Between crisis and persistence

Abstract

In this article, I highlight how crisis and persistence are narratives employed to describe democracy in the Pacific Islands. I outline six explanatory variables and illustrate how they interact temporally and spatially. By exploring the tensions within and between narratives, I provide a deeper reading of how the meanings we attach to democracy are negotiated and co-produced by theorists and policymakers. I conclude by arguing that this type of narrative analysis enables us to better understand how the taken-for-granted assumptions that are embedded within policy narratives inform governing practices.

Introduction

The job of most history and social science is to summarise, codify and otherwise ‘package’ important social movements and major historical events in order to make them legible and understandable. Given this objective and the fact that the events that they are seeking to illuminate have already happened, it is hardly surprising that historians and social scientists should typically give short shrift to the confusion, flux and tumultuous contingency experienced by the historical actors, let alone the ordinary bystanders, whose actions they are examining. ¹

This description of academic practice points to the way(s) scholars create and employ narratives to explain human action. Narratives, in this context, are sense-making devices that ascribe meanings to people, places and events. They are signifiers – a type of intellectual shorthand that allows us to quickly convey taken-for-granted assumptions – that become embedded within institutions and their policies. In doing so, they move from being theoretical heuristics that provide a plausible explanation for a particular phenomenon to a basis for action. In short, they become endogenous to the policy process; they exist within it and are produced by it. ² If this all sounds too esoteric, consider this example of immediate relevance to democratic practice in the Pacific Islands. At a recent donor-funded meeting, participants – mostly politicians and senior civil servants – were asked to split into three groups to discuss the workshop’s papers on democracy and democratisation, and propose solutions. Seamlessly, Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian groupings (luckily Fiji was not represented, so there was no confusion) appeared and what began as an early (often racialist) European representation of diversity, which later informed colonial administrative policy, ³ came full circle as the ‘subjects’ of study acted out its findings. Narratives, in short, influence how we understand the social world and act within it.

In the spirit of Anthony Van Fossen’s book South Pacific Futures, I show that this same dynamic, where narratives and actions interact and are (re)negotiated in the messy and contingent world of political practice, is at work in the literature and associated policy agenda on democracy and democratisation in the Pacific Islands. ⁴ Following the ‘narrative turn’ across the social sciences, the terms ‘master’ and ‘counter-’ narratives or stories have a relatively wide usage, with the former associated with dominance and the status quo and the latter with subversion and adjustment. ⁵ From the late 1980s, the master narrative about democracy in the region has persistently portrayed ‘crisis’. The Rodney Cole-edited Pacific 2010 introduced the ‘doomsday scenario’, where a combination of economic stagnation and rising population inevitably resulted in growing poverty and crime, undermining fragile political institutions. ⁶ This pessimistic view of the contemporary Pacific was followed by Paul Dibb’s ‘arc of instability’ metaphor and Ben Reilly’s ‘Africanisation’ thesis. ⁷ And yet, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles and perpetual crisis, and with important exceptions like coups in Fiji and civic unrest in Solomon Islands, democratic government largely persists, elections are held (around 200 regionally since the 1960s) and parliamentary representation and decision-making are principally maintained, leading some theorists and policymakers to ask: why? ‘Persistence’, then, becomes an explanation employed in opposition to the depiction of ‘crisis’, with exponents either arguing that conditions are not as critical as portrayed, or that the seemingly inevitable product of ‘crisis’ – the collapse of democratic government – has failed to eventuate.

The standard move in the existing literature on democracy, both in the Pacific and elsewhere, is to identify and privilege the significance of certain explanatory variables and then make causal inferences about their impact on democratic transition and practice. In this article, I take a different approach. Rather than privileging one variable or model over another, I reconstitute these variables as narratives that are employed to make sense of democratic practice in the Pacific Islands through the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘persistence’. I make two moves. First, I outline six variables – culture; state strength/fragmentation; size; civil society; institutions, electoral systems and constitutions; and international intervention and foreign aid – employed by scholars working in the contemporary Pacific to describe democratic practice as either in a state of ‘crisis’ or ‘persistence’. I do not seek to champion one argument – although, as I will illustrate, some resonate more with certain countries and eras than others – but rather aim to understand their internal composition and tease out what can be learnt by looking at how these narratives are created and sustained by theorists and policymakers. Consequently, I do not provide a one-size-fits-all definition of democracy or democratisation but have rather reviewed the extant literature that self-identifies with the study of politics in the Pacific Islands and drawn on examples that illuminate the arguments contained in each body of work. My goal is to critically examine the different ways this phenomenon is conceptualised and understood. The method is interpretive (typically constructivist-subjectivist) and, following the conventions of this type of research, the standard is plausibility: of narratives that resonate with and reflect the lived world of policy practice. ⁸

One caveat before I begin. This article is based on the assumption that narratives have causal power. However, it is not my primary aim here to demonstrate that this is the case; I take it as a given that they do. Instead, I am interested in the mechanics of how (as opposed to if ) narratives produce our understanding of the political world. As an explanatory mechanism, ‘counter-stories’ are created through an ongoing relationship with the narrative they resist as critics internalise and reproduce explanatory norms. ⁹ That is, exponents of both ‘crisis’ and ‘persistence’ tend to use the same six variables, albeit in support of opposing arguments, to describe democratic practice in the Pacific Islands. In this way, the two narratives function as ‘mobilising metaphors’ that serve as a rallying point for policymakers who, in practice, require a shared repertoire. ¹⁰ Table 1 aims to map this interplay, but even this heuristic, which is designed to clarify and provide a sense of conceptual order, is misleading. A thorough exploration of the literature highlights that in contrast to the goal of clear and sanitised theorising that privileges the causal significance of one variable, these perspectives overlap. They do not have to be mutually exclusive: some scholars and policymakers draw on multiple variables to analyse the experiences of individual countries and certain eras while others hold seemingly contradictory views in tension.

Table 1.

Interpreting democracy narratives in the Pacific Islands.

Explanatory variable	Crisis	Persistence
Culture	Culturally mandated forms of political authority, rank and hierarchy are at odds with modernist principles and the European liberal tradition.	Hybrid or indigenised democratic institutions build on the strengths of existing mores, as exemplified by constitutionally mandated chiefly councils and their equivalents.
State strength/fragmentation	Strong regional, island, clan, linguistic and family-based identities and patronage undermine the authority of centralised state-based institutions and work against the formation and consolidation of political parties and a national consciousness.	The dispersion of power among a host of disparate, non-ideological or class-based political factions ensures that no one group can dominate or capture the institutions and machinery of government.
Scale	Tight social controls demand conformity and work against a pluralist expressions of discontent. The threat of social ostracism marginalises political opposition, which in turn facilitates patriarchal authoritarianism and the personalisation of power.	Remoteness and smallness unifies communities around common challenges while the relatively reduced social proximity between leaders and those they govern provides for more direct citizen engagement, accountability and transparency.
Civil society	Powerful leaders and ruling elites treat their countries as ‘fiefdoms’ by exercising control over nearly all aspects of political life, thus curtailing opposition, freedom of the press and other forms of civic activism.	Elite excess and corruption is tempered by the strength of non-government institutions, including churches and trade unions (especially in Fiji), traditional leaders and culturally mandated forms of reciprocity, and the increasing vocality of non-governmental organisations with strong online links to overseas communities.
Institutions, electoral systems and constitutions	Ill-designed institutional transfer leads to executive domination and legislative instability that undermines democratic processes leading to coups and constitutional crisis.	Extensive public consultations at independence about the form and function of institutional design and the relatively high reliance of small populations on the civil service for employment ensures the continuation of current institutions.
International intervention and foreign aid	Geopolitical manoeuvring, ill-conceived interventions and foreign aid dependence perpetuates a handout mentality while the reliance of some economies (Solomon Islands, PNG) on resource extraction industries props up corrupt patronage-based regimes and fuels resource conflict (i.e. Bougainville).	The commitment of international agencies, bilateral donors and regional organisations to democratic government provides a check against authoritarian rule while foreign aid and technical assistance underpins the functioning of governing and regulatory institutions.

By showing how the same variables are used to simultaneously perpetuate a sense of ‘crisis’ and ‘persistence’, I draw out how narratives interact and reinforce each other. In which case, to return to the workshop example above, from the vantage point of this article, whether or not participants wholeheartedly agreed with the categorisations ‘Melanesia’, ‘Polynesia’ and ‘Micronesia’ is somewhat immaterial; what matters is that they help make sense of the ‘confusion, flux and tumultuous contingency’ Scott's quote describes. In turn, the significance of this approach for students of politics and would-be reformers of political institutions in the Pacific Islands lies in its capacity to illustrate how taken-for-granted assumptions are embedded within the policy narratives that inform reform efforts. In this respect, the explanatory power of ‘crisis’ and ‘persistence’ is coupled to the function of these narratives in the policy process, where they unite disparate actors around a common ‘mobilising metaphor’. ¹¹ In doing so, they project conceptual coherence where there would otherwise be disorder.

Echoing this, and as with all heuristics, there is inevitably a degree of crossover between the six narratives that I outline in Table 1. Explanations of institutional failure, for example, employ a variety of causal factors, including patronage or conflict between the cultural logics of modernism and traditionalism. This qualification aside, my aim is to strip back the veneer of coherence contained in the narratives ‘crisis’ and ‘persistence’ to demonstrate what is otherwise a disparate field. Consequently, while there is often a time lag between when debates emerge in the mainstream literature and the publication of Pacific case studies, there is no reason to suggest that the democracy discussion, as represented in the Pacific context, is vastly different from that of other parts of the world.

Culture

A belief that the values and principles of ‘modern’ state-based institutions are at odds with ‘traditional’ or ‘cultural’ forms of political authority is arguably the dominant rubric through which commentators and analysts have conceptualised the relationship between the state and society in the Pacific region since independence. Taking their cue from Samuel Huntington’s modernisation theory, existing cultural practices, particularly collective land tenure and culturally sanctioned forms of reciprocity, are presented as barriers to the realisation of individual rights and liberties. ¹² Consequently, this debate is less about whether prevailing ‘pre-modern’ dynamics affect contemporary politics – the assumption is that they do – and instead focuses on how they undermine liberal democratic processes, with notions of rank and hierarchy in particular singled out as obstacles to principles like ‘one-vote, one-value’. Writing after the 1987 coup, Fijian academic Asesela Ravuvu described democracy as a ‘façade’ a ‘parting whim of a colonial power that had itself only practised dictatorship’, while Peter Larmour’s work on institutional transfer highlights the power of the ‘foreign flower’ metaphor – unable to take root in South Pacific soil – as described by a Fiji Times editorial. ¹³ These descriptions are particularly pertinent in Fiji, the one Pacific nation that has failed Huntington’s ‘two-turnover test’ (two consecutive changes of government is the benchmark for successful democratic consolidation). ¹⁴ Commentators refer to a prevailing ‘coup culture’, ¹⁵ while Melanesianists commonly lament the insidious nature of ‘big man’ politics. ¹⁶ The manipulation of culture is also regularly seen as a root cause of corruption by donors and international agencies such as Transparency International in what Larmour calls a ‘gothic’ view (grimy and gloomy). ¹⁷ For cultural relativists, practices ordinarily deemed corrupt (gifts, bribes) have different meanings according to context.

Recently, debate about the relationship between culture and politics has shifted somewhat. There is growing recognition that cultural practices can and do contribute to the maintenance of democratic institutions, and that hybrid arrangements are not always a perversion of either an ideal ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ system. Writing about Samoa, Asofou So’o argues that Westminster traditions have not failed to take root in the Pacific but have instead been successful adapted. ¹⁸ He points to legally mandated matai (chiefly) candidacy as a positive example of introduced systems being blended with the best of the fa’samoa (Samoan way). While not always ‘liberal’, he argues that this has generated relative stability and prosperity. Others question the privileging of external measures of ‘success’ (think the version of liberal democracy contained in Freedom House rankings and World Bank governance indictors) over local beliefs and practices. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s reflections on ‘Develop-Man’, for example, celebrates the persistence of culture in the face of modernisation, while Epeli Hau’ofa’s vision of Oceanic empowerment extols political leaders like Vanuatu’s Father Walter Lini and Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Bernard Narokobi for promoting Melanesian values as equal or better than their Western equivalents. ¹⁹ Rather than undermining democracy, in this view, democratic institutions like parliaments become indigenised with their form and function reflecting their history – both inherited and introduced. Furthermore, this perspective acknowledges that previous forms of political rule in the Pacific often contained processes that could be considered democratic, with even the most stratified Pacific societies having traditions of equality between adult men speaking in village meetings; much like the famously democratic Greek city states. ²⁰

State strength/fragmentation

In parallel with the end of the Cold War, state-based institutions have been the dominant medium through which theorists and policymakers have sought to strengthen formal government institutions in the Pacific region. ²¹ Largely functioning as an alternative to the emphasis on democracy discussed elsewhere in this article, Pippa Norris identifies three main strands in this debate. ²² The first is a sequential argument, first advocated by Huntington, which sees strong states as a precursor to democratisation. The second is the good governance agenda, which considers the regulation of the political economy to be a necessary precondition of development (think leadership codes and oversight bodies). And the third is a state capacity argument, synonymous with a Weberian view of the legitimate use of violence and the utility of an impartial and professional civil service. By the late 1990s, and particularly after the September 11th attacks, state strengthening, especially in relation to law and order, had become a core plank in donor reform efforts, while democratic practice, characterised by personalisation and the persistence of cultural norms, was cast as the antithesis of these ideals.

Reflecting this concern, fragmentation, both as it relates to fluid coalition groupings within parliament and separatist or breakaway movements outside of it, has increasingly been identified as a key factor undermining democratic legitimacy. Institutional engineering, particularly relating to electoral systems and constitutions (discussed in greater detail later), has been undertaken to counter this trend. ²³ In addition, the fluid nature of politics (regular floor-crossing and votes of no confidence), often linked to the relative absence of strong political parties, has been of growing concern to academics, commentators and donors over recent decades. Contrary to popular opinion, the fractured nature of parliamentary coalitions is not an exclusively Melanesian phenomenon. Other Pacific countries, where parties have a limited impact and the executive sits in the legislature, often experience similar dynamics. The presidency of Nauru, for example, changed nine times during the 1990s and five times in 2003 alone. ²⁴ Tuvalu had seven different governments between 1998 and 2006, ²⁵ while strong two-party identification in Cook Islands is declining, with floor-crossing now more regular than it was during the governments of Sir Albert Henry and Sir Tom Davis. Likewise, since the 2010 Tongan elections, the most significant since recent democratic reforms, parliament has been subject to persistent speculation about side-switching and votes of no confidence. ²⁶ Consequently, if, as theorists since Schattschneider have argued, democracy is defined as the consolidation of party government, then democracy has failed in most Pacific countries, where the foremost independence parties – Pangu in Papua New Guinea, Vanua’aku in Vanuatu, for example – are no longer capable of winning parliamentary majorities. ²⁷

Echoing the culturalist arguments outlined earlier, fragmentation and the absence of strong nationalist movements is often considered a Melanesian phenomenon that mirrors the cultural and linguistic diversity of that region (around one-quarter of the world’s languages are spoken in Melanesia) and undermines the form and function of state-based rule. Separatist movements, such as those involved in the Bougainville conflict, Papua Besena and Nagriamel, and ethnic tensions in Fiji and the Solomon Islands support this view. Conflict in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands is also linked to the practices of resource extraction industries. However, this orthodoxy can be misleading. The US-administered Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands fragmented into distinct political entities (Palau, Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia [FSM]) at independence. Similarly, the former British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands split to become the sovereign nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu.

The fluid nature of political coalitions and the resulting manoeuvring and brinkmanship, critics claim, undermines the capacity of government to implement their reform agenda, with donor-funded party-strengthening programmes justified under this rationalisation. The literature opposed to this prevailing view is relatively scarce. Reilly argues that fragmentation, as opposed to a small number of entrenched factions, ensures that no one party or ethnic majority retains power; thus incentivising all actors to perpetuate a system that, sooner or later, will enable them to control the machinery of state. In contrast to the orthodox picture of state weakness, critics of Pacific elites have also argued that their relative strength (discussed further later) has undermined the liberal project. ²⁸ However, unlike the culturalist perspective, there has been no substantive attempt to draw on the strong tradition in political theory that sees many of the characteristics common to politics in the Pacific (personalisation, the absence of parties and professional politicians, weak bureaucratic control) as ideal to advance an argument for why democracy persists. From this perspective, the intellectual roots of which can be traced through Aristotle to Arendt and Habermas, participation in public life, as opposed to the pursuit of material aspirations enshrined in the development enterprise, is the primary end of political action.

Size

Size provides an obvious point of contrast between democracies in the Pacific and those in other parts of the world. Perversely, relative to the other five variables, this explanation is often absent from the analysis of democracy and democratisation in the Pacific. Scale is of great concern to some economists, who see the isolation and relative dependence of small island states on aid and remittances as detrimental, and in extreme cases fatal, to development and by extension democracy. ²⁹ Following Seymour Martin Lipset’s thesis, proponents argue that democratisation is strongly correlated with industrialisation and the rise of an educated middle class. ³⁰ Given the historical absence of these dynamics in the region, and the improbability of large-scale industrialisation occurring in the future, this perspective presumes that the Pacific would be relatively undemocratic. Adherents cite highly personalised patronage-based ‘big man’ politics – the term is also used in the Caribbean – electoral malpractice and fraud as examples of poor democratic performance. Elections and the regular rotation of leadership, adherents maintain, do not provide sufficient proof of democratisation, with the ideal pursuit of consensus masking the ugly reality of conformity and social ostracism that confronts discontented citizens in small communities.

The counter-argument can be found in a number of diverse literatures. Political theorists have long argued that ‘small is beautiful’ when it comes to democratic politics as size limits the number of competing interests. ³¹ Advocates of this perspective frequently hark back to antiquity and the belief that to maintain a stable polis, the entire citizenry should be able to meet together in one place to discuss and debate matters of common concern. ³² Rather than an educated middle class, democracy enabled humble men (but not women or slaves) of insignificant wealth and lineage to make their own laws. ³³ More recently, large comparative studies have found a correlation between country size and democratisation, particularly in the Pacific and the Caribbean. ³⁴

To explain the impact of size on social relations, Teresia Teaiwa wonders how Pacific Islanders can ‘hold grudges against people whom they cannot avoid, people they are bound to run into at the supermarket, the market or the street, people whom they are often bound by blood and history?’ ³⁵ From this perspective, the personalisation of politics reduces the distance between voter and constituent, while patronage and cronyism, rather than being symptomatic of democratic crisis, facilitate social integration, thus reinforcing common political dynamics. This view is echoed by Duncan and Woods, who show, with reference to the Caribbean, that despite inequality, corruption and violence related to the international drug trade, democracy persists. ³⁶ Indeed, Larmour goes further by arguing that if transnational circumstances (sovereign status and global market conditions) are held constant, then development poses the greatest risk to existing democracies in the Pacific by deepening social conflicts. ³⁷ He reasoned that democracies in PNG and Fiji were in most danger of crisis while countries with relatively smaller economies and little prospect of development are likely to persevere. Despite representing the most extreme example of the ‘resource curse’ or ‘Dutch disease’, Nauru has not suffered from violent conflict, although John Connell maintains that it is perhaps the Pacific’s first truly ‘failed’ state. ³⁸

Civil society

The apparent weakness of civil society actors in the Pacific has been of great concern to democracy promoters. ³⁹ Drawn from Amartya Sen’s entitlement theory, although it has deeper roots in the basic needs approaches of the 1970s, this perspective sees an active citizenry as a key building block of democratic consolidation. ⁴⁰ Unrestrained elite excess is a key concern for Ron Crocombe who claims that many of the region’s politicians have treated their countries as personal ‘fiefdoms’ due to their extensive influence over nearly all aspects of social, economic and political life. ⁴¹ His documentation of nepotism under Sir Albert Henry’s government in Cook Islands provides a picture of public life co-opted by one family. Veteran Pacific reporter Michael Field echoes this sentiment and cites his willingness to criticise political figures as the overriding rationale behind his being banned from several Pacific Island countries. ⁴² His colleague, Tonga’s Kalafi Moala, was imprisoned for his editorship of the newspaper Taimi ‘o Tonga, which ran stories that were critical of the ruling monarchy. ⁴³ The gendered nature of parliamentary decision-making in the region has also attracted attention among civil society organisations like the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement. ⁴⁴ From this standpoint, democratic transparency and representativeness is undermined by the control of the predominantly male elite over countervailing forces, including the media.

Alternatively, Jon Fraenkel argues that most ‘Pacific countries have a relatively free press, more or less independent judiciaries and, despite some glaring irregularities, few examples of overtly rigged elections’. ⁴⁵ In this view, rather than being deliberately crushed, the emergence of a strong civil society has historically suffered from problems associated with the size of the market; print and radio media often require government subsidies. More recently, the Internet provides new forums for political engagement, especially among young urban elites and diaspora communities, with numerous Facebook groups and blogs sharing news and information about political events and policy issues. ⁴⁶ In examining the 40-year history of women’s organising in Fiji, Nicole George finds that active citizenship both reflects and contests global and locally contingent factors. ⁴⁷ In Vanuatu, politician Ralph Regenvanu has generated enormous support for his anti-corruption campaign, which has a strong online social network presence among young urban constituents. ⁴⁸ His party platform blends globalised discourses like good governance and transparency with localised concerns about land and custom.

Invariably absent from the avowedly secular concern with governance is recognition that, outside of family and kinship networks, Churches and religious organisations are among the strongest non-government actors in the Pacific region. As earlier, in some instances, Churches are implicated as an extension of the ruling elite. Brij Lal, for example, cites the influence of the Fijian Methodist Church on violence after the 1987 coup. ⁴⁹ The imposition of a Sunday Observance Decree, Lal argues, in a country where half the population was non-Christian, encouraged intolerance among more militant fundamentalist Christians, some of whom were responsible for burning down and desecrating Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religious sites in October 1989. Conversely, Churches can provide an avenue for the expression of dissent. Bishop Patelesio Finau was a key figure in Tonga’s pro-democracy movement, while former Papua New Guinean minister and later anti-corruption campaigner Sir Anthony Siaguru used his newspaper column to urge Churches to speak out from the pulpit against the abuse of power. ⁵⁰

A similar tension can be found in discussions about the role of traditional leadership curbing elite excess. Culturalist explanations tend to view grandiose forms of conspicuous consumption as an extension of previous cultural practices. Conversely, Barrie Macdonald finds that public displays of wealth and affluence by Western-educated elites are curtailed in Kiribati by cultural norms and values, while Narokobi’s writings emphasise the redistributive aspects of Melanesian leadership as a counterpoint to what he sees as the bastardisation of these values by contemporary politicians. ⁵¹

Institutions, electoral systems and constitutions

After culture, some of the most intense discussion about democracy in the Pacific has revolved around institutional architecture. As outlined earlier, this view of democratic crisis primarily sees the problem in terms of ill-considered institutional transfer and design, particularly the persistent instability of party-less Westminster systems. Concerned with votes of no confidence, coercion and coups in the case of Fiji, numerous island governments have initiated constitutional reviews. Arend Lijphart’s goal of ‘consociational’ democracy informed discussion about the 1997 Fijian constitution, while in Papua New Guinea, the shift from First Past the Post to Limited Preferential Voting was made in the belief that it would temper the hyper-fractionalisation that many observers felt drove violence around elections. ⁵² This view, often combined with an emphasis on electoral integrity, is also popular with donors concerned with building capacity among regional electoral commissions. The use of legislative instruments to engineer stronger political parties is also a feature of this debate. PNG's Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates is the most prominent attempt to engineer stability in the region, ⁵³ but similar reforms have been attempted elsewhere (in Samoa and Cook Islands, for example).

A variety of arguments are put forward to counter this image of crisis. Constitutional architects and independence leaders often defend the extensive consultations that led to the current institutional arrangements by citing their ‘home-grown’ nature, including provisions for traditional leaders and the preference for accommodating existing political dynamics. ⁵⁴ In Niue, despite some of the 14 representative seats now having only a handful of constituents, key architects of the constitution remain committed to the principle of village representation. Institutional features, including presidential term limits, a cap on ministerial portfolios and a stipulation that successful votes of no confidence trigger the dissolution of parliament, are believed to have contributed to the relative stability of parliamentary politics in Kiribati. Conversely, despite presidents in FSM and Palau being relatively insulated from legislative revolt and no-confidence motions, these countries experience similar practical dynamics to their Westminster equivalents, leading Fraenkel to question whether institutional engineering can really make the difference that its advocates proclaim. ⁵⁵

Finally, while the crisis view of economic conditions common in many Pacific Island countries stands opposed to Lipset’s thesis (growth fosters an educated and democratically active middle class), it can also be seen to underlie the persistence of democratic regimes in the Pacific. ⁵⁶ The public sector accounts for more than a third of total employment and 60–65% of gross national product in Palau, ⁵⁷ and while this represents a barrier to neo-liberal development, it also means that most families have a personal stake in the persistence of governing institutions and an active interest in day-to-day political functions and practices. ⁵⁸

International intervention and foreign aid

Foreign intervention in Pacific Island affairs began well before the colonial period. Different disciplines privilege particular analytic frameworks to interpret how past events influence contemporary politics. Historians, for example, use the phrase ‘fatal impact’, while anthropologists often lament the march of modernism and the destruction of cultural heritage and language. ‘New Interventionism’ is the term used by some International Relations scholars to describe Australia’s 21st-century role in the Pacific. ⁵⁹ Intervention as a form of crisis also features in neo-Marxist accounts of development assistance in the region, with dependency theorists critical of the way that aid perpetuates the reliance of islanders and island governments on global market forces. ⁶⁰ At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, neo-liberals argue that the negative effects of aid – protectionism impedes economic growth – undermine development. They advocate scaling down assistance in favour of free market mechanisms. ⁶¹

Concern with the nature of international interventions is also a feature of the literature on China in the Pacific, the most prominent example of which is Crocombe’s Asia in the Pacific Islands: Replacing the West. ⁶² In the Solomon Islands, commentators and donors have been critical of the government of Taiwan for providing discretionary funding to MPs on the grounds that it intensifies patronage-based politics. ⁶³ Triggered by the election of Snyder Rini as Prime Minister, one commonly cited cause of the April 2006 riots in Honiara’s Chinatown was frustration with the hidden hand of Asian-backed ‘money politics’. ⁶⁴ Similarly, scholars of PNG and the Solomon Islands have been critical of resource extraction industries and the corruption they can engender. ⁶⁵

Alternatively, democratic persistence can be explained as a product of continued intervention. Independence shaped the types of institutional architecture apparent in the contemporary Pacific but current donor-funded scholarship schemes are a carryover from colonial practice. The aim in both instances is to inculcate emerging elites in the values of democratic government. ⁶⁶ A similar point can be made about free association arrangements and labour mobility laws, which in addition to providing important remittances, also serve as a channel for political opinions. Sir Albert Henry and Sir Tom Davis pioneered ‘flying voters’ from New Zealand to Cook Islands in the 1970s and campaigning in overseas communities is common throughout Micronesia and Polynesia today. ⁶⁷

Strong pressure from the international community around values and practices associated with democratic government can also help explain democratic persistence. Organisations like the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Centre for Democratic Institutions (AusAID) and the Institute for Democratic Electoral Assistance (better known as IDEA) provide training for MPs and parliamentary staff, leadership dialogues, and other forums where democratic processes are discussed. Avinash Kumar finds that the impact of the international community has been an important factor in the persistence of the legislature in Fiji, despite several coups, while Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was ostensibly mobilised to secure the rule of law and parliamentary democracy. ⁶⁸ Finally, economists note that despite problems of size, small island states represent an ‘empirical anomaly’, with higher than average standards of living – derived from skilfully managing the globalisation process to generate aid and remittances ⁶⁹ – which should, according to Lipset, provide a democracy dividend. ⁷⁰

Conclusion

Master narratives invariably create counter-narratives. Even a development goal like ‘good governance’, with its seemingly irrefutable positive connotations, has its critics, who either argue that legal-rational values (impartial, meritorious, etc.) are hegemonic, that the targets of such reforms are in fact not as ‘bad’ as they are made out to be, or that proselytising ‘good governance’ professionals resemble colonial-era missionaries.

In this article, I have highlighted how ‘crisis’ and ‘persistence’ are narratives employed to describe democracy in the Pacific Islands. In doing so, I have described six variables – culture; state strength/fragmentation; size; civil society; institutions, electoral systems and constitutions; and international intervention and foreign aid – and illustrated how they interact temporally and spatially. I have demonstrated that while some appear to have greater explanatory power in certain contexts – culture in Samoa, institutions in Kiribati, ostracism in pre-reform Tonga, Crocombe’s ‘fiefdoms’ in the 1980s/1990s – we nevertheless commonly draw on multiple factors to analyse the experiences of individual countries and certain eras, including holding seemingly contradictory views in tension. For example, despite stemming from opposed rationales, AusAID simultaneously funds programmes that seek to strengthen political parties with the aim of reducing persistent political instability, while also supporting civil society actors who view executive domination as the root cause of democratic crisis. ⁷¹ A similar tension is apparent in calls to strengthen institutions and tackle corruption by neo-liberals, who also argue for reduced international intervention and a lean, flexible civil service.

By illustrating how different narratives seek to understand democracy in the Pacific region, I have provided a deeper reading of this literature that draws out how explanations interact and reinforce each other. Consequently, while Table 1 seeks to provide a sense of conceptual order, policymaking is rarely this coherent but rather appears, as Michael Bamberg argues, ‘improvised’ and ‘open to interpretation’, with actors employing multiple narratives that embody their lived experiences. ⁷² Indeed, if anything, this conceptual discussion points to the urgent need for more work that analyses when and how policy actors employ these narratives in both official and everyday language. The goal of narrative analysis in this context is to describe how narratives interact and explain why their plausibility fluctuates. In turn, this would provide a better sense of when and how different actors unite around a common metaphor and shared repertoire to legitimise and sustain policy interventions. In doing so, we are able to strip back the veneer of conceptual coherence and better understand the taken-for-granted assumptions that inform governing practices.