What is the Pacific Islands Forum? How a Summit for the World's Tiniest Nations became a Global Draw

Tonga: As leaders of Pacific nations were welcomed to their annual meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, on Monday, they were greeted first by torrential rain and then by an earthquake.

The magnitude 6.9 quake was deep enough not to cause damage, but the long shudder and ankle-deep water served as a reminder of the natural vulnerabilities of many of the member countries of the Pacific Islands Forum, who are locked in an existential struggle for economic and environmental survival.

It also underscored the tension at the heart of an event that once barely captured the world’s notice and now draws delegations from dozens of countries across the globe — the way a fierce skirmish for geopolitical influence in the South Pacific among major powers further afield threatens to overtake local concerns, often to island leaders’ dismay.

“We don’t want them to fight in our backyard here. Take that elsewhere,” Baron Waqa, the forum’s secretary-general and a former president of Nauru, told reporters last month.

Still, there are more than 1,500 delegates from more than 40 countries at this year’s meeting of Pacific member states, all hoping to further their agendas in a region where oceans, resources and strategic power have grown increasingly contested.

Founded in 1971, the Pacific Islands Forum brings together 18 member states to discuss and coordinate responses to the issues confronting a remote and diverse region, who know that their countries — with populations as small as 1,500 people — attract more notice on the global stage when they speak with one voice. Its leaders — from Pacific Island nations, some of them among the world’s most imperiled by rising seas, as well as Australia and New Zealand — have long been at the forefront of urging action on climate change.

For the first few decades of the forum’s existence, the annual meetings of its leaders largely escaped wider notice. In recent years that has changed, regular forum-goers say: China’s campaign of aid, diplomacy and security agreements with leaders across the Pacific has prompted a rapid expansion of the size and scope of the organization and its meetings.

This week’s summit features the forum’s largest ever delegation from China and a sizeable deputation from the United States, led by Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.

Both countries are among 21 “dialogue partners” — a group of nations with interest in the region — in the forum. There is a waiting list for entry, but applications are currently closed while the forum reviews its structure. Observers said Monday that a tiered system — reflecting partners’ genuine interests and involvement in the Pacific — was a possibility.

“We’ve been mindful that our region is of great interest from a geopolitical perspective over the last few years or so,” Mark Brown, the Cook Islands prime minister and outgoing chair of the forum, told Islands Business this month. “But the security issues that are seen by our bigger development partners are not the same security issues that we consider as important.”

Where large powers might attend the forum seeking to curry influence while undermining others' sway, the focus of the region's leaders sits squarely where it always has been: the perils of climate change and rapidly rising seas.

Reminders are everywhere in the Tongan capital, Nuku’alofa — metal water bottles supplied as keepsakes to delegates are labeled “one less plastic bottle,” but at each meeting and meal, plastic bottles of water are distributed. Rising seas and natural disasters, as in many Pacific Island nations, have contaminated rainwater and groundwater and made them unsafe to drink.

This year, the topic has another champion — the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, who in a speech at Monday’s opening ceremony decried “humanity treating the sea like a sewer” and applauded Pacific leaders and young people for declaring a climate emergency and calling for action.

Some leaders tried to bring pressing issues at home to center stage: The Tongan prime minister and incoming forum chair, Siaosi Sovaleni, spoke on Monday of the health and education challenges confronting his country — and echoed throughout the Pacific.

Other topics include the legacy of nuclear horrors in the region, the cost of living and debt, and regional security — including a Pacific police training center scheduled for construction in Brisbane, Australia, that is seen as a direct challenge to China's eagerness to equip the law enforcement agencies of some island nations.

Fiji’s prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, in June referred to the confluence of problems — also including transnational drug trafficking in his assessment — as a “polycrisis,” with each challenge exacerbating others.

But the Forum’s most fraught matter is likely to be the ongoing unrest in New Caledonia. Deadly violence flared in the French territory in May over a longstanding independence movement and Paris’ efforts to quash it. A failed attempt by Pacific leaders to visit the capital, Noumea, ahead of the summit has further inflamed tensions.

Longtime forum watchers say the test for major powers at the event is whether their leaders can engage in the “Pacific way,” a kind of humble consensus politics that centers on relationships and holds at its heart the idea of the so-called Blue Pacific family — island nations linked by shared culture and heritage, and distinct from the wider Indo-Pacific, whose interests are seen as more disparate and remote.

Raised eyebrows greet summit participants who are loud, pushy, or over-eager in vying for sway. “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,” Brown, the Cook Islands leader, told Islands Business.

But the leaders are pragmatic that global interest in the Pacific is here to stay.

“It needs to be something the world pays attention to. It’s not the way it used to be,” said New Zealand’s foreign minister, Winston Peters, last week. “We’ve been a lucky people and a lucky theater. We must do our utmost to secure that in the long term.”