Photo: Olimpia Kot, European Values
What is happening?
The Pacific’s most important annual political gathering took place this year without several of the region’s key leaders. The prime ministers of Fiji, Solomon Islands, Samoa and Vanuatu pulled out of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) shortly before its opening in Palau, August 30. Their absence added another layer of uncertainty to a forum already navigating divisions among its members and growing pressure from external powers, while trying to keep Pacific priorities at the center of the regional agenda. As external interest in the Pacific grows, so does the importance of who sets the terms of regional engagement.
What is the broader picture?
The annual Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting is the Pacific’s premier political gathering, bringing together regional leaders to set collective priorities on issues ranging from climate change, economic development and security to ocean governance and relations with external partners. As the annual summit of the region’s principal political organization, the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting provides a key platform for Pacific states to coordinate positions and articulate their collective interests.
For the second consecutive year, however, controversy over who would be at the table marred proceedings, with several prominent leaders canceling their participation shortly before the summit. After facing a no-confidence motion, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale decided against attending, while the prime ministers of Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa were also absent. While these three countries were represented at ministerial level, the leadership absences raise questions about the weight of the regional forum at a time when Pacific governments are simultaneously pursuing increasingly important bilateral relationships.
External participation also remained contentious, with Taiwan, a development partner of the forum, returning to Palau after being excluded alongside other external partners from the 2025 PIF in Honiara, the Solomons capital. On that occasion, Beijing strongly objected to Taiwan’s presence, with China’s Special Envoy for Pacific Island Countries Affairs Qian Bo (錢波) warning that there would be “consequences.” The response from within the region this time around was significant: Host Palau maintained Taiwan’s presence, stressing that decisions over participation belong to the forum and its members. The Taiwan International Youth Ambassadors Association raised security concerns after unidentified individuals, reportedly speaking with Chinese accents, were seen filming guests at a Taiwan Night event, held alongside the forum. The episode again exposed the pressures surrounding external engagement but also demonstrated the determination of forum members to retain control over the institution and its partnerships.
Another disagreement emerged over China’s July 2026 intercontinental ballistic missile test in the Pacific. The issue had already generated divisions among forum members ahead of the leaders’ summit. Forum leaders ultimately expressed concern over the lack of adequate advance warning and called on all states conducting such tests to provide at least 24 hours’ notification. Yet the issue did not produce a fully unified position: Nauru formally disassociated itself from this section of the communiqué. Rather than presenting Pacific states as a single bloc responding to great-power competition, the statement revealed disparate strategic positions and external relationships.
Despite the high-profile absences and disagreements, the 2026 Forum produced a substantial regional agenda. Leaders endorsed the Regional Peace and Security Action Plan 2026–2030 and advanced new mechanisms for humanitarian response and cooperation against transnational crime, while reaffirming climate change as the single greatest threat to Pacific security. Climate and economic resilience remained central, with the endorsement of the BELAU Declaration for Urgent and Inclusive Climate Action and further steps to operationalize the Pacific Resilience Facility, a community-centered climate and disaster financing facility for the region.
The forum also endorsed the Pacific Pact on Gender and Climate Action, strengthening women’s participation in climate decision-making and access to climate finance, and endorsed the region’s first collective principles on artificial intelligence and responsible digital technologies, emphasizing digital sovereignty and the protection of Pacific cultures, languages and traditional knowledge. Leaders also advanced regional approaches to ocean governance, fisheries, maritime sovereignty and renewable energy. Underpinning these decisions was an emphasis on Pacific agency and the sovereign right of forum members to determine their priorities, shape the regional agenda and choose their own partnerships.
Why is it important?
The 2026 Forum highlights a central tension in contemporary Pacific regionalism. Pacific island states are attracting growing strategic attention and have more external partners and bilateral opportunities at their disposal, but this also creates pressure on the regional institutions through which they have traditionally sought to exercise collective influence. The absence of several leaders, disagreement over the missile test and controversy surrounding Taiwan demonstrate that forum members are not always singing from the same song sheet. At the same time, the forum remains the main platform through which Pacific states can collectively define what matters to the region. Importantly, their agenda does not always mirror the priorities of the powers competing for influence in the Pacific. Climate resilience, ocean governance, fisheries, economic security and, increasingly, digital sovereignty remain at its center.
The challenge for the PIF is therefore not to keep external competition out of the Pacific, but to prevent it from determining the regional agenda. For external partners, this means that successful engagement will increasingly depend on responding to Pacific-defined priorities rather than approaching the region primarily through the lens of geopolitical competition.