University of the South Pacific

This In Brief discusses contemporary land complexities in Solomon Islands with reference to land dealings around the capital city of Honiara. It provides a brief history of land in Honiara before discussing urban land use, planning, and development.

Establishing a national university has been widely perceived by smaller developing countries as a means of visibly taking ownership of the country’s economic, social and cultural development.  A national university, funded and directed by the government, can be charged with meeting local labour market needs, addressing social and ethnic inequality, and preserving and celebrating national and cultural identity.  National universities were often established in the early years of post-colonialism, to mark the birth of a newly independent nation – most notably, the National University of Singapore.

In the Pacific, 12 small nation states uniquely cooperated to set up and jointly manage a multi-campus regional university, the University of South Pacific (USP), in 1968.  Loosely modelled on the regional University of the West Indies, USP is funded by its 12 member countries, with donor aid from Australia and New Zealand.  Despite the existence of USP, however, the larger Pacific Island Countries, notably Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Tonga have all subsequently established their own national universities.  The newest, the National University of Vanuatu, was launched at the start of 2020.

Building a credible national university that meets the needs of multiple stakeholders, often with the limited financial resources of small developing country, presents a raft of challenges.  This paper, using a critical ethnographic methodology, examines the lessons from the first ten years (2010-20) of Fiji National University, from the perspective of a researcher who served as vice-chancellor from 2016-20.

Critical self-reflection as a research methodology has inherent weaknesses.  Unlike ethnographic methods which employ first-hand observation of participants, when the researcher is an active participant in events there is a natural tendency for him/her to interpret cause and effect in ways which overemphasise the significance of the actions taken or show the researcher in the best light.  However, when undertaken critically in a reflexive way which acknowledges and articulates the researcher’s own biases, this methodology offers a uniquely deep insight into the challenges of institution-building in a Pacific context.

The paper identifies a number of obstacles to executing the vision of a national university.  Some are common to the creation of new universities by merging smaller, constituent colleges which has taken place in other countries, notably the UK when the polytechnics were established in the 1970s.  These include forging a common organisational culture, upskilling or reskilling academic faculty for their new roles, and strengthening teaching and research without destroying earlier traditions of vocational training and employability.

Others are more specific to developing countries, which include the almost complete dependence on public funding to support operational and capital spending, as well as providing financial support for students.  This creates an acute financial vulnerability to a weakening of the fiscal position, which is exacerbated by the fact that the tax bases in many small island economies are heavily reliant on international tourism.  It also inevitably fosters an unhealthy dynamic between the university’s management and the government, on whose patronage the fortunes of the university’s finances rest.

Finally, it finds that some challenges are more distinctively Pacific, or even Fijian, in nature.  These include the bonds of kinship and respect for elders, which are often unacknowledged but sometimes in conflict with ‘imported’ management practices and even national legislation based on international ‘good practice’.  Ever present is the spectre of neo-colonialism, when the templates for organisational management and the benchmarks for success are uncritically adopted from the dominant Humboldtian model of higher education as a teaching-research nexus.  This threat is magnified by the pressure on newly-established universities to appoint senior academic managers trained outside the region, who unconsciously become a conduit for the transmission of Western academic values.

Global climate change scenarios are seen as future concerns, but this is not the case for the Pacific island countries and territories. The natural sciences have already built substantial knowledge about the oceanographic, geological and atmospheric processed associated with global warming and ocean change. Nonetheless, deep views from the social sciences, as well as legal perspective, need to be collected, analysed and executed, in order to know what happens when the climate change effects threaten the viability of sovereign states. Small island developing states contributed the least to global warming, yet they are suffering the most from its effects, while legal consequences of losing the most or all of their territory will lead those nations to the threat of losing sovereign status in the international arena. The
 
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Pacific Ocean, being the largest water basin on Earth, remains an isolated region in terms of geopolitics and research. This article is, therefore, a modest attempt to collect models and scenarios of the future of the Pacific states concerning their full existence as the equal legal entities, but also to present some international law proposals in this matter. Secondly, its goal is to sensitize European readers to certain issues of the geographically remote South Pacific, which might eventually affect all of us.

Keynote address by Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie at The University of the South Pacific Journalism Awards,19 October 2018, celebrating 50 years of the university's existence. Wide-ranging speech covers core values of journalism, global threats to journalists and press freedom, political leaders fueling "media phobia", the Jamal Khashoggi assassination in Turkey on 2 October 2018, Pacific media whistleblowers and the history of the University of the South Pacific journalism.

Scholars of religion and policy makers may be surprised at the changes occurring on the second largest island of the world that straddles one of the most Christianised and least Christianised areas of the world.

This book provides an accurate and deeper understanding of the nature of Islam in Papua New Guinea, and determines the causes and processes of recent growth in the country's Muslim population.

Combining ethnographic, sociological and historical approaches to understanding Islam's growth in Papua New Guinea, the book uses extensive fieldwork, interviews and archival records to look at the establishment, institutionalization and growth of Islam in a country that is predominantly Christian. It analyses the causes and processes of conversion, and presents a new analytical approach that could be used as a basis for analysing Islamic conversions in other parts of the world.

Presenting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Islamic conversion thorough the examination of the causes and process of Islamic conversion in Papua New Guinea, the book is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Religion, Islamic Studies, Cultural Studies, Strategic Studies and Security Studies.