood, I argue, is realised in performance, during everyday encounters in occupational contexts such as ‘on the lake’ or ‘down at the Co-op’. But fishermen also imagine togetherness, in different contexts, through the construction of conceptual boundaries, by identifying themselves as, for instance, ‘a fourth generation lake fisherman’. These two modes of conceiving how one belongs to a community – through performance or via recourse to structural ideals, produce remarkably different ways of viewing the world, relating to other people, and relating to one’s surrounds. On the one hand, a community constituted by social interaction relies on action in the present and a view towards ongoing future interactions between community members. This mode of belonging is dynamic and is characterised by movement, towards others and towards the future.