The Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting is an unreliable measure of the health of Pacific regionalism, and the space for Pacific countries to disagree and decide on their own terms is narrowing, Sione Tekiteki wrote on the Devpolicy Blog.
Tekiteki is a senior lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology and previously served at the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Secretariat in three positions over nine years, most recently as Director, Governance and Engagement.
Much of the reporting on the leaders' meeting in Palau in September weighted geopolitical posturing, he wrote. Leaders' absences fuelled speculation about external pressure and the Taiwan issue sharpened disputes over participation.
The statement on China's intercontinental ballistic missile test in July, agreed by 17 of the Forum's 18 members with Nauru dissenting, was widely reported as a test of regional cohesion, he wrote. Coverage of the revised partnership mechanism concentrated on which partners would gain direct access to leaders.
Announcements at the meeting included what Tekiteki described as Australia's A$600 million commitment to combat drug smuggling and a US$150 million investment package, both framed as part of the contest for regional influence. Tess Newton Cain and Stefan Armbruster described the communique as "increasingly flabby" and lacking forward momentum.
Those criticisms are not wrong, Tekiteki wrote, and he has felt his own frustrations with the pace of Pacific regionalism. But the annual meeting is a political gathering, akin to a parliamentary sitting, that puts competing interests on display while substantive policy work attracts less attention.
Disagreement can also show countries asserting agency on issues they feel strongly about, as with Nauru's dissent, he wrote. Absences may say more about competing demands on leaders' time, which together with limited capacity are among regionalism's biggest challenges.
The value of regionalism becomes clearer in what happens after leaders leave, he wrote. The BELAU Declaration for Urgent and Inclusive Climate Action gave leaders a common position to carry from Palau to the United Nations General Assembly, and the Pacific Resilience Facility featured prominently in Pacific states' addresses.
The Forum's 2021 declaration on preserving maritime zones and its 2023 declaration on continuing statehood helped pave the way for the first UN Declaration on Sea-Level Rise in September 2026, he wrote. The 2025 International Court of Justice advisory opinion on climate change grew out of a Vanuatu-led campaign that Forum members took up collectively.
Vanuatu raised West Papua at the General Assembly while many Pacific nations did not, despite its inclusion in the leaders' communique. Regionalism does not require countries to speak with one voice, Tekiteki wrote; it can mean giving one another space to advance a position where views differ.
His second concern is that traditional powers are consolidating influence through bilateral agreements, increasingly with strategic trust clauses that commit a Pacific country to consult its partner before entering security arrangements with others. Henrietta McNeill-Stowers and Romitesh Kant have argued in Pacific Dynamics that such arrangements can produce insecurity.
A more inwardly united Pacific could become less empowered, he wrote, because as choices narrow the absence of dissent may reflect resignation rather than agreement. Funding packages of the size announced in Palau are large relative to recipients' budgets, negotiated bilaterally rather than through the Forum, and rarely free of expectations about how a recipient will conduct itself.