This timely and ambitious volume - a product of close research collaboration with the United Nations Multi-Country Office for Micronesia - is conceived as a holistic “journey” across various domains of progress in a region that, despite fundamental common traits, remains vast and diverse. Pacific island countries and territories (PICTs) have (too) often been identified with elements of vulnerability, whether these be social, economic, or environmental in nature. While these factors cannot be overlooked, this volume aims to showcase not only the long-standing and emerging challenges but, perhaps more importantly, the opportunities, the resilience, the resourcefulness, and the ambition that local socioeconomic development patterns in the Pacific already encompass. Beyond PICTs themselves, we hope that the analyses collected in this book will contribute to highlighting the global significance of the human–nature nexus in the current Anthropocene. Often captured in the concept of “small islands, big oceans”, the importance of the region and its islands and peoples transcends the geographical remoteness and small size of many PICTs.

Throughout the South Pacific, notions of ‘culture’ and ‘development’ are very much alive—in political debate, the media, sermons, and endless discussions amongst villagers and the urban élites, even in policy reports. Often the terms are counterposed, and development along with ‘economic rationality’, ‘good governance’ and ‘progress’ is set against culture or ‘custom’, ‘tradition’ and ‘identity’. The decay of custom and impoverishment of culture are often seen as wrought by development, while failures of development are haunted by the notion that they are due, somehow, to the darker, irrational influences of culture. The problem is to resolve the contradictions between them so as to achieve the greater good—access to material goods, welfare and amenities, ‘modern life’—without the sacrifice of the ‘traditional’ values and institutions that provide material security and sustain diverse social identities. Resolution is sought in this book by a number of leading writers from the South Pacific including Langi Kavaliku, Epeli Hau’ofa, Marshall Sahlins, Malama Meleisea, Joeli Veitayaki, and Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka. The volume is brought together for UNESCO by Antony Hooper, Professor Emeritus at the University of Auckland. UNESCO experts include Richard Engelhardt, Langi Kavaliku, Russell Marshall, Malama Meleisea, Edna Tait and Mali Voi.

A Sustainable Future for Small States: Pacific 2050 is part of the Commonwealth Secretariat’s regional strategic foresight programme that examines whether current development strategies set the region on a path to achieve sustainable development by 2050. The study analyses whether Commonwealth Pacific small states (Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu) will achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. It reviews critical areas that can serve as a catalyst for change in the region: governance (examining political governance, development effectiveness and co-ordination, and ocean governance); non-communicable diseases; information and communications technology and climate change (focussing on migration and climate change, and energy issues). In each of these areas, possible trajectories to 2050 are explored, gaps in the current policy responses are identified, and recommendations are offered to steer the region towards the Pacific Vision of ‘a region of peace, harmony, security, social inclusion, and prosperity, so that all Pacific people can lead free, healthy, and productive lives’.