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YOUTH IN FIJI AND
SOLOMON ISLANDS
LIVELIHOODS, LEADERSHIP
AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
YOUTH IN FIJI AND
SOLOMON ISLANDS
LIVELIHOODS, LEADERSHIP
AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

AIDAN CRANEY

PACIFIC SERIES
For Kiri
Published by ANU Press
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
Email: [email protected]
Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au
ISBN (print): 9781760465148
ISBN (online): 9781760465155
WorldCat (print): 1309098982
WorldCat (online): 1309098948
DOI: 10.22459/YFSI.2022
This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

The full licence terms are available at

creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover artwork by John Pettitt.
This book is published under the aegis of the Pacific Editorial Board of ANU Press.
This edition © 2022 ANU Press
 Contents

Abbreviations ix
Acknowledgements xi
Prologue xiii
Introduction 1
Field sites 2
The research approach 7
An outline of the themes explored 11
1. Youth and development 13
A note on youthhood 13
The youth bulge 18
Structural minimisation 24
Holistic livelihoods: A framework 27
Critical and reflexive engagement 33
Conclusion 40
2. Education as an enabler and a barrier 43
The purpose of education 45
Case study: Opinions of the education system held by civically engaged
Pacific youth 48
The inefficiencies of education systems 50
Quality of formal education 56
Technical and vocational education and training 59
Adapting to local needs 63
Critical thinking and rational ignorance 64
Educating girls 69
Comparing Fiji and Solomon Islands 72
Conclusion 73
3. The recurrent issue of under/employment 75
Employment, unemployment and underemployment 77
The purpose of employment 80
Case study: Pesa, Fiji 84
Employment as a status marker 85
The reality of employment opportunities 87
 Case study: The Suva Crime-Free Wheelbarrow Association 90
Youth unemployment and civic engagement 92
Migration and the disruption of social hierarchies 95
Institutional responses to unemployment 100
Seasonal migration 105
Comparing Fiji and Solomon Islands 107
Conclusion 108
4. Civic engagement and leadership 111
Civil society in the Pacific context 112
Rationalising power imbalances 113
Structural minimisation 116
Qualities of a leader 121
Case study: Identifying youth leaders 122
Youth leadership as an oxymoron 123
Cultures of silence 125
Deep and deliberative democracy 127
Comparing Fiji and Solomon Islands 130
Conclusion 130
5. Emerging youth activists 133
Young people and critical civic engagement 134
Case study: Be the Change 138
Developmental benefits of civic engagement and participation 139
Case study: 350 Pacific 141
Facilitating youth participation 143
Comparing Fiji and Solomon Islands 147
Conclusion 148
6. Navigating tradition and modernity 151
Attitudes to youth and tradition 153
Culture as fixed 157
Governance and participation 160
Case Study: Forum Solomon Islands International 165
Civic engagement in the online space 167
Opportunity and threat 169
Negotiating neotradition 173
Comparing Fiji and Solomon Islands 178
Conclusion 179
7. Pacific youth futures 181
The structural minimisation of youth 184
Youth livelihoods 186
Youth civic engagement 187
Pressures of globalisation 189
Areas for future research 190
Pacific youth futures 191

Bibliography 197
 Abbreviations

FSII Forum Solomon Islands International

GDP gross domestic product
HDI Human Development Index
ICT information and communication technology
ILO International Labour Organization
NEC National Employment Centre (Fiji)
NGO nongovernmental organisation
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development
PIFS Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat
REP Rapid Employment Project
SINU Solomon Islands National University
SPC Secretariat of the Pacific Community
TVET technical and vocational education and training
TWP Thinking and Working Politically
UN United Nations
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
US United States

ix
 Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge that the research and writing of this book
took place on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation
in Australia, the people of Rewa and Naitasiri in Fiji, and the people of
Guadalcanal in Solomon Islands. I extend my thanks to these peoples and
their elders and leaders, past and present. As an Irish-born Australian,
I am eternally grateful to be able to work in these spaces.
My utmost gratitude goes to my research participants, both the
communities with whom I engaged and the key informants who shared
with me their wisdom and experiences. I also could not have completed
this research if not for the help of some incredible research assistants: Viola
Lesi, Sina Suliano, Loqi Tawaivuna and Litea Bola in Fiji, and Fredrick
Watson Vava and Eddie Pii in Solomon Islands.
There are an incredible number of people at La Trobe University who have
been of invaluable support to me. Principally, Helen Lee, who has been
an incredible supervisor, mentor and friend, whose continued generosity
is a genuine gift. As an interdisciplinary researcher, I have been helped by
many others in my intellectual journey and so my thanks goes to: Chris
Roche, Wendy Mee, Michael O’Keefe, Yeshe Smith, Jack Taylor, Natalie
Araujo, Makiko Nishitani, Tarryn Phillips, Tait Brimacombe, Nicks
(Barry, Herriman and Smith), Raul Sanchez-Urribarri, Julie Rudner, Ray
Madden, Brooke Wilmsen, Tom McNamara, Rae Wilding, Sue Davies,
Linda Kelly, Eileen Christou, John Cox, Lis Jackson, Lisa Denney, Ujjwal
Krishna, Chris Adams, Allan Mua Illingworth, Tim Thornton, Dan
Bray, Ben Habib, Dominic Kelly, Gijs Verbossen, Kirsty MacFarlane,
Mia Hansen, Alex Cosma, Karen Strojek, Chris Trinh, Julie Blythe and,
more generally, the Department of Social Inquiry, Institute for Human
Security and Social Change, and the Department of Politics, Media and
Philosophy. Apologies to anyone I have overlooked.

xi
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

Thanks also to David Hudson and the team at the Developmental

Leadership Program, Patrick Vakaoti, Matthew Allen, the staff of the
Pacific Leadership Program, members of the Green Growth Leaders’
Coalition, and colleagues from the Australia Pacific Training Coalition
and The Asia Foundation.
The greatest thanks of all go to my amazing family and friends. I would
love to name them all individually, but there are too many, and I fear
missing someone. For broad-stroke purposes, this includes my high
school (and adjacent) mates, my Fiji family, those who supported me
in Honiara, Curtin drinking buddies (and the John Curtin Hotel for
providing a wonderful alternative classroom) and a host of wonderful
individuals whom I have met across the globe.
To my parents, Deirdre and Brendan, who took the greatest of risks in
uprooting their family and moving to the other side of the world, my
eternal thanks. Thank you to my brothers, Colin and Evin, their partners,
Margeaux and Melissa, and the tykes, Aisling, Torin, Liam and growing.
Henry Dale and Dorothy Marie, thanks for being excellent study buddies.
For funding assistance, I acknowledge the generous support of a La Trobe
University Postgraduate Research Scholarship and Internal Research
Grant that supported the research process for the thesis from which this
book is derived. I also acknowledge the support of the La Trobe University
Social Research Platform Grant in funding the copyediting of this book.
I also thank ANU Press for their ongoing commitment to open-access
publication, which helps to make works such as this readily accessible in
the Pacific. I particularly extend this thanks to Pacific series editor Stewart
Firth, and the two anonymous reviewers of my draft.
A special thank you goes to John Pettitt for his wonderful cover art.
Finally, to Kiri, words will never express how thankful I am for your love
and support.
Extracts of some of the data and discussion in this book have previously
been published elsewhere. This includes chapters in Helen Lee’s edited
volume Pacific Youth: Local and Global Futures (see Lee and Craney 2019;
Craney 2019) and articles in Asia Pacific Viewpoint (Craney 2021a) and
The Contemporary Pacific (Craney 2021b).

xii
 Prologue

The research presented in this book unofficially commenced on 3 August

2012. On that day, I arrived in Suva, Fiji, for a 10-month stint working
for the local office of an international nongovernmental organisation
(NGO). Through the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development
program, I was employed in a research, training and evaluation capacity
on a project that aimed to improve the livelihood opportunities for peri-
urban and rural youth who were unemployed and had varying levels of
education. During this period, I not only worked on the particulars of the
project but also was exposed to a network of youth activists and advocates
attempting to address a range of issues that young people faced in Fiji and
throughout the Pacific region.
Through my work, I became aware of the multiple and compounding
issues that young people in the Pacific face to actualise their livelihood,
leadership and civic engagement potential. The challenges these young
people faced were typically siloed and essentialised: unemployment,
idleness, teenage pregnancy, and so on—each a genuine issue to confront.
The more knowledgeable I became about these issues, the more it appeared
to me that there was a pattern in how these problems were identified and
how it was proposed they should be addressed. Policy papers were written
and development projects were funded.
The quality of these interventions and the extent to which there was
genuine commitment to their success varied. When each intervention
resulted in less-than-perfect outcomes, they were discontinued or reframed.
There is nothing new or unusual about this; it is common practice in
public policy and the development sector (Andrews et al. 2015; Cornwall
and Rivas 2015; Wong 2003). Rather than reflecting on how challenging
it is to address youth livelihood and development issues, however, I began
to consider that the reasons the same issues were discussed decade on
decade and interventions did not achieve their intended goals were the

xiii
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

essentialisation of each issue and the failure of interventions to go beyond

paper commitments. This was how the seeds were planted for my decision
to formally research youth livelihoods, leadership and civic engagement in
Oceania. It was also where I first began to form my conceptual framework
for understanding these issues through a ‘holistic livelihoods’ approach
and to develop the contention that young Pacific peoples’ lives are marked
by their ‘structural minimisation’—two concepts that I discuss further in
the book proper.

xiv
 Introduction

With roughly one-third of their populations aged 15–34, both Fiji and
Solomon Islands are experiencing what is referred to in the social sciences
as a ‘youth bulge’. Expanded to include those aged 0–14, these population
percentages increase to more than 60 per cent and almost 75 per cent,
respectively (FBoS 2018; SINSO 2011).1 As with all countries, the future
prosperity of the Great Ocean States of the Pacific (Naupa 2016)2 is
inherently linked with the capacities of their young people to become
full, active and positive participants in all facets of society. Based on the
large population of young people in these states, the development of such
capacities is pertinent. Despite this, there remains a significant shortage
of literature related to the opportunities for Pacific youth to develop their
individual potential, engage in prosocial behaviours and decision-making
processes, and contribute to discourse about the developmental futures of
their communities, countries and cultures.
This book addresses these issues. Through a combination of case studies
and conversations with youth advocates and young people, particularly in
activist spaces, I explore the concerns young people in Fiji and Solomon
Islands face regarding the daily provision of needs, engaging with their

1 The population breakdown by age demographics from the 2019 census is yet to be released.
2 Throughout this book, I employ interchangeable terminology to refer to the region consisting
of Pacific island countries and territories—specifically ‘Pacific’, ‘Oceania’ and the ‘Great Ocean
States of the Pacific’. This reflects current debates within Pacific studies from both established and
emerging scholars about the elasticity of such terms and which is/are most appropriate (McGavin
2014: 134), supported by personal communication with various Pacific studies scholars. The
terminology ‘Great Ocean States’—or sometimes Large Ocean States (Jumeau 2013) or Big Ocean
States (Sogavare 2016)—is designed to contrast with the established development parlance of ‘Small
Island Developing States’. The rationale for this terminology is twofold: the first is to recognise that
many Pacific cultures identify the Pacific Ocean as part of their spiritual and ancestral homeland—
that is, their borders do not cease at their shorelines; the second is to challenge notions that may
equate smallness in land size with inferiority in terms of intellectual or cultural capacity. The adoption
of this term has been heavily influenced by Epeli Hau`ofa’s essays ‘Our Sea of Islands’ (1994) and
‘The Ocean in Us’ (1998), both of which discuss these issues even if not the specific terminology.

1
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

communities as active citizens, and their opportunities to achieve self-

actualisation. This includes an examination of some of the formal and
informal structures—such as education, employment and civil society—
that are intended to assist young people in reaching their potential and
becoming productive members of their communities to see the extent
to which they are promoting or inhibiting young people to achieve that
potential.
The framing of youth issues all too often applies a pejorative lens that
assumes youth deviancy (Protzko and Schooler 2019; Pruitt 2020). I do
not engage with this subject through a security-focused risk-management
lens, however (Goldstone 2002; Moller 1968; Urdal 2006). Rather, my
research acknowledges the capabilities of youth to have both positive and
negative impacts on their societies, with a focus on identifying where their
positive potentials can be and are being nurtured. This perspective also
allows for the recognition that most of the everyday practices in which
young people engage in any location are neither objectively positive nor
objectively negative. Like any other demographic, young people have the
capacity for good and ill but most generally display a neutral disposition
and engagement with their societies.

Field sites
Outsiders often wrongly impose assumptions about cultural homogeneity
across Oceania as well as within states. This is despite the Pacific Ocean
occupying roughly one-third of the world’s surface and recognition that
Oceania is home to great cultural and linguistic diversity (Tryon 2009).
In an attempt to acknowledge the cultural heterogeneity across and
within states, this book examines Pacific youthhood at three intersecting
levels: the experiences of youth within Fiji and Solomon Islands, the
experiences of youth in these states in comparison with one another, and
the experiences of Pacific youth more broadly.
The selection of Fiji and Solomon Islands for comparison was due to
similarities and differences across the two that provided insights at
subnational, national and regional levels. They are, respectively, the second
and third most populous Oceanic states. Fiji’s population was recorded in
2017 as 884,887 people spread across its 332 islands (FBoS 2018). More
than three-quarters of these people live on the largest island of Viti Levu,
with most of the rest of the population living on the second-largest island
2
 INTRODUCTION

of Vanua Levu. The most recent Solomon Islands census provisionally

approximated a population of 721,455, in 2019 (SINSO 2020: 1).
Though Solomon Islands comprises more than 900 individual islands,
most are uninhabited. Six island groups hold most of the population,
with Guadalcanal and Malaita the most populous.
Both Fiji and Solomon Islands have experienced civil unrest since the
late twentieth century. Fiji has experienced four attempted coups d’état
since 1987, with the first three represented by the perpetrators as rooted
in tensions between the iTaukei and Indo-Fijian populations (Fraenkel
and Firth 2009a: 3; Lal 2009: 36).3 The two coups in 1987 were
conducted by the armed forces, resulting in military-led government,
and stimulated by fears in the iTaukei community about the increased
political influence of the Indo-Fijian community following elections
that resulted in an Indo‑Fijian majority-led government (Ravuvu 1991:
79–81, 97). The 2000 coup, backed by businessman George Speight
and similarly represented as motivated by fears of Indo-Fijian political
influence, was unsuccessful and led to the peculiar situation of parliament
being dissolved and then reinstituted by the High Court (Fraenkel and
Firth 2009b: 453; Lal 2002). The 2006 coup—the ‘coup to end all coups’
(Fraenkel and Firth 2009a: 4)—was described by its leaders as intended
to unite a divided nation (p. 7). Though the role of ethnic tensions should
not be understated and continues to be acknowledged by scholars as an
underlying cause of unrest (Tarte 2009), studies by scholars such as
Fijian sociologist Vijay Naidu (2013) and development historian Robbie
Robertson (2012) suggest that issues of land rights, economic opportunity
and political power were more salient factors.
Solomon Islands was the site of civil conflict between 1998 and 2003,
which is known locally as ‘the Tensions’ (Bennett 2002; Liloqula 2000;
Vella 2014). The conflict required foreign security and governance
intervention to stabilise the country (Dinnen 2012). Similar to the first
three coups d’état in Fiji, the cause of the conflict in Solomon Islands

3 iTaukei is the term used for all ethnically indigenous Fijians, other than those from the island
of Rotuma. Usage of the term ‘Indo-Fijian’ to refer to Fijians of Indian ethnicity is employed in
this book to reflect its common usage by people of all ethnicities in Fiji. With continuing social
and political discussions regarding who can and should be able to refer to themselves as ‘Fijian’
(for example, Lal 2016: 74; Narsey 2012), this should not be read as a commentary of my personal
beliefs regarding this debate. To avoid confusion, ‘Fijian’ is used in this book to represent all Fijians
regardless of ethnicity, ‘Indo-Fijian’ to represent Fijians of Indian ethnic descent, and ‘iTaukei’ to refer
to indigenous Fijians.

3
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

appears on the surface to have been ethnic friction between the Guale of
Guadalcanal island4—which is home to the nation’s parliament and major
trading industries—and the Malaitans of Malaita, who have migrated to
Guadalcanal in large numbers since the end of World War II. Ostensibly
sparked by a document produced by the Guadalcanal Revolutionary
Army in 1988 and again in 1999, ‘Demands by the Bona Fide and
Indigenous People of Guadalcanal’, the conflict has been positioned by
numerous scholars as rooted more precisely in issues of poor livelihood
opportunities, land rights and concerns about institutional legitimacy
(Allen 2005; Hameiri 2007; Kabutaulaka 2001; Wainwright 2003).
Though I do not offer a thorough evaluation of the Tensions (see Allen
2013; Hameiri 2007; Wainwright 2003), the role of youth during and
after the conflict needs to be addressed. As a vulnerable population at
the time of the Tensions and the generation whose formative years were
most shaped by the conflict, these youth have experienced acute personal
suffering and have been subjected to the effects of the erosion of social
capital. Evaluations of the conflict—including by the official Solomon
Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2012)—have found
that young people’s role in the conflict was significant and they were
overrepresented as both victims and perpetrators (Noble et al. 2011).
Significant differences between the two nations also need to be noted.
With reference to their conflicts, Fiji’s have been far less violent and its
politics since gaining independence in 1970 has been marked by strong
political parties (Fraenkel 2015; Madraiwiwi 2015; Ravuvu 1991: 74).
Solomon Islands politics has been more fragmented, relying on loose
coalitions to form and maintain government (Alasia 1997; Firth 2018;
Wood 2014).
Beyond these measures, greater developmental differences are present
across the two states. Fiji, for example, is considered by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP 2020) to experience high human
development according to the Human Development Index (HDI),
while Solomon Islands is the lowest-ranked of all countries assessed as
experiencing medium human development by this measure. The most
recently published HDI table ranks Fiji 93 of 189 countries, with Solomon
Islands ranked 151—ranking four places above Papua New Guinea to

4 Guale is the term used for all indigenous people of the island of Guadalcanal; Malaitans refers to
all indigenous people of the island of Malaita. Each island is home to multiple ethnolinguistic groups
(Reilly 2004).

4
 INTRODUCTION

be the second-least developed country in Oceania (UNDP 2020). Fiji

is the regional hub for most development and multilateral organisations
(Schmaljohann and Prizzon 2014: 6) and a site of considerably more
international trade and diplomacy than Solomon Islands. Fiji’s greater
connection to global markets is also evident in its annual tourist numbers
compared with Solomon Islands; they attracted 792,230 and 23,192
foreign visitors in 2016, respectively (SPTO 2017: 6). Further differences
include the cultural diversity within each country, with Fiji’s multiethnic
population mainly comprising those who identify as iTaukei and as Indo-
Fijian,5 while in Solomon Islands, the diversity of indigenous cultures
represents considerably more linguistic and kinship identities (Firth
2018: 3).
As well as recognising differences between Fiji and Solomon Islands,
it is important to acknowledge differences within each country,
particularly those marking urban and rural locations. Looking at
multiple sites in multiple countries minimises the risks associated with
what Pacific historian Kerry Howe referred to as ‘monographic myopia’.
Howe’s (1979: 81) primary concern regarded the lack of relativity and
connectedness in much academic writing on Pacific history that has led to
our knowing ‘more and more about less and less’ because of research being
conducted in very localised contexts. By looking at the issues of youth
livelihoods and development across multiple communities, I hope to
avoid the risk not only of the research being too location-specific, but also
of what I see as an equal threat: the conflation of information from one
Pacific site as being representative of all Pacific locations and cultures—
something expressed by anthropologist Michael Herzfeld (2001: 18) as
the ‘myth of the homogenous Other’. In this way, I seek to highlight the
heterogeneity of experiences across and within Fiji, Solomon Islands and
other Pacific locations.
The heterogeneity of youth experiences is explored in this book through
engaging the perspectives of a wide range of young people and those who
work with them. The voices consulted and represented in this book include
youth activists and advocates with varied backgrounds and interests
according to indicators of age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, education and
disability, among others. Focus groups with youth and village communities

5 Fiji’s ethnic population was recorded as 57 per cent iTaukei, 37 per cent Indo-Fijian and
6 per cent ‘other’ in the 2007 census (FBoS 2021a). Figures regarding ethnic demographics were not
released following the 2017 census—to some controversy (Narayan 2018).

5
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

also occurred in urban, peri-urban and rural settings in each country. Most
discussion relates to data drawn from fieldwork in Fiji—due to my previous
experiences working and living in the country, as well as its position as
the regional development hub, making it a more appropriate space in
which to engage in discussions about regional issues with professionals
working in multilateral organisations. This is complemented, compared
and contrasted with data gathered in Solomon Islands, which at times
magnify differences between the states, at others indicate similarity and,
importantly, provide insight into similarities and differences across both
countries according to demographic and geographical indicators. That is,
sometimes the two sites offer broad similarities and differences from one
another, but sometimes the experiences of young people living in rural
areas of each country may have more alignment than with the experiences
of urban youth in their respective countries. The value of investigating
a multiplicity of perspectives was captured by Kris Prasad, an activist
for LGBTIQ+6 rights from Fiji, who said to me: ‘If we just look at the
mainstream and not the margins, we’re not going to get anywhere.’
The inclusion of diverse voices is also an attempt to mitigate as best as
possible my limitations as an outsider. Having experience working with
and alongside Fijian youth of various ethnicities,7 education levels and
life experiences, I was exposed to different responses to and forms of
engagement with my position as a white kai valagi,8 including situations
where my own biases were highlighted and exposed. My history of
living and working in Fiji reinforced my theoretical knowledge of the
principles of research based in participant-observation and exposure to
practical limitations as, prior to commencing research, I had already lived
the experiences that anthropologist Ray Madden outlines as central to
ethnography:
It is a practice which values the idea that to know other humans
the ethnographer must do as others do, live with others, eat, work
and experience the same daily patterns as others. (2017: 16)

6 LGBTIQ+ represents Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, and others who do
not identify as heterosexual and/or cisgender.
7 iTaukei, Indo-Fijian, Fijians of European and Chinese descent and kai loma (Fijians of mixed
descent/ethnicity).
8 Fijian, meaning ‘foreigner’.

6
 INTRODUCTION

Advancing my own reflexive ethnographic experience, this book

champions the experiences and knowledge of my informants. Although
the findings discussed are my interpretations of the information provided
to me through interviews, focus groups and participant-observation, I am
explicitly aware that this knowledge has been co-created alongside those
I engaged as research informants as well as innumerable contacts who
have shaped my understanding of the livelihood and development issues
facing the Fijian and Solomon Islander youth represented in these pages.
The work presented intends to represent the experiences and expectations
of youthhood in Fiji and Solomon Islands from those who work with
and for these young people, including youth themselves. This is why my
research primarily engages with the voices of youth activists and advocates.

The research approach

Most of the discussion within this book was produced during my PhD
candidature at La Trobe University from 2014 to 2018. Fieldwork was
conducted during two periods in 2015. From March through May of
that year, inclusive, I was based in Suva, with travel around the greater
metropolitan area and into the highlands of Naitasiri. For six weeks
during July and August, I was based in Honiara, with travel extending to
the Visale region. That I spent a greater amount of time in Fiji, both for
fieldwork and for employment (prior to, during and following the formal
research period), is reflected in the contents. As much as I am aware that
the ethnographic detail in this book is much more robust in relation to
Fiji than to Solomon Islands—and as much as I sincerely wish it was
more balanced—I am heartened to know of multiple emerging scholars
focusing on the experiences of young Solomon Islanders whose work will
fill this gap in coming years (see Evans 2019; Oakeshott 2021; Ride 2019).
The experiences and evidence of Fijian youth activists and advocates are
complemented with information received in Solomon Islands and with
reference to the wider Oceania region through informants whose work
has a broader regional focus.
I conducted 37 interviews with a total of 43 informants. In Fiji,
I interviewed 28 people in 23 discrete interviews, with two interviews
involving two informants and one involving four. In Solomon Islands,
I interviewed 15 people in 14 discrete interviews, with only one involving

7
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

multiple people. My interviews were focused on activist youth and

professionals working in sectors relevant to youth livelihoods, leadership
and civic engagement.
The informants interviewed were drawn from a wide range of areas of
expertise. The cross-section of those with whom I consulted included
academics, bureaucrats, civil society actors and activists, disability workers,
economists, multilateral development program staff, NGO staff, religious
leaders, youth activists and youth group representatives, with multiple
informants representing multiple roles. Informants have consented to all
quotations attributed to them. References to their employment or work
in civil society are accurate as at the time of data collection. Informants
are referred to by their first names throughout the book to delineate
informant responses from the literature as several informants have also
published material relevant to the research.
The informants quoted should not be read as representative of all those
in their area of expertise or demographic. Though they were engaged as
experts, their responses must be understood as representing their individual
experiences. My rationale for engaging with people representing broad
communities and interests was affirmed by several informants, particularly
those from communities that are regularly excluded from discussions of
mainstream approaches to social issues yet who have experience in research
and development programming related specifically to the interest group
they represented.
Prior to each interview, I emailed participants a list of themes about which
I was interested in speaking. I opened interviews with a variation of the
question, ‘What is the current state of youth in X location?’ according
to the specific demographic being discussed. Once the interviews began,
I was guided by the informants as to the information they thought was
relevant, only occasionally guiding the discussion if I felt it had moved
significantly from the core issues of youth, livelihood and development
issues. Only one informant wished not to have their thoughts officially
audio recorded, or their name attached to their statements. This informant
did, however, clarify that they wished to speak about the issues affecting
their community and have their experiences inform and be represented in
the research findings.

8
 INTRODUCTION

Focus groups were also undertaken with seven discrete communities—

four in Fiji and three in Solomon Islands. In each country, one urban,
one peri-urban and one rural community were selected to discuss
livelihood and development issues as experienced and understood by
their young people. Each focus group lasted approximately two hours
during daytrips to the sites, with the peri-urban and rural communities
each visited twice at intervals at least one week apart. These focus groups
primarily engaged local youth, only allowing adults into the space to
be informed of the purpose of the research and segregating youth and
adults when communities requested adults be allowed to contribute to the
conversations. An extra focus group was conducted in Fiji with a work-
based collective, the Suva Crime-Free Wheelbarrow Association.
All focus groups were conducted in a combination of English and local
languages (Fijian/Vosa Vakaviti9 in Fiji and Solomon Islands Pijin10 in
Solomon Islands) with support from local research assistants. The initial
intention was to run the consultations in a manner akin to talanoa or
tok stori, which is designed to replicate loosely structured conversations
that are commonplace in communities throughout both countries
(Burns McGrath and Ka`ili 2010; Halapua 2000, 2013; Sanga et al.
2018; Tagicakiverata and Nilan 2018; Vaioleti 2006). Although I had an
initial list of questions to guide the discussions, the focus groups were
designed to be quite iterative and responsive to the wishes of the youth
communities and how they wished to engage. Instead, all communities
except the Suva Crime-Free Wheelbarrow Association requested that they
respond to my questions using butcher’s paper I provided, engaging in
limited discussion to elaborate on their written responses. Community
definitions of youth, discussed below, proved interesting, though it was
the discussion of examples of youth leadership that was particularly
insightful (covered in Chapter Four). I was also particularly entertained
by the honest response from a group of young men from the peri-urban
Fijian community I consulted, who wrote that alongside completing
household chores, engaging in informal economic activities and playing,
their days were marked by a practice to ‘roam around aimlessly looking
for girls’.

9 Fiji is home to hundreds of dialects (Geraghty 1983). The most widely recognised indigenous
language is based on that of the high chiefly island of Bau (Geraghty 2005).
10 The lingua franca of Solomon Islands.

9
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

The focus groups held with urban communities provided opportunities

to see how other communities worked in different contexts. For the
urban Fijian community, a lengthy talanoa was held that incorporated
both youth and adults alike. All the youth in this group were aged at least
18 years and kava was consumed during the process. This conversation
was highly enlightening for understanding the livelihood struggles this
community faced, but there was minimal input from young people and
discussion regularly strayed from youth-specific issues.
The urban group I engaged in Solomon Islands operated differently from
all other communities consulted. The group was based at a church in
central Honiara and met weekly to discuss social justice and religious
matters. Led by John Firibo, a young Solomon Islander whom I later
interviewed and whose thoughts are represented at times in this book, this
group chose to respond to the questions using butcher’s paper, as did their
peers in the focus groups. This group, however, engaged in deep discussion
with one another, without the need for facilitation, and elaborated to me
on the answers they provided on paper.
The focus group with the Suva Crime-Free Wheelbarrow Association arose
as a response to an interview conducted with a Fijian youth development
activist, Usaia Moli. He informed me of the existence of the association
and the work they were doing to act collectively to improve the livelihoods
of ‘bara boys’—informal wheelbarrow porters in and around the central
Suva marketplace whose livelihoods are precarious and who hold little
social status. Most bara boys are young men, many of whom are or have
been street-frequenters. I chose to meet with them to hear their stories of
self-driven collective action. This discussion is captured in a case study
presented in Chapter Three.
As with my informant interviews, in the focus groups, I intended to gather
information from a wide range of young people in these communities.
Despite attempts to engage Indo-Fijians—particularly in the peri-urban
settlement where a significant community existed—I was unable to engage
representatives in any of the communities I consulted. Multiple Indo-
Fijian interviewees explained to me that Indo-Fijian communities were
less inclined to be involved in social research projects than other ethnic
groups and that the voice of young Indo-Fijian women is particularly
difficult to engage. This is a problem that has been experienced by others.
Barrington et al. (2016: 92), writing of their experience working with
communities on participatory projects related to water, sanitation and

10
 INTRODUCTION

hygiene, said: ‘In Fiji, we struggled to engage community members of

Indo-Fijian ethnicity.’ Urban geographer Luke Kiddle (2011) suggests this
may be a hangover effect from Indo-Fijian indentured labour practices
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He posits that the
physical isolation that came from living and working on large tracts of
land as individuals and families both limited informal contact between
Indo-Fijians and iTaukei and emboldened concepts of individual identity
within Indo-Fijian communities, in contrast to the sociocentrism of
iTaukei mataqali (clan, landowning unit) (Kiddle 2011: 53).
With this in mind, it is important to recognise that the experiences
captured in this book do not reflect the universal experiences of all Fijian
and Solomon Islander youth. Drawing on concepts for the teaching and
understanding of Oceanic cultures by Pacific studies scholar Teresia Teaiwa
(2005), the information in this book should be read as an interpretation
of knowledge collected during the research process. What I hope emerges
in these pages is a picture of the diversity of ways in which young people
in Fiji, Solomon Islands and throughout the Great Ocean States of the
Pacific experience issues related to their livelihoods, leadership and civic
engagement.

An outline of the themes explored

In this book, I explore the impacts of complex and intersecting cultural,
structural and institutional stimuli on youth livelihoods, leadership and
civic engagement from multiple angles to provide a holistic understanding
of the challenges and opportunities faced by youth in Fiji, Solomon
Islands and the wider Pacific. I commence with framings that situate
the text. These explore definitions of youthhood, the contemporary
resonance of studying Pacific youth during this period when the region
is experiencing a ‘youth bulge’ and my theoretical conceptualisation of
development at individual and collective levels. This is followed by an
analysis of the formal education systems of Fiji and Solomon Islands in
Chapter Two, with significant overlap in the discussion about the real
and desired livelihood opportunities for young people that occurs in the
exploration of employment realities in Chapter Three.
Chapter Four moves away from formal pathways and indicators of good
citizenship, investigating how young Fijians and Solomon Islanders
are expected to engage as social citizens. I explore these ideas further
11
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

through case studies of positive deviance (Hummelbrunner and Jones

2013) in Chapter Five, looking at examples of young people creating
new opportunities to be critically engaged citizens in prosocial ways.
This is followed in Chapter Six with a discussion of the challenges of
maintaining and reimagining cultural values and traditions in an
ever‑globalising world.
I conclude by drawing these discussions together not only to demonstrate
that Pacific youth should be seen both as partners for today and as leaders
of tomorrow, but also to highlight that, in many ways, they already are.

12
 1
Youth and development

The projected youth population in the [2018] elections is 47 per

cent, so we hold the highest majority of the mandate, so to speak.
— Jope Tarai, Fiji

This comment by Jope Tarai, a young Fijian academic and social

commentator, highlights the significance of Fiji’s youth population and
its potential power as a political bloc. If this 47 per cent of eligible young
voters took a consensus position on any political issue—social, economic,
environmental or other—it would be difficult to conceive of their will
not being met. To assume that these young people can exercise their will
in such a manner, however, overlooks the social structures that influence
young people’s political participation in Pacific countries such as Fiji.
Although youth are numerically significant, the power they exercise and
the extent to which their civic engagement is encouraged are extremely
limited. Analysing youth populations in Fiji and Solomon Islands, this
book discusses where and how young people practise civic engagement
and leadership, the concerns they espouse for their current and future
livelihood opportunities, and the structures that work to assist and/or
impede their positive potentialities.

A note on youthhood
Defining youthhood in the Pacific island region is not a straightforward
exercise. Understandings of who and what are ‘youth’ in Solomon Islands
and Fiji are somewhat fluid. The Solomon Islands Government notes in
its National Youth Policy that ‘youth in Solomon Islands is now defined

13
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

as “persons between 15 and 34 years of age, inclusive”’ (Government of

Solomon Islands 2017: 14, emphasis in original)—a slight amendment
from previously identifying youth as ranging from 14 to 29 years of age
(Government of Solomon Islands 2010: 4). The Fijian Government
(2012: 3) defines youth as ‘those between the ages of 15 to 35 years’,
but acknowledges in working documents that this definition is flexible
according to community values. Perhaps most comprehensively, Pacific
youth experts Richard Curtain and Patrick Vakaoti note in the 2011
version of The State of Pacific Youth report:
The age span covering youth, as a stage in the lifecycle moving
from dependence to independence, varies. It can range from as
young as age ten years to as old as mid-thirties, depending on the
age at which some children have to start to fend for themselves and
what society deems to be the end point of the transition. (2011: 8)

Both the 2011 and the 2017 versions of The State of Pacific Youth report
note significant age definitions of ‘youth’ across multiple Pacific states.
Curtain and Vakaoti (2011: 8) note that while ‘the age group 15−24 years
is often used’, common usage in the region ranges from 12 up to 34 years
of age. Similarly, Clarke and Azzopardi (2017: 4) write: ‘Definitions of
the youth period vary in terms of its duration in the Pacific region.’
In each of the interviews I conducted with youth activists and professionals
working in youth development fields, I asked how ‘youth’ was defined
in their culture. The responses varied significantly, ranging from strict
age parameters to working definitions used for engaging young people
in youth-targeted programs, and cultural norms that informed practical
applied definitions. Typical responses stayed within the age distinctions of
14 at the lower end and 35 at the upper end. Within these parameters, there
was no consensus that these were fixed ages, with multiple respondents
stating that the upper age limit for youth was 25 while others disclosed
that cultural factors could see people as old as 50 still being considered
as youth.
A sample of interviewee responses reflecting the lack of an agreed definition
of ‘youth’ according to age included the following:
The categorisation of youth [is] from 18–35 generally in the
Pacific.
— Emily Hazelman, regional development worker, Fiji

14
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Youth in the Pacific is defined up to 35.

— Salote Kaimacuata, regional development worker, Fiji

Some [NGOs] focus on youth from 14 to 27 … but the National

Youth Policy has a sentence that opens it up for young people to be
[understood] in cultural situations and circumstances.
— Harry Olikwailafa, youth activist, Solomon Islands

Some are saying 14 [year olds] are considered youth. Some are
saying 18. Some are saying the cut-off age is 25. Some feel that
they are still youth into their mid-thirties.
— Joshko Wakaniyasi, disability advocate, Fiji

Rather than age, culture appears to be the dominant determinant of

who is or is not considered a youth. Taking on adult responsibilities and
characteristics—marriage, having children, employment and/or positions
of authority—provides more workable boundaries for categorisation of
a transition out of youthhood. Tura Lewai, a civil society activist from Fiji
who has worked with rural and urban communities across Oceania for
various development organisations, positioned this in relation to young
people marrying in Fiji:
You can be part of the youth group in the village, even if you are
50 or 45, as long as you’re not married. Once you are married, you
are no longer a young person.

Sandra Bartlett, a youth development worker from Solomon Islands,

echoed this cultural conception in her country of graduating from
youthhood through marriage or becoming a parent:
Society looks at it as married or not married. You just hear it being
said in the language: ‘Hem woman nao’—she’s had a kid, so she is
a woman now.

Sandra added that ‘student’ has entered the local lexicon in recent years
as shorthand for young people in Solomon Islands Pijin, with ‘youth’
still used as a term but increasingly being associated with more formal
definitions for policy and programming purposes. She explained that
student is a value-neutral term applied to children and young people
that simply recognises them as yet to achieve the abovementioned status
markers. More interestingly, Sandra disputed the notion that young
people are regularly referred to by, or even necessarily associated with, the
term masta liu, which she referenced as derogatory, and which is discussed
further in Chapter Three.
15
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

In Indo-Fijian communities, social justice activist Roshika Deo explained,

there are no pure translations for ‘youth’ between English and Fiji Hindi.1
The closest comparisons are the relational terms larkan and jawan larkan,
which translate roughly as ‘child’ and ‘mature child’, respectively. Roshika
explained that these terms can be used to refer to any person younger than
the speaker, although they are more likely to be used to refer to children,
youths and where there is a clear generational gap.
Indigenous definitions of youthhood become a little more complicated in
iTaukei communities. As Vakaoti (2018: 13) has discussed, terminology
for young people in Fijian is delineated by gender, with young women
referred to as goneyalewa and young men as cauravou. Development
industry professional Peni Tawake explained that these terms inform
how notions of ‘youth’ are conceptualised by iTaukei people, with both
being predicated on the notion of young people existing as ‘developing
individuals’ (Vakaoti 2018: 13). Supporting Tura’s comments above,
Peni added that goneyalewa and cauravou are most precisely used to refer
to people who have not realised status markers such as marriage and
parenthood in a manner that is ‘open ended’ and only loosely connected
with age. Peni also spoke of alternative local terminology for formal youth
spaces, such as how Methodist Church youth groups at the congregation
or parish level are called mataveitokani—directly translated as ‘friendship
group’ but used almost exclusively to refer to Methodist Church youth
groups. Subtle differences abound between the social understandings of
goneyalewa and cauravou, the use of ‘youth’ as a primary category in policy
and programming, and spaces created specifically for young people in
localised settings, such as mataveitokani. These multiple, complementary
terminologies demonstrate how local and foreign discourses shape
and reshape how youthhood is conceptualised at the local level in
different contexts.
The common thread between conceptions of youth across the languages
and cultures of Fiji and Solomon Islands is that they position youth in
relation to a transition beyond that stage of life. As multiple writers have
described, young people are regularly considered to be adults-in-waiting,
rather than people with full functionality, both in the Pacific (Baba 2014;
Bacalzo 2019; Good 2012; Mitchell 2011) and beyond (Caputo 1995;
Golombeck 2006; Honwana 2014; White and Wyn 2013; Wyn 1995).

1 Also known as Fiji Baat (Willans and Prasad 2021).

16
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Akuila Sovanivalu, a bureaucrat with Fiji’s Ministry of Youth and Sports,

more explicitly stated: ‘Youth is a transition point for children way up
to adulthood.’
Jope Tarai mentioned shifts in familial responsibility, but also explained
that employment acts to mark the social evolution from youth to adult,
including the status and respect afforded to such a transition. When I asked
him how young people became adults, he explained:
It’s typically them having a family and a job … Because they are
able to contribute to the obligations of the community and in
having to contribute, they get to have a say in how things are
done. In that regard, they are no longer seen as young. Once you
are able to contribute to social functions [and] family obligations,
you are taken more seriously. You are seen as a person who is of
particular status and, ultimately, part of the authority.

Some interviewees even expressed frustration with what they saw as

a social-structural category inflated to be so inclusive as to render
meaningless usage of the term ‘youth’ in the Pacific. Jope stated:
Our national youth age is projected to be 18 to 35. Then it became
15 to 35. Then the Provincial Youth Council wanted it to be 15
to 45. It is embarrassing. Even that is questionable, because the
World Bank statistics represent [youth as those aged] 18 to 24.

Elisha Bano is a youth activist from Fiji who resigned her position on the
Fiji National Youth Council at the age of 28 as she felt she was becoming
too old for the role and wanted to create an opportunity for younger
leaders. She offered similar concerns to Jope, pointing out that the large
age range could include people across multiple generations:
UN-wise, we usually consider 18 to 24. When I started doing
work with the National Youth Council, it’s from 15 to 35,
which I think is ridiculous … I cannot say my parents are youth,
so I started struggling with that from day one.

The fluidity of youth definitions was evident when meeting with urban,
peri-urban and rural communities in both Fiji and Solomon Islands.
In each focus group, I asked participants to assemble into smaller groups
to answer some questions about their lived experiences. When I asked
how ‘youth’ was defined, it was regularly reflected that the starting point
was turning 15, with no group offering a younger age. This was despite
multiple young people between the ages of 12 and 14 attending two of
17
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

the focus groups. When I inquired with the larger groups if these young
people were considered youths, I was told they were. When I followed up
on the discrepancy between what had been stated as the base age range
for youth and the inclusion of the 12–14-year-olds, neither group could
explain the disconnection between definitions and application, though
they were able to acknowledge its presence.
It is evident from these examples that the definition of youth in the Pacific
is fluid and contested. My own working definition of youth includes
those aged 15–35 years who are socially recognised as such. This reflects
the most common range of ages used in Pacific youth organisations and
as expressed by my informants.

The youth bulge

Although I do not approach this research through a security-focused
framework that problematises youth civic activity, I acknowledge that
such approaches have been the foremost prism through which such issues
have been investigated in the international development literature and
that they do offer significant insights. The most common framing of this
perspective is through the ‘youth bulge’ terminology (Urdal 2006). In its
simplest terms, youth bulge refers to populations where the youth cohort
is particularly large in comparison with other age ranges. Population
geographers Gary Fuller and Forrest Pitts (1990: 9–10) state that a youth
bulge is reached when the proportion of people aged 15–24 in a country
exceeds 20 per cent of the total population, though they note this figure
is ‘somewhat arbitrary’. Youth bulge theory, however, goes further to link
such population bubbles with an increased risk of civil unrest. The exact
origins of ‘youth bulge’ as a term and as an identified social issue are unclear.
For example, development practitioner Anne Hendrixson (2004: 2)
claims that Fuller coined the term in the 1980s, while political scientist
Lionel Beehner (2007) attributes it to social scientist Gunnar Heinsohn
in the 1990s. Regardless, discussions of a link between a significant youth
population and an increased risk of violence date at least as far back as
Herbert Moller’s 1968 paper ‘Youth as a Force in the Modern World’,
which noted that youth populations can act to promote either progress or
insecurity. As Moller wrote:

18
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

The presence of a large contingent of young people in a population

may make for a cumulative process of innovation and social and
cultural growth; it may lead to elemental, directionless acting-out
behavior; it may destroy old institutions and elevate new elites
to power; and the unemployed energies of the young may be
organized and directed by totalitarian rulers. (1968: 260)

There are significant and legitimate data to support claims connecting

a youth bulge with an increased risk of civil unrest. Both Moller (1968)
and Jack Goldstone (2002), a political scientist with expertise in
revolutionary movements, have written about the impact of youth as
drivers of historical movements dating back centuries. Examples they
provide include the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, the civil
rights movement in the United States (Moller 1968) and ‘most twentieth-
century revolutions in developing countries’ (Goldstone 2002: 10). More
recently, young people have been involved in social protest movements
in cities and countries with significant youth populations such as
Burkina Faso (Harsch 2016), Jakarta, Tehran, Belgrade and Harare
(Urdal 2004: 4), and in the Middle East and North African states that
were involved in the Arab Spring (Al-Momani 2011; Anderson 2011;
Herd 2011; Moghadam 2013).
The Pacific region also has experienced multiple instances of civil unrest
in the past two decades, partially marked by the involvement of youth.
Conflicts of varying scale have taken place in Fiji, Kanaky/New Caledonia,
Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu. It must be
noted that the intent and level of unrest have varied significantly across
these states, as has the extent to which young people have been drivers
of, or responders to, conflicts and demonstrations. In 2003 and 2005,
Tongan commoners took to the streets to protest in support of greater
democracy and against media censorship (Singh and Prakash 2006). They
also caused widespread damage to the capital, Nuku`alofa, in riots in
2006 prompted by the stalling progress of democracy and perceptions of
dishonest governance processes regarding trade and business dealings that
favoured the nobility (Campbell 2008; van Fossen 2018). In the early
years of the twenty-first century, civil conflicts engulfed parts of Kanaky/
New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu,
and were attributed to a combination of poor livelihood opportunities,
urban migration squeezes and ethnic tensions (Storey 2005; Wainwright
2003). Unrest was also sparked in Papua New Guinea in 2016 as student
demonstrators called for the resignation of then Prime Minister Peter

19
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

O’Neill following allegations of corruption (Connors and Barker 2016).

Similarly, riots took place in Honiara in 2019 linked to issues of poor
livelihood opportunities and concerns about government corruption, with
youths identified as a core cohort of demonstrators (Fraenkel 2019a; Ride
2019), although the extent of their involvement is unclear. Meanwhile, Fiji
has experienced recurrent issues related to political legitimacy since 1987,
with roots in issues of livelihood opportunities, land rights disputes and
hostility between ethnicities (Firth 2012; Naidu 2013). In all instances,
the involvement of youth has been reported.
Rather than proving that disproportionately high youth populations
necessitate civil unrest, these global examples arguably speak to a peaceful
status quo being held by youth in each of these societies, which is
demonstrated by the rarity and notability with which protest movements
and revolutions occur in specific settings. The foremost thinker on
youth bulge issues of this century, political scientist and peace researcher
Henrik Urdal (2006: 617), notes that a high youth population does not
necessitate or even greatly increase the risk of conflict: ‘An increase of
one percentage point in youth bulges is associated with an increased
likelihood of conflict of more than 4%.’ Yet he also identifies that this is
only a marginal increase on a minimal risk base (Urdal 2006: 619, 620).
Urdal argues that a youth bulge is just one of a combination of factors
that increase the risk of civil unrest and must be understood in relation to
many corollary and compounding factors. Primary among these are poor
livelihood opportunities (Urdal 2006: 609, 619–24; see also Thomas
2001: 6; Ware 2004: 2; Sukarieh and Tannock 2017: 858), particularly
for well-educated youth generations (Urdal 2004: 4) in countries with
populations in the tens of millions (Urdal 2006: 619; see also Fearon and
Laitin 2003: 85). This is just as true at the local level. As Imelda Ambelye
reports of youth antisocial behaviour in two rural communities in Papua
New Guinea:
The antisocial behaviour and other problems that youths face
are a result of many factors. Displaced aggression is the result of
youths looking for opportunities to release their frustrations as
victims of structural deprivation. (2019: 198)

Thus, we can see that large youth populations do not, by themselves,

necessitate social upheaval. Instead, as with the conflicts experienced in
Oceania this century already discussed, the provision—or the possibility
for provision—of livelihoods offers a more salient explanation for

20
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

instances where young people rupture the peaceful status quo. As Urdal
(2004: 2) states: ‘It is clear that if large youth bulges that hold a common
generational consciousness would always produce conflict, we would have
seen a lot more violent youth revolts.’
Critical youth scholar Lesley Pruitt (2020) has written that uncritically
framing youth development issues through the prism of the youth bulge
risks assuming youth deviancy in the design of policy and program
documents. She argues that discussions of the youth bulge essentialise
violent and problematic outbursts by young people—predominantly
males—marginalising female perspectives, without giving due
consideration to the diverse demographics within youth populations or
examining the social factors contributing to violence. Pruitt writes:
[R]esearch must acknowledge that young people may take on
a range of roles, not only as perpetrators or victims, but also as
peacebuilders, and this evidence base should be used to inform
future policy-making. (2020: 728)

With youth bulge framing that positions youth as a security risk gaining
credence in the Pacific (Clarke and Azzopardi 2017), it is important that
the behaviours of youth in countries such as Fiji and Solomon Islands are
kept in perspective.
Considering this literature and my own experiences, I believe it is more
prudent to focus on the skills young people have and can be reasonably
expected to develop, their capabilities to exercise these skills, the formal
and informal structures that promote or inhibit these, and how they are
currently engaging as active citizens of their communities. Rather than
viewing youth as a potentially problematic generation, I view them as
a generation whose positive potentialities, if realised, can result in their
individual benefit, as well as the collective benefit of their communities
and cultures. Examples throughout this book demonstrate that cohorts of
youth are eager to be engaged in decision-making processes regarding the
developmental futures of their communities and have significant skills in
exercising developmental leadership.
Although young people should be recognised for their positive potential,
it is important this is not framed in terms of an assumed duty of youth
to serve their societies. My research approach looks at youth not as
a subservient demographic obliged to perpetuate contemporary social
ideals of what is good and valuable, but as active citizens capable of

21
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

positively challenging and reshaping their communities. In this way, I see

a link between individual and communal capabilities because a failure
to provide young people with opportunities to achieve their individual
potential will limit their ability to engage critically and positively with and
shape their societies. As Curtain and Vakaoti state:
Without a major investment in young people, they may well
flounder as a generation, undermining the capacity of Pacific
Island countries and territories to escape aid dependence, develop
economically and, in some cases, even survive as viable societies.
(2011: 5)

Viewing young people as a human and social resource in which to invest

is not a new approach to matters of youth livelihoods in developing
contexts, yet it is one that has significantly less traction with governments
and developmental donor agencies. Curtain wrote in 2006 of a global
tendency to not acknowledge the positive possibilities of youth and
instead view young people as an issue through a security lens:
The view of young people as critical assets for lifting economies
and societies out of poverty offers the most potential for change,
yet it has gained the least attention. Governments, international
agencies, and donors could harness far better the capacities of
young people. (Curtain 2006: 440)

Similarly, the World Bank’s 2007 World Development Report—which was

notable for its focus on youth2—identified a window of opportunity
in which to utilise youth bulge populations to drive developmental
advances, if properly supported, which is estimated to be between 10 and
40 years, varying by country (World Bank 2007: 4). It is theorised that
investing in youth during this period holds significant promise of reaping
developmental dividends due to factors including a general increase in the
formal education of these youth and a gradual general decline in fertility
rates. Failing to do so risks stalling economic and developmental growth,
with possible intergenerational impacts of minimised opportunities for
growth and development. Combined, these factors suggest increased
possibilities for young people to invest more of their own time and
resources in formal and informal livelihood activities, which will likely

2 Annual World Development Reports investigate global development issues with specific attention
to one area of opportunity or concern. Though there are significant overlaps between some of the
reports, none has yet duplicated a previous focus. As such, there has been no similar youth focus since
the 2007 report.

22
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

lead to social and economic benefits (World Bank 2007). Projections of

average annual growth in the youth population in the Pacific island region
of 2.2 per cent (Maebiru 2013: 148) and census statistics showing higher
childhood five-year indices than for youth (FBoS 2018; SINSO 2011)
indicate that the window will likely remain open in the Pacific for
many decades.
The demographics of the Great Ocean States of the Pacific mean they
are primed to take advantage of the potential of their youth populations.
Regional youth development policy and program expert Rose Maebiru
(2013: 148) notes: ‘With a mean age of 21 years for most Pacific island
countries, the region has a huge resource at its disposal to address national
and regional issues.’ Critical youth scholars Mayssoun Sukarieh and
Stuart Tannock (2017) argue through their research into the framing of
youth as a peace and security concern that while youth are the most likely
generational cohort to push for social change through civil disobedience,
this can be mitigated by providing livelihood opportunities for them.
Like Pruitt (2020), they also caution that it is equally problematic to
view youth through myopic lenses as either potential troublemakers
or developmental saviours:
Youth has always had a double-sided aspect, such that for every
stereotypical representation of youth as problem and pathology
there exists an inverse idealisation of youth as possibility and
panacea. (Sukarieh and Tannock 2017: 855)

The strengths perspective I take is not intended to suggest that these

youth populations hold the answers to questions of sustainable positive
development, that they should be appreciated only for their working-age
potential, nor that increased employment and ever-expanding economies
are necessarily the best or most appropriate forms of development for
these countries. Rather, my approach helps to better understand the
opportunities that currently exist for young people to engage in activities
that will enhance their opportunities for prosperous livelihoods, to engage
with their communities as prosocial active citizens and to achieve their
own full potential regarding agency and identity. It aligns with rights-
based approaches to youth development that recognise the structural
issues impeding individual and collective youth development, advocate
for the active engagement of young people in identifying and addressing
such issues and oblige those in decision-making spaces to act to address
these issues (UNFPA 2005: 11).

23
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

Structural minimisation
A central and recurrent theme in the literature and discovered through
my own research is the concept that youth are to be seen but not heard.
Passivity is considered a desirable trait of youth in Oceania (Baba 2014;
Good 2019; Lee 2019a; McMurray 2006; Vakaoti 2012)—something
that is steeped in concepts of tradition and signifying respect. Young
people are not encouraged to be outspoken or to ask questions; their role
is to learn from observation and example, and to do as they are instructed.
These views are held at family and village levels, and permeate to higher
decision-making levels with deleterious results, producing what I label as
the structural minimisation of youth experiences and perspectives. These
negative effects manifest in multiple ways.
First, the customary silences of youth translate into a lack of advocacy
for young people during policymaking processes. As leaders age, they
are influenced by their peers and by those who can communicate with
them on a relatively level platform. As youth are largely denied access
to decision-making processes at the institutional level, their potential
input is largely ignored. Further, if their needs are considered but not
met, youth represent a subsection of society with little power to challenge
such decisions. Cameron Noble, Natalia Pereira and Nanise Saune (2011)
provide a prime example of this silencing of youth issues in their report
on urban youth pacification approaches for UNDP Pacific. They note
that ‘[y]outh are not mentioned in the Pacific Plan Annual Progress Reports
from 2008 and 2009’ (Noble et al. 2011: 16) and ‘there are only limited
opportunities for young men and women to participate in national and
regional decision-making processes in the Pacific’ (p. 19). This issue was
again reflected in the lack of action on youth matters in the 2013 Pacific Plan
Annual Progress Report (PIFS 2013), despite the 2012 version discussing
the need to ‘mainstream’ youth development matters throughout policy
processes (PIFS 2012). Notably, the page dedicated to youth development
issues on the website of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS)—the
body responsible for the Pacific Plan and its successor, the Framework for
Pacific Regionalism—has variously shown as being ‘under construction’
or, worse, displaying an ‘Error 404’3 message between 2015 and 2021
(PIFS n.d.), except for a brief period in 2018 when a post was uploaded

3 A standard response displayed on websites when a specific location is erroneous or not being
actively maintained.

24
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

with a tangential appeal to young people to ‘actively pursue a healthier

ocean’ (Taylor 2018). These issues of youth minimisation at the highest
levels of decision-making are further reinforced by the lack of formal
opportunities given to youth to discuss development issues with their
peers. For example, this book draws repeatedly on the Suva Declaration
created by the more than 300 youths who attended the second Pacific
Youth Festival in 2009 (SPC 2009b) as an example of regional youth
priorities, although I am acutely aware that this document is more than
a decade old. This is because although two regional youth festivals were
held, one in 2006 and one in 2009, a third has not eventuated.
Second, denying youth the opportunity to engage in decision-making
processes and share opinions creates an environment that implicitly
discourages critical thinking. When young people are aware that their
opinion counts for little, they may be less likely to engage in thinking about
how situations could be improved or upheld. Democratic theorist and
economist Anthony Downs (1957) coined the term ‘rational ignorance’
in relation to this process when writing about the limits of democratic
engagement, positing that humans regularly choose—consciously or
unconsciously—to not engage with the development of a skill for which
the time and energy costs are unlikely to result in equivalent benefit to
the individual. Downs related this specifically to levels of engaging with
political and policy ideas, arguing that to consider issues on which one’s
thoughts and feelings are unlikely to bear any impact is a waste of energy.
He concludes that this results in a lack of capacity for critical thought in
affected areas (Downs 1957).
The effects of not valuing the participation of youth are many, particularly
in relation to the themes of agency, civic engagement and the roles young
people are expected and allowed to play in their communities. For
example, discussion of the lack of opportunities for youth participation
and visibility of youth leaders as role models, which I examine in Chapter
Four, prompts reflection: if young people are considered only as the
leaders of tomorrow but are not engaged in leadership processes today,
what purpose do they serve as individuals and as a collective? Mereia
Carling (2009) addressed this conundrum in her master’s thesis on youth
citizenship in Fiji, referencing a shift in thinking around the role of youth
in international development policy and practice in recent decades, away
from a conception of them as passive citizens-in-waiting to one in which
youth are more active and engaged. She writes that this change in approach

25
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

moves forward from the popular adage, ‘children and young people
are the leaders of tomorrow’, towards the notion that children have a
vital role to play in the present—‘children, young people and leaders
are partners today’. (Carling 2009: 26; emphasis in original)

Many people with whom I spoke described the expectation of adult

villagers, teachers and leaders that young people would engage in society
only in prescribed and acceptable ways and that when they ran afoul of
these expectations their contributions would largely be ignored. Salote
Kaimacuata, a child protection specialist at UNICEF Pacific and former
magistrate in the Fijian judiciary who oversaw juvenile hearings, expressed
how young people are denied opportunities to actively participate in
decision-making processes throughout the Pacific:
I know that in each of the countries [of Oceania] their youths have
been struggling but they are not getting the door to open so that
they can be included. We leaders are really good at talking the talk
but not really following up with the actions promised our youth.

Reflecting on how youth minimisation is built into the structure of

Pacific societies, Luisa Senibulu, a regional development worker from Fiji,
discussed how such marginalisation is couched in justifications of culture
and tradition:
The culture of Pacific island countries is such that it limits a lot of
young people’s potential in being engaged in a lot of issues because
of the structures of our cultures and our traditions. It places a lot of
limits on the ability of young people to freely express themselves.

Benjamin Afuga, a civil society activist from Solomon Islands who

helped to create an online space for Solomon Islanders to engage in
civic discourse (discussed in more detail in Chapter Five), articulated
a desire to see increased youth participation in decision-making processes.
His experiences have led him to believe that this silencing of youth voices
does not benefit the people of Solomon Islands:
Youth in this country, in comparison to other countries, they have
been disengaged in many things. Decision-making, I believe, is
important when it comes to consultation and ideas. Youth must
always be part of it.

Usaia Moli has worked with Fijian youth for more than a decade, including
as an outreach worker for at-risk and street-frequenting youth, as former
chair of the Fiji National Youth Council and as a political candidate in

26
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

the 2014 national election, in which he campaigned on a youth platform.

He expressed the frustration that youth activists feel through such
exclusionary practices:
Throughout our lives, when we grow up, when we tried to do
things, they’d say, ‘Grow up’, so we grew up and now you’re
telling us, ‘Go back and be children’. We come up willing to take
responsibility, we have proven ourselves, but they say it is still not
enough. When will it be our time?

This marginalisation of the youth voice described by many of my

interviewees cannot be seen in isolation as a problem of youth engagement.
Rather, the cultural context that informs this disregard for youth voices
and the wider impact it has on local, national and regional scales need
to be understood. When examining youth livelihood and development
issues across the societies of Oceania, it is imperative to examine the
current state of affairs. Equally, how access and agency for young people
are promoted or inhibited on an institutional level, both formally and
informally, must be interrogated. Youth make up a vast cross-section of
the greater population of Oceania, so to understand the issues they face
and project how their futures, and those of their communities, may look
require a holistic examination of the roles youth play across the gamut
of civil society. Youth issues cannot be quarantined. In the Great Ocean
States of the Pacific, as elsewhere, it is not that youth are an issue, but
that youth issues are representative of wider cultural, social, economic and
political issues.

Holistic livelihoods: A framework

Truly reflexive engagement with a subject requires an understanding of
how the subject is theorised. This book analyses concepts of livelihoods
and how young people in Pacific societies achieve their full potential, as
individuals and as part of their communities, as well as how they engage
with their societies as active citizens. My view of livelihoods goes beyond
the practical ability of providing for oneself, incorporating notions
of how people can explore and achieve their potential. As is discussed
below, this incorporates aspects of historically influential as well as more
contemporary critical social and international development theories.
Historically influential approaches include Abraham Maslow’s (1943)
hierarchy of needs, the sustainable livelihoods approach of Robert

27
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

Chambers and Graham Conway (1991), and the capabilities approach

to development created by Amartya Sen (1999, 2003). Contemporary
critical approaches informing this research are drawn largely from the
alternative development school (for example, Berner and Phillips 2003;
Nederveen Pieterse 1998) and adaptive development school (for example,
Andrews et al. 2012; Leftwich 2011; ODI 2014; TWP Community
2016). Informed by what I label a holistic livelihoods approach, my
research approach views livelihoods as being rooted in the capacity to
secure the provision of goods, whether through subsistence agriculture,
the formal market or alternative measures, and further incorporates
notions of wellbeing, including how individuals and communities are
able to engage with their societies as full and active citizens.
As this book deals with discourse regarding ‘development’, it is vital this is
somewhat defined. As development scholar Dorothea Kleine (2010: 675)
writes: ‘Research positioned in the contested space that is “development”
needs to be able to answer the fundamental question of what is
understood as development.’ My approach is informed by the literature
related to matters of international development, Pacific epistemologies
and reflections on the impacts of development, anthropological texts
on cultural identity and cultural expression, analysis of data from my
fieldwork, and my own experiences working in international development
programs in Oceania. Together, these factors have highlighted to me that
development operates at two complementary levels. At a societal level, it is
about freedoms and capabilities, while at the household experiential level,
it is about food and security. As a concept and a discipline, development
is about creating conditions that will ultimately allow the opportunity
for all individuals and communities to fully determine and achieve their
future trajectories, with reasonable caveats regarding how these trajectories
impact on others’ rights to their own developmental opportunities.4
For the most disadvantaged and marginalised members of any society, it
still must be acknowledged that such lofty ideals are inconsequential in
relation to immediate concerns regarding how they feed themselves and
their loved ones, their access to adequate physical shelter and security,
and their ability to access opportunities regardless of factors such as their
gender, sexuality, ability or ethnicity. Though these two understandings of
development may appear to be contradictory, they are contingent on one

4 Comprehensively detailing such caveats is not possible due to differences in cultures and the fact
that cultures themselves are constantly evolving (for example, Good 2012; Pigg 1996; Sahlins 2005). As
guiding principles, they are best articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN 1948).

28
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

another: freedoms and capabilities are moot if basic needs cannot be met;
and, as is discussed below with relation to Maslow (1943), basic needs
can only be met when the possibility for the satisfaction of higher-order
needs is present.
This understanding of development is influenced by discourse about
rights-based approaches to development. There has been a broad global
acceptance of the notion that all people are entitled to the provision of
basic rights and freedoms since the adoption of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948, at least at the level of public discourse. If we
accept that Maslow’s (1943) basic safety and psychological needs can act
as effective proxies for foundational rights, the poverty-reduction focus
of much development policy and programming (Nankani et al. 2005)—
that is, those interventions that seek to secure the ability of people to
put food on the table—can be recognised equally as a human rights
initiative. The rights discourse in development moves beyond these
foundational considerations, however, to advocate for the economic and
social conditions in which people can thrive as full and active citizens as
an ethical imperative (Nelson and Dorsey 2003; Sen 2001: 229–30; Uvin
2007). The principal ethic that young people should be recognised as
active citizens while their societies provide the conditions by which they
can develop their individual potential provides an overarching framework
for the holistic livelihoods approach.
The holistic livelihoods approach is applicable to understanding
development that is both ‘intentional’ and ‘immanent’. As described
by economist Michael Cowen and historian Robert Shenton (1996),
intentional development is that which is targeted, follows a strategy and
is generally represented through economic-focused policies and programs.
Immanent development describes development that occurs as a more
natural process even though influenced by social, political and economic
ideas and policies. As the holistic livelihoods approach is concerned
with issues of access to basic needs and the potential for individual and
community advancement, it is equally applicable to both intentional and
immanent forms of development, noting that each is concerned with
‘human improvement’ (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 54).
The need to acknowledge the basic needs concerns of disadvantaged
and marginalised people was expressed to me by multiple informants.
Usaia Moli, from Fiji, told me:

29
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

In the end, it comes down to the food that you put on the table.
It’s always been about that. At the end of the day, with everything
else that comes in—there is a lot of talk of climate change, there
is a lot of talk on unemployment—but in the end, it comes down
to that. It is food on the table: ‘How can I support my family?’

The pre-eminence of basic needs for poor, disadvantaged and marginalised

people was echoed by Rosie Catherine, a mental health and women’s
rights activist, also from Fiji, who said: ‘People are concerned about their
basic needs; if I have food and I have a job, that’s more important to me
than all these [employment and development] policies and legislation.’
The holistic livelihoods approach that I apply is strongly informed by
Maslow’s view of basic needs outlined in his seminal article ‘A Theory of
Human Motivation’ (1943), in which he first presented his theory of a
hierarchy of basic human needs. This is complemented by Sen’s (1999,
2003) capabilities approach, which is grounded in how development is
experienced through the opportunities available to the most disadvantaged
and marginalised. Maslow (1943: 383) argued that basic needs could not
be appreciated in isolation from other needs and that the realisation of
basic needs was only possible when the opportunity for the realisation
of higher-order needs was also present. The capabilities approach to
development builds on this base, advocating that opportunities for the
individual enabled by society are a more appropriate prism through
which to explore developmental advances than conventional indicators
such as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (Hicks and Streeten
1979; Sumner and Tezanos Vazquez 2014), which can hide significant
variations in how development is being experienced by and within
different communities.
One of the strengths of the capabilities approach is that it does not limit
its assessment of how communities can achieve their potential to the
provision of goods or the capital accumulated. All forms of capital—
human, social, political, economic, and so on—can be built on, but all are
useless without the capability to be expended. For example, providing a
university education to a young person may provide them the skills to be
a lawyer, but if there are no employment opportunities for lawyers then the
capabilities do not necessarily result in a significant increase in the human
capital an individual can exercise. Such issues are discussed in Chapters
Two and Three in relation to the education and employment preferences
of Pacific youth as well as mismatches between formal education and
employment sectors.
30
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Communications and international development scholar Thomas

Jacobson (2016), writing about the applicability of the capabilities
approach to development communication programs, explains the need to
connect capabilities with opportunities through the prism of ‘functionings’.
Unless resources match opportunities, they have little utility:
The concept of functioning is paired with that of capabilities.
Capabilities refer to real opportunities citizens have to enjoy a
functioning rather than to the actual enjoyment of the functioning.
This pairing of functionings with capabilities is important because
for Sen development refers principally to the availability of choices,
and the ability to make choices, about whether to enjoy particular
functionings. (Jacobson 2016: 794; emphasis in original)

This is what Sen is referring to when he proposes that development is

about freedom: the freedom to access institutions of development; the
freedom to participate in society; and the freedom to choose livelihood
courses (Sen 1999: 3; 2003: 5).
Building on concepts of complexity—explored below—within
capabilities, I do not view livelihoods as being connected solely to
provisions. As Chambers and Conway (1991: 5) note: ‘A livelihood in
its simplest sense is a means of gaining a living.’ Instead, I understand
livelihoods as being holistically connected with personal ambition, social
capital and the structures that allow for or impede these. In this way,
my holistic livelihoods approach incorporates aspects of Chambers and
Conway’s (1991) sustainable livelihoods approach, as this is concerned
with existing in an environment that allows for the ongoing realisation of
needs. For a livelihood to be considered sustainable, it needs to be able to
cope with and recover from stress and shocks, maintain or enhance
its capabilities and assets, and provide sustainable livelihood
opportunities for the next generation; and … [contribute] net
benefits to other livelihoods at the local and global levels and in
the short and long term. (Chambers and Conway 1991: 6)

The value of the sustainable livelihoods approach is that it locates

individual livelihood needs and capabilities in the context of the needs
and capabilities not only of other disadvantaged and marginalised peoples,
but also of future generations. It understands that capacities to meet basic
needs must be met with the complementary, continuing capabilities to
utilise them to their fullest potential.

31
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

The paradox of the sustainable livelihoods approach is that while it

addresses the need for livelihood opportunities to be available to all on
an ongoing basis, it offers no clear purpose for development beyond the
realisation of making a living. Its focuses of poverty eradication (Krantz
2001: 6) and social equity (Chambers and Conway 1991: 22–23) are
certainly worthy causes and benefit from being approached in a manner
that acknowledges the diversity of factors that can lead to and perpetuate
poverty. The sustainable livelihoods approach does not, however, address
concerns about the purpose of development as connected to concepts
of wellbeing, happiness and opportunities for self or community-
advancement (Hopwood et al. 2005). Nor does it engage with questions of
politics and power imbalances that may impinge on the ability of certain
individuals and groups to access livelihood opportunities (de Haan and
Zoomers 2005; Scoones 2009). Though Chambers and Conway (1991: i)
expressly challenge the reader to ‘examine this paper from the perspective
of a person alive in a hundred years’ time, and then to do better than
the authors have done’, there is no clear picture of the kind of societies
they envisage existing at the end of that time frame, other than that all
people will have the capacity to make a living. This overlooks Maslow’s
(1943: 382) conception of needs as both a continuum and a web that
allow individuals to achieve self-actualisation—the realisation of one’s
full potential—within the cultural and social relations that make human
action meaningful.
The holistic livelihoods approach offers a way of understanding the aims
of international development policy and practice that better marries
the concepts of basic needs and capabilities. I recognise that while the
provision of food and physiological security needs provides the most
rudimentary platform for development, they are limited in their scope to
promote sustainable developmental change, even at the individual level.
To be developed at an individual level requires being granted the ability
to seek meaning and self-actualisation. For this to be achieved, structures
need to exist that promote the potential proliferation of people’s capacities
and capabilities. For citizen-led social change to occur, the possibility to
develop individual capabilities must be available.
Thus, when speaking of holistic livelihoods, I speak of the needs and
opportunities afforded to individuals and communities not only to
provide for themselves, but also to envision change at individual and
collective levels and to have the opportunities to achieve such change.
Youth livelihoods are about more than education, employment or
32
 1. YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT

subsistence; they are also about agency, identity and opportunity. This
is why this book not only looks at the structures of formal education
and employment that are commonly understood to promote people’s
capabilities, but also analyses how young people in Fiji and Solomon
Islands actively participate in their societies.
It is important to note that although this approach may appear to favour
the needs and capacities of the individual, this is not at the expense of the
needs of communities. The holistic livelihoods approach is interested as
much in the structures that promote or inhibit capabilities as it is with
the practicalities of who achieves such capabilities and how. In this way,
this approach addresses needs at both the individual and the community
levels. Though such connections may not always be self-evident, this is an
inevitable consequence of ever-changing cultural attitudes and practices,
as well as the shape and function of the formal and informal structures of
politics, society and the economy. These problems have been addressed in
critical development theories, as mentioned below, and are discussed in
greater detail in Chapter Four in relation to young people’s engagement in
civil society in Fiji and Solomon Islands, and in Chapter Six with reference
to the influence of social constructs of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’.

Critical and reflexive engagement

While the holistic livelihoods approach is utilised as an applied vision
of development, it is strongly informed by critical development theories,
including the writing of Pacific scholars who did not work specifically
in the development studies space. Pacific writers such as Wendt (1976),
Hau`ofa (1983, 1985) and Ravuvu (1988) have long engaged in debates
about issues of dependency, neocolonialism and alternative visions of
development that are the hallmarks of critical theories in the schools of
alternative development, adaptive development and related concepts of
intersectionality and complex adaptive systems. While the majority of
my informants did not describe their approach to change with reference
to specific development theories, their ideas about the ideal processes
informing social change accorded with the key approaches on which I have
drawn, and this influenced my development of the holistic livelihoods
lens. These discussions and my reading of critical development texts by
Pacific writers have forced me to constantly revisit my position as an
outsider to the region while conducting this research.

33
 YOUTH IN FIJI AND SOLOMON ISLANDS

Critical development theories challenge the notion that to be ‘developed’

requires economic growth and material gain. Post-development theorists
such as Arturo Escobar (1992) and Gustavo Esteva (2010) specifically
dispute the terminology and practice of international development,
arguing that the industry and the discipline entrench power imbalances by
defining who is ‘developed’ and who is ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’.
Recognising issues of power imbalances, alternative development
perspectives propose approaching development theory and practice from
a values base that emphasises the agency of beneficiary communities.
Alternative development approaches place emphasis on the wellbeing
of individuals and communities in terms relevant to them (Berner
and Phillips 2003; Nederveen Pieterse 1998). They seek to avoid the
paternalism of the donor-directed modes of development that may assume
linearity and impose ethnocentric beliefs about the desires of the recipient
populations (cf. Rostow 1971). Alternative development is underpinned
by the belief that disadvantaged and marginalised peoples are the experts
on their own situation and that any developmental interventions should
be grounded in the values of the communities they seek to impact (Berner
and Phillips 2003).
Like alternative development, adaptive approaches to development
specifically acknowledge the lack of universality around developmental
goals and interventions, harshly critiquing interventions that seek to
transpose ‘working’ policies, projects and programs from one context to
another (Andrews et al. 2012). Adaptive approaches are largely informed
by complex adaptive systems thinking, which argues that systems made
up of multiple and independent parts are inherently unpredictable as any
interaction between two or more parts can have unforeseen ramifications
on other parts (Gell-Mann 1992; Rittel and Webber 1973). Rittel and
Webber (1973: 160) write of social issues as ‘wicked problems’ for which
interventions responding to individual stimulus cannot reasonably
anticipate the corollary affects they may have without understanding the
often unknown—and sometimes unknowable—other stimuli affecting
the problem. When interviewed, Jack Maebuta, a peace and education
studies scholar from Solomon Islands, succinctly connected this notion
to the need to holistically understand and address issues of Pacific youth
livelihoods. Speaking of unemployment, Jack noted that ‘[u]nemployment
gives birth to other livelihood issues’.

34
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