Land: a fault line for Pacific peace and security?

Executive summary

Land is entwined with daily life in the Pacific

Eroding coastlines. Submerged homes and graveyards. Rising saline levels in soil and freshwater systems. Changed harvest periods and diets. Relocated communities. Sea wall construction. Reclaimed land.

Each of these scenarios is linked to climate-induced impacts affecting Pacific Island communities. Each also has land as a common denominator.

Missing the land for the sea

Land management policy was a key element of a former Pacific Islands Forum-led initiative aimed at minimising regional conflict by connecting state and customary land governance with peacemaking and security. But this focus faded in the early 2010s alongside waning regional attention to human security.

Currently, spaces for regional knowledge sharing and exchange about land governance are limited. While resource-based attention to land has continued in some sectors, the non-commercial aspects of land governance systems that underpin community cohesion, sustain life and livelihoods, and mediate conflict are often overlooked. Land tenure is not among the selected regional Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) priorities. Despite the muted regional policy attention to land governance, national affairs suggest otherwise.

In recent years, ocean governance has become more of a critical regional priority, propelled in part by multilateral processes and increased geopolitical competition in the Blue Pacific.

Without external pressure or multilateral processes directly forcing attention on what Pacific peoples also hold dear, land, is regional security policy in danger of missing the land for the sea?

What can be done?

Well-supported, pluralistic land tenure systems are implicit to several security themes within the Boe Declaration on Regional Security and the Blue Pacific Ocean of Peace Declaration.

However, these declarations would benefit from a more targeted recognition of the links between land governance, peacemaking and security. Possible policy approaches can be found  within the Pacific Regional Framework for Climate Mobility and the Pacific Guidance on Internal Planned Relocation, which recognise land loss and mobility as entwined with the protection of cultural heritage, identity and dignity.

The region is encouraged to:

• Refocus on land and its centrality to Pacific peoples’ identity and belonging. For the Blue Pacific, land is as important as the sea. The recognition of culture in regional declarations provides an important foundation for this.
• Reintroduce land governance as a critical component of regional peace and security discussions. The issues will only get sharper as climate change intensifies and socio-political pressures mount.
• Use the development of the Regional Peace and Security Action Plan to formally recognise the role of plural land governance systems and their contribution to social cohesion and everyday peacemaking, and advance this through collective regional action.
  • This could be through dedicating space for regular regional dialogue about the land-peace-security nexus within the Pacific’s regional security architecture, and exchanging knowledge through existing platforms such as the Pacific Peace and Security Dialogue and the Pacific Peace Conference.
• Use the annual Pacific Security Outlook Report to spotlight pressing land policy issues – including sustainable access, plural governance systems, ‘new’ land, and transboundary mobility – and target strategic regional security assessments accordingly, such as via the Pacific Fusion Centre and the Forum Subcommittee on Regional Security (FSRS).

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In conversation with

Karen Mapusua

Director, Land Resources Division, The Pacific Community

George Hoa’au

Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and External Trade, Solomon Islands

Vehia Wheeler

Environmental and Cultural Consultant, Sustainable Oceania Solutions

Dr Akka Rimon

Research and Engagement Fellow, Pacific Security College

About the Pacific Security College Policy Paper Series

This paper is published by the Pacific Security College. It reflects the views of the author alone and isn’t an official statement on behalf of the College, its funders, or the Australian National University. The Policy Paper Series aims to contribute a diversity of views and ideas to the regional conversation about the journey to 2050.