FORMER Pacific Islands Forum secretary general Dame Meg Taylor has called for Pacific leadership to be grounded in the region’s own philosophies, relationships and cultural values rather than borrowed models.
Speaking at the 2nd Pasifika Philosophies, Leadership, Weaving Futures Conference, Taylor reflected on her experiences growing up in Papua New Guinea and working across the Pacific, saying leadership must be understood beyond formal positions and individual authority.
She said her early experiences of traditional leadership showed her both the strength of collective decision-making and the limits of systems that excluded women from formal spaces of deliberation.
Taylor said women and elders had long played important leadership roles within Pacific communities, often without holding formal titles.
“Leadership lives in relationship, not only in position,” she said, stressing the need to recognise leadership carried by women, elders and community members who hold societies together without official positions.
Drawing on her experience at the Pacific Islands Forum, she said collective leadership required governments, civil society, young people and elders to have a genuine place in regional decision-making.
She recalled efforts during her time as secretary general to bring greater public participation into regional processes, including consultations with civil society and communities that contributed to the Framework for Pacific Regionalism.
Taylor said consensus was deeply rooted in Pacific societies but became harder to maintain when scaled from villages to the regional level, particularly when external interests pressured Pacific countries.
“Collective leadership is not the absence of ego; it is the ongoing and unglamorous work of making space for others inside decisions that would be easier to make alone,” she said.
She pointed to the Blue Pacific narrative as an example of what collective leadership could achieve, saying it provided the region with a shared story grounded in its ocean identity and common cultural concepts.
However, she warned that Pacific unity could weaken when countries faced sustained diplomatic pressure from larger powers.
“Our initial unified positions on the environment, on nuclear waste, on deep sea mining, on self-determination — these have softened again and again under sustained diplomatic pressure from larger powers,” she said.
Taylor said a strong regional identity and shared story were essential to protecting Pacific interests.
“A region without a shared story and a shared identity will always be undermined,” she said.
She also called for legal instruments and policy frameworks that reflect the region’s own philosophies to support Pacific leadership.
A whole-of-life approach to leadership, she said, should recognise people as relational beings with obligations to previous and future generations, while treating land, ocean and people as an interconnected whole.
Taylor challenged participants to consider whether the Pacific had the legal architecture, policy frameworks, political will and collective commitment needed to protect its way of life.
She said the task for the current generation was to strengthen the foundations of Pacific sovereignty through relationships, collective practice and locally grounded philosophies.
“If there is one thing I am certain of after a life spent in the spaces between family, custom, and political leadership, it is that leadership that lasts is never the leadership that stands alone,” she said.
