The Pacific Way

FORUM Staff

Mutual respect, dialogue and consensus are hallmarks of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and distinguish the organization among enduring partnerships worldwide. Sixteen nations and two French territories, with populations ranging from Australia’s 27 million to Niue’s 2,000, address matters affecting the region, which comprises nearly 20% of Earth’s surface.

The PIF began as a consortium of seven island nations in 1971 and initially was called the South Pacific Forum. It is not a government. Rather, it’s an intergovernmental organization focused on cooperation among the 18 members and on political and economic policy. It gives a collective voice to independent island states spread across thousands of kilometers of the Pacific Ocean.

“They are stronger together,” Suzanne Vares-Lum, president of the East-West Center, a Hawaii-based think tank that promotes relationships among people and nations of the Indo-Pacific, told FORUM. “At the same time, the [PIF] acknowledges the unique characteristics of each sovereign nation.”

There also are 21 dialogue partners — nonregional nations and the European Union — that have interests in the Pacific and advance the PIF’s priorities and vision, the organization’s website states. The partners do not have voting power, but their involvement adds perspective and bolsters the organization’s international stature.

PIF leaders strive for consensus and authenticity, often called “the Pacific way,” reflective of their cultures and values. Even the preferred attire — colorfully printed clothing — exudes a casual, cooperative spirit.

The PIF, based in Suva, Fiji, typically focuses on the immediate needs of the region’s people. “It’s important that we control the narrative as Pacific countries, setting our own destiny,” Cook Islands Prime Minister and PIF Chairman Mark Brown told Radio New Zealand in November 2023.

Despite the organization’s amicable approach, tensions occur. “There are bound to be divisions. There are bound to be disagreements,” Dr. Alfred Oehlers, a professor and Pacific islands expert at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, told FORUM. “What’s unique about them is they try as much as possible to present a unified front — on topics such as climate change. It depends on the issue.”

Disputes have arisen and ebbed throughout the PIF’s history. For instance, the organization suspended Fiji in 2009 after a military coup, then reinstated the nation in 2014. The PIF in 2022 moved to rotate appointments of its secretary-general, helping resolve protests by five Micronesian states that threatened to leave the PIF. Repeated attempts by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to gain diplomatic, trade and security influence in the region are another source of contention.   

Every member’s position is considered at regional meetings, and more prosperous nations provide transportation to leaders of states with limited resources.

“The PIF is probably one of the greatest success stories around the world,” Oehlers said. “It’s a venue for sovereign nations to get together and try to work things out.”

2050 Strategy

PIF leaders in 2019 moved to establish long-term goals and a blueprint to achieve them by midcentury. The resulting 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, endorsed in July 2022, addresses seven areas: political leadership and regionalism; people-centered development; peace and security; resource and economic development; climate change and disasters; the ocean and natural environment; and technology and connectivity. The goals align with the PIF’s vision of a region that is conducive to peace, harmony, security, social inclusion and prosperity. Success means all Pacific people can lead free, healthy and productive lives.

“The 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent is a long-term strategy to guide how our region will work together as countries and territories, communities, and as people to build on our strengths and secure our future against the challenges of today and the coming decades,” the PIF stated in introducing the document. It acknowledges challenges such as the “climate emergency” of rising temperatures, slow economic growth, disparate health and education systems, and environmental degradation of land and waters. It also recognizes strengths: culture and traditions, a young population and ocean resources.

At their meeting in the Cook Islands in November 2023, PIF leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the 2050 Strategy, discussed a first phase of its implementation and stressed the plan’s importance to ensure regional cooperation. A recurring theme was that climate change is the region’s greatest security threat. A communique released after the meeting emphasized the need for Blue Pacific nations to secure legal standing of their lands and waters “in perpetuity” — especially when facing the existential threat of sea-level rise and increasingly severe storms. Leaders endorsed the organization’s Declaration on the Continuity of Statehood and the Protection of Persons in the Face of Climate Change-Related Sea-Level Rise.

They also called for faster progress on gender equity, reaffirmed a commitment to sustain and develop fisheries, endorsed elevating the region’s trade and environmental agendas, and discussed nuclear threats, including contamination caused by peaceful uses of nuclear energy. These initiatives and others — including improved education and health care — align with the 2050 Strategy.

“It’s our North Star,” Paki Ormsby, then policy director of the PIF Secretariat, which produced the strategy, told FORUM. “It’s fundamental for us. We were faced with a situation — the climate crisis — that needed a response. There were socioeconomic challenges, and this was even before we knew about COVID-19. We needed a strategy to help guide us through these turbulent waters.”

Geopolitical tensions, militarization

Dr. Sandra Tarte, acting head of the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) School of Law and Social Sciences in Suva, said the Blue Pacific narrative has emphasized nontraditional security threats over geopolitical ones, which often are portrayed as a distraction to priorities such as climate change.

Pacific states, however, should acknowledge and address the Indo-Pacific’s increased militarization and geopolitical tensions, Tarte told FORUM. While the 2050 Strategy calls for a “flexible and responsive” regional security mechanism, the PIF must consider how to best harness its “friends to all, enemies to none” posture. That is beginning to happen. Tarte cited the Track Two Pacific Dialogue on Security and Geopolitics. The December 2023 workshop, sponsored by USP in consultation with the PIF Secretariat, focused on Pacific responses to geostrategic dynamics and military activities in the region. The workshop on USP’s Laucala, Fiji, campus included academics, researchers, citizens and government leaders.

Ormsby said the 2050 Strategy addresses geopolitical competition but in the context of other pressing regional matters. “We’re not naive about those [competitive] challenges,” he said.

Increased international interest in the Pacific and growing pressure on individual states to align with influential nations could weaken the PIF’s regionalism, wrote Cherry Hitkari, a fellow at Pacific Forum, a Hawaii-based research institute. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) serves as an example. While a strongly professed regional identity has helped ASEAN address shared concerns and aspirations, external coercion threatens to damage its unity, Hitkari wrote in August 2023.

The PIF faces other challenges, at least partly due to its members’ disparate sizes, populations, wealth, governance and other characteristics. Disputes have arisen among the Pacific subregions of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, straining the PIF’s cohesion.

Accomplishments

The PIF promotes cooperation among regional authorities, collaborates with international governments and agencies, and represents its members’ pressing interests. While expanding its membership over more than five decades, the PIF has:

• Been a strong advocate of maritime domain awareness and declared that exclusive economic zones and other protections established through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea are valid regardless of climate-related rising seas. 

• Established policies to manage and conserve vital fisheries, especially migratory species such as tuna. Based in the Solomon Islands capital, Honiara, the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency addresses illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, which interferes with the leading income of many Pacific states.

• Taken an anti-nuclear stance. The Treaty of Rarotonga prohibits nuclear weapons and the dumping of radioactive waste in the region. PIF Chairman Brown suggested revisiting the 1985 treaty “to ensure that it reflects the concerns of Pacific countries today,” The Guardian newspaper reported in November 2023. 

• Raised international awareness of climate change and its detrimental effects. Testimony and visual evidence presented by low-lying Pacific island nations bolster worldwide concern about sea-level rise and increased storm severity.

• Supported efforts to quell civil unrest in the Solomon Islands, one of its member nations. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands — requested by Honiara and led by Australia from 2003-17 — largely restored peace and stability.

• Established norms of regional cooperation demonstrated by the unanimous endorsement of the 2050 Strategy.

Despite occasional disagreements, Oehlers said, the PIF has done its best work in the past decade. “There’s always a lot of focus on what’s awkward or negative rather than positive and successful,” he said.

History

Humans have inhabited the Pacific islands for thousands of years, establishing communities with distinct cultures and means of survival. Productive uses of the surrounding ocean, including remarkable navigational feats, recur throughout the region’s rich history. Europeans encountered the islands in the 1500s and colonization surged in the 19th century. 

Today’s Pacific regionalism, embodied in the PIF, took root as many island communities were gaining independence. The South Pacific Forum continued adding member states and changed its name to the Pacific Islands Forum in 1999.

“It was an exercise in trying to assert and empower themselves so they would have a better chance of being heard on the world stage,” Tarte said. “It built on a tradition of regionalism that had already been established during the colonial era.”

There is a strong desire to remain neutral as other Indo-Pacific powers strive to persuade the island governments to see things their way. Though the Solomon Islands drew closer to the PRC after signing a security agreement in 2022, attempts by the PRC to assert influence among other PIF states have been less fruitful. For example, shortly after Beijing’s secret pact with the Solomon Islands, other Blue Pacific nations rejected a multilateral proposal to deepen the PRC’s security and economic ties in the region. And April 2024 elections in the Solomon Islands weakened the PRC’s influence there after supporter Manasseh Sogavare, though re-elected to Parliament, withdrew his candidacy to retain the prime minister post. 

PIF leaders established the Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific (CROP) in 1988 to improve cooperation, coordination and collaboration among intergovernmental organizations. This partnership of agencies supports PIF’s commitment to regionalism. The PIF’s secretary-general also serves as the CROP chair. CROP works with the Pacific Aviation Safety Office; the Pacific Community scientific and technical organization; the Pacific Islands Development Program; the PIF Fisheries Agency; the PIF Secretariat; the Pacific Power Association; the Pacific Tourism Organisation; the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme; and USP.

The Biketawa Declaration of 2000 and the Boe Declaration of 2018 encourage PIF members to help neighbors in crises. The former emphasized the states’ moral responsibility to protect their neighbors during hardships and was invoked, for instance, during the Solomon Islands civil strife and when COVID-19 swept through the region in 2020. The Boe Declaration expanded the concept of security to account for natural and human-caused disasters. It labeled climate change the greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and well-being of Pacific people.

Endorsement of the 2050 Strategy marked a signature moment, reflecting the aspirations of PIF leaders throughout the organization’s history. “I am very impressed with the technical and visionary tone of the document,” Oehlers said. “It’s entirely consistent and aligned with United Nations and international rules of order.”  

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Source of Support

Nations collaborate with Blue Pacific leaders to bolster sprawling region

FORUM Staff

The Partners in the Blue Pacific (PBP) works with the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) to advance the latter’s priorities, including those codified in its 2050 Strategy. The PBP aims “to bring new energy and resources to deliver practical, tangible results.”

Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States launched the PBP in June 2022. Canada, Germany and South Korea since have participated as partners. The natons, after conferring with PIF leaders, assist with bolstering disaster resilience and climate change mitigation, addressing cyber threats and opportunities, enhancing ocean research, and deterring illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. 

“We will map existing projects and plan future ones, seeking to drive resources, remove duplication, and close gaps, which will avoid greater burdens and lost opportunities for Pacific governments and Pacific people,” the founding members stated at the PBP’s inception.

“This is a coordinating mechanism, not an implementing mechanism,” Dr. Alfred Oehlers, a Pacific islands expert at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (DKI APCSS) in Hawaii, told FORUM. “Lots of nations want to help but the Pacific island countries don’t have bandwidth to handle all the offers.”

Pacific Aid Map

Development assistance plays a larger role in Pacific economies than in any other part of the world. The Lowy Institute’s Pacific Aid Map, funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs, has detailed information about grants and loans to the region.

Researchers at the institute, an Australia-based think tank, collected data on more than 30,000 projects and activities sponsored by 82 development partners to compile the interactive map, which shows the effectiveness of foreign aid flowing to 14 Pacific states from 2008 through 2021: the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Together, those states received more than $40 billion in aid during that period, the institute reported.

Australia and Japan increased support to all 14 states in 2021, and Australia was the largest contributor from 2008-21, providing 40% of all development financing to the region, the institute reported. By contrast, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) contribution decreased in 2021, with most of its $241 million outlay targeting island nations with diplomatic ties to the PRC, the researchers found. Kiribati and the Solomon Islands, both of which switched political allegiance from self-governed Taiwan to Beijing in 2019, received increased Chinese aid in 2021.

Cooperative Effort

PBP members and observers — the European Union, France and India — joined representatives of Pacific island countries, the PIF Secretariat and others at DKI APCSS in Honolulu for a workshop on IUU fishing and maritime domain awareness in January 2023. The workshop addressed challenges facing the Pacific, including capacity and capability gaps. It also identified areas for cooperation.

Oehlers praised the PBP. “It is doing something. It’s working,” he said. “The right people at the right time are contributing and benefiting.”

Along with coordinating their efforts, the PBP and its member nations plan to forge closer relationships with Pacific governments and the PIF. The U.S., for example, held White House summits with PIF members in 2022 and 2023 as part of its commitment to the region, especially with rising sea levels and treacherous storms threatening low-lying island nations. “The United States [is] committed to ensuring an Indo-Pacific region that is free, open, prosperous and secure,” U.S. President Joe Biden said at
the September 2023 gathering. He requested $200 million from Congress for initiatives to expand and deepen U.S. engagement in the Pacific islands.