“We’ve been mindful that our region is of great interest from a geopolitical perspective over the last few years or so,” says Prime Minister of Cook Islands Mark Brown. “But the security issues that are seen by our bigger development partners are not the same security issues that we consider as important. For us in the Pacific, the national security issues are climate security and economic security.”
After last year’s Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Rarotonga, Brown continued as Chair of the 18-member regional organisation. Now his tenure is coming to the end, and the role passes to Tongan Prime Minister Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni, host of the 53rd summit that starts on Monday.
Before he left for Nuku’alofa, the outgoing Forum Chair spoke to Islands Business from his office in Rarotonga, describing the achievements and challenges of the last year. In a broad-ranging discussion, he highlighted the ongoing challenge of accessing climate financing, the need for innovative responses to debt distress, and the constant danger that great power agendas can overshadow Pacific voices.
Dialogue with partners
As strategic competition ramps up between the People’s Republic of China and the United States and its allies, the number of donors to Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) has more than doubled in the last 15 years. Since 2017, 18 new embassies have sprouted across the region.
There has also been a proliferation of bilateral summits between Forum members and partner countries: the Pacific Island Countries-China Political Leadership Dialogue; the US-Pacific Islands Forum summit in the White House; the BRICS summit; Japan’s Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting (PALM); the Indonesia-Pacific Forum for Development; the France-Oceania summit; the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation (FIPIC) and the Korea-Pacific Islands leaders’ summit, first held last year.
For Brown, this new engagement presents many opportunities, but often threatens to undercut Pacific priorities and stretches the resources of smaller Forum members: “From my perspective as Chair, there is no doubt that the Pacific as a region has grown into an area of great interest from partners in other parts of the world. Over the last year, an outcome was the increased engagement of leaders at the summits that we held with the US, the first with Korea, with India and most recently with Japan with the Palm10 Summit.”
While this engagement is welcomed by Forum member governments, it’s been a constant battle for the Forum Secretariat to get partners to include agenda items that are regional priorities. As Brown diplomatically noted: “It’s important that that interest is channelled into a way that addresses the priorities that Pacific countries have already identified.”
This week’s meeting in Tonga in no exception: one high-profile participant will be UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
“We’re hopeful that the attendance of the Secretary General of the United Nations will elevate the issues that we have,” Brown said. “But we are also mindful that it is our voice that is heard, and not just the Secretary General’s! We’ve seen events in the past where celebrity-status guests arrive, they speak – but once they leave, there should be more focus on the work that the Forum is doing.”
At the 52nd leaders’ meeting hosted by Brown last year, the theme was ‘Our voices, our choices, our Pacific Way.’
“This theme highlighted the need to show that the Pacific does have its own voice and that others do not speak for us,” Brown said. “There is a way that Pacific countries do business with each other and it should be something that we’d like the rest of the world to acknowledge. There are things like talanoa that are part and parcel of the way the Pacific does things.”
“What’s important for us is that our voice is clear,” he said, “that we articulate not the just the issues we’re facing, but the proposed solutions that we seek to help us address some of the issues.”
The climate emergency and COP31
The 39 members of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) make up nearly 20% of the membership of the United Nations. But island states are angered by the failure of OECD countries and other major industrialised nations to fulfill their commitments on climate finance and emissions reductions.
In recent years, Australia has been in dialogue with Türkiye, as the two countries both seek to host the 31st Conference of the Parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2026. At recent Forum summits, island leaders have endorsed Australia’s bid for COP31, although Pacific civil society and church organisations are mobilising to highlight Canberra’s failure to fully halt the expansion of fossil fuel projects. Many are concerned that COP31 will greenwash the power of the mining sector and coal exporters, with Australia exporting nearly three times more carbon energy that the United Arab Emirates, who were widely criticised for climate hypocrisy under COP28 President Sultan al Jaber.
For the outgoing Forum Chair, COP31 is an opportunity for island states, but also a challenge for the largest Forum member.
“To have a COP in the Pacific region is an opportunity to highlight the voices of the Pacific,” Brown told Islands Business. “But I think it then puts the spotlight and the pressure on countries like Australia, the US and others who are active in the Pacific region. We must put the pressure on them to come up with some valuable commitments towards addressing issues that Pacific countries have on climate resilience and climate financing.”
He fired a diplomatic shot across the bows of the Albanese government: “It would look a bit embarrassing to host a meeting like COP31 in the Pacific region, and the very members who are impacted by climate change then start criticising COP31 for not addressing the needs of Pacific countries. So if you’re going to host it here in the Pacific, you have to make sure that you can deliver on what Pacific countries have been calling out for.”
Earlier this year, Brown addressed the SIDS conference in Antigua and noted “the glaring lack of contributions and commitments to climate finance that has not been forthcoming. Accessing climate finance is notoriously difficult for countries like us, which is why we wanted to stand up the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF).”
“In Rarotonga last year,” Brown explained, “we saw a contribution to the PRF of $50 million from Saudi Arabia, which helped to stimulate contributions from other countries after the Forum had ended. This was an initiative developed and built by Pacific countries to address the issue of access to climate finance, which has been a bit of a challenge for most of our countries over the years.”
As Tonga welcomes Forum leaders this week, Prime Minister Sovaleni hopes his nation will be endorsed as the country of domicile for the PRF – the region’s new resilience financing mechanism.
Environmental challenges
The climate emergency is not the only environmental challenge facing island states, who have mobilised against plastic waste and Japan’s ocean dumping of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific from the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor. But while ocean protection is a common concern, there remains significant differences over the issue of deep-sea mining (DSM).
Regional civil society groups want a complete DSM ban while many governments support a moratorium on exploitation of ocean resources. In contrast, Forum members like Nauru, Cook Islands and Tonga are working with transitional corporations to prepare the ground for DSM projects in their Exclusive Economic Zones.
With the Cook Islands EEZ hosting extensive seabed resources, Prime Minister Brown has long been a DSM champion. At last year’s summit in Cook Islands, he attempted to square the circle of very divergent views: “In Rarotonga, we proposed a talanoa session around deep-sea minerals, deep sea mining and the different viewpoints that our countries have. Some of our countries have a very strong stands on calling for moratoriums, while some of our countries have a very vested interest in pursuing and promoting their interests in deep sea minerals.
“Through the talanoa, we’re hoping that the discussion will help reach a collective position,” he said. “It may not be a unified position, but it would certainly be a collective decision when we recognise and respect the varying positions that are taken by different countries on this particular matter. Overlaying all of that is our commitment to the oceans and protection of the ocean environment, to be sure that we have a good sound regulatory process in place before any extraction takes place, and also to respect the sovereign decision taken by each country.”
Debt restructuring after COVID
In recent years, the Forum has deployed Climate Champions to the annual COP negotiations, with leaders and ministers mobilised to intervene in the political debates that scientists and officials can’t resolve. In the past, Mark Brown has led the region’s climate finance advocacy, and now continues this work to address the debt distress faced by some island states, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and global inflation.
“Multilateral banking institutions really need to address the issue of debt sustainability, debt management and debt restructuring,” Brown said. “Debt restructuring is not a term that the banks like to use, but the reality is that many of our Pacific countries in the region are in a position of debt distress.”
While Pacific Rim think tanks like to focus on China’s so-called debt-trap diplomacy, Brown noted that “Pacific countries have come out of COVID with increased debt and much of this debt is with the institutions like the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank” – multilateral banks where the United States, Japan, Australia and other allied nations hold considerable clout.
Brown thinks the Forum can highlight the nexus between climate, COVID and conflict: “If member countries are not meeting their carbon emissions targets or their contributions to climate finance institutions like the Green Climate Fund, they should then consider changing the rules of these banks to wipe off some of our public debt. After all, it is these G20 countries that sit on the boards of these banks, and it is the boards who can change the rules on debt management and debt restructuring.”
New Caledonia
When Islands Business spoke with Prime Minister Brown, he should have been in New Caledonia. For months, the Forum has proposed a monitoring mission to contribute to dialogue in the French Pacific dependency, after rioting and clashes between independence activists and French security forces. However, as we detailed this week, the mission was postponed until after the Tonga summit.
Since the crisis began in mid-May, Brown explained, “as the Chair, I have been in regular contact with President Mapou of New Caledonia to offer the support of Forum member countries and the Forum Secretariat, in addressing the violence and the issues that have flared up in New Caledonia. One of the calls that came through from New Caledonia was for a mission, a high-level delegation of leaders. The Troika of [past, present and future] Forum Chairs was recommended to New Caledonia, to talk to various groups, to view the situation on the ground and to be able to report back to our Forum leaders next week.
“Unfortunately, President Mapou sent me a letter indicating that they were not satisfied that due process and protocols had been observed in their engagement with the State of France,” Brown explained. “His recommendation was that until such time that the New Caledonia government is satisfied with the arrangements for our country to come to New Caledonia, it is better that we defer the mission. So we’ve now agreed to defer this until after the Forum leaders meeting in Tonga. I’m hoping that the differences between the New Caledonia government and the French State can be resolved to allow the Troika mission to go ahead.”
He said the Forum’s immediate call was for the de-escalation of violence, and bringing New Caledonians around the table for dialogue to address issues that have led to the escalation of violence. Beyond this, however, “there’s no doubt there has to be a discussion about a pathway to greater autonomy for New Caledonia, which has been the crux of these incidents that have flared up. It will not be a simple solution and it maybe we have to look at a long-term approach to how we can address the issues of those calling for greater autonomy and those that are calling for the status quo and to remain associated with France.”
The challenge for the Forum, however, is that many independence supporters don’t just want greater autonomy – they want full and sovereign independence, and have the backing of members of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, who want more French action on decolonisation. Both the Government of New Caledonia (a full member of the Forum since 2016) and the French State (a long-standing Forum Dialogue Partner) are sending delegations to Tonga, so the crisis will be widely discussed this week, in the sessions, in the leaders’ retreat, in the corridors and around the kava bowl.
Cook Islands and the Forum
As delegates fly in to Nuku’alofa, the Forum Secretariat is now led by a new team, with Secretary General Baron Waqa of Nauru supported by two deputy secretaries general: Fijian diplomat Esala Nayasi and Samoa’s former Foreign Affairs deputy CEO Desna Solofa.
However, reflecting on his time as Forum Chair, Brown also highlighted the work of former Secretary General Henry Puna – Brown’s predecessor as Prime Minister of Cook Islands was the first Cook Islander ever to head the Forum Secretariat in Suva.
In a valedictory speech in May, Puna noted that his homeland was one of the founders of the regional organisation in 1971 and stressed that “the Forum was formed in the realisation that in this world, individually our voices will never be heard, but together collectively as one region, we can make a difference.”
However Puna’s leadership was cut short after just one term when the regional organisation suffered a damaging split, as five members of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit walked out, angered by Puna’s appointment in 2021 in place of their own nominee.
Speaking to Islands Business, Brown praised his Cook Islands mentor, noting that Puna inherited the job at a difficult time: “As Secretary General, when he came in during Covid, I think he played a significant role and he was an outstanding Secretary General in the work that he did when COVID was in full effect. To ease the region out of COVID, he led the organisation admirably.”
Although a lengthy process of dialogue and reconciliation ended the Forum split, Brown also reflected on the impact Puna’s resignation had on his nation: “This was the sacrifice that was made by Secretary Puna, but also made by the Cook Islands in order to bring the family back together and maintain regional unity. We were disappointed that that was what it took, what it cost. But we saw that was the way to ensure we could bring our family back together again.”
“We’re now looking forward,” Brown stressed. “The family has been brought back together again, with some due consideration to additional regional hosting of institutions in some of the member countries in Micronesia. There was also the acceptance of Secretary General Puna only doing one term. The whole purpose now is to bring about the regional unity of these countries, and we now have agreement on how our future Secretary Generals will be appointed. We hope that this sort of event doesn’t eventuate again in the future.”
For newly inaugurated Baron Waqa – a former President of Nauru – and Forum Secretariat staff, there’s still a busy agenda. Alongside work to implement the 2050 Strategy for a Blue Pacific Continent (with a baseline study to be presented to this week’s summit), leaders have initiated a Review of Regional Architecture (RRA), aimed at rationalising and co-ordinating the diverse range of regional organisations that make up the Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific (CROP). The RRA is also looking at the often-vexed relationship with the 21 countries serving as Forum Dialogue Partners, along with numerous other observers.
For Mark Brown, “the Review of the Regional Architecture is very timely, now that the Pacific countries have adopted the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific and also last year adopting an implementation plan. For our CROP agencies, it seems that their values must be coordinated with the priorities that we’ve adopted, and that there is greater collaboration between the CROP agencies and the member countries.”
A queue of new applicants who are seeking Dialogue Partner Status will be working the corridors this week, so Brown noted wryly that “it is also important that the collaboration and rationalisation be led by Forum members rather than led by Dialogue partners.”