In 2006, rioters set fire to Chinatown and damaged Parliament in Honiara in a context of political crisis. In the Pacific island states, customary power and liberal democracy have coexisted since independence without one absorbing the other. Every political crisis brings hereditary assemblies and councils of chiefs to the foreground, because formal institutions have never held the terrain of legitimacy alone. This dualism is structural, not transitional.

The essentials

  • In the Pacific island states, customary power and parliamentary power have coexisted since independence without one absorbing the other.
  • Customary institutions play a role during certain political crises in these territories.
  • Hereditary legitimacy precedes constitutions; it was not replaced by them, but bracketed.
  • State-building programs have been funded in the Pacific, but their effectiveness against the plurality of legitimacy varies.
  • For the 2030s, the open question concerns the possibility of designing legally recognized hybrid forms, or maintaining informal cohabitation as the only solution.

The return of chiefs does not constitute a setback

The Solomon Islands have nine provinces, several dozen distinct linguistic groups, and a constitution inspired by the Westminster model. They have a Prime Minister, an elected Parliament, political parties. They also have chiefs whose authority, particularly over customary land disputes, was never formally transferred to the state.

During certain political crises, including the 2000 and 2006 troubles, village chiefs and customary councils played a mediation role. Academic work shows that these institutions exercise authority over land matters and that they are not survivals on their way to extinction.

Tuvalu offers an even clearer case. With eleven thousand inhabitants spread across nine atolls, the formal state there is skeletal by necessity. The falekaupule, the assembly of elders of each atoll, manages daily affairs according to oral customary law.

The national Parliament legislates and the falekaupule cooperate on island and customary affairs.

Wallis and Futuna presents the most formalized configuration of this duality. A French territory since 1961, it is governed jointly by an administrator appointed by Paris and by three customary kingdoms, Uvea, Sigave and Alo, whose kings (lavelua and sau) exercise authority recognized by the 1961 status itself. Representative democracy and hereditary monarchy are inscribed in the same legal text. When a king is overthrown by his own subjects according to customary law, as has happened several times since the 1980s, the French administration must take note of it without being able to decide.

Democratization sidestepped the problem of legitimacy

Independence in the Pacific states came quickly, often between 1975 and 1980, under pressure from the United Nations and colonial powers that wanted to close their regional presence. Constitutions were drafted in a few months, modeled on British or French templates, with varying attention to existing structures.

The result is what Ronu Mohanty and Peter Larmour call in their work on Pacific institutions “parallel legitimacy”: two sources of authority, two registers of rights, two modes of conflict resolution, that overlap without ever truly merging. Elections produce governments. Governments legislate. But the concrete implementation of policies, over land, over marine resources, over family disputes, goes through customary intermediaries that the state did not appoint, train, or pay.

This configuration goes beyond the Pacific alone, but it takes particular acuity there for geographical reasons. In an archipelago where each island forms a complete community, with its own kinship network and its own rights over the lagoon, a central state cannot claim monopoly on legitimacy. Physical distance keeps local power alive where politics fails to do so.

International donors, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union, funded state capacity-building programs in these archipelagos for thirty years: courts, land registries, trained civil services, professional police forces. The investment produced real results on certain governance indicators. It did not resolve fundamental questions: who owns the land, and who has the right to settle a conflict in a village.

These questions can be addressed according to customary law, but they do not fall exclusively under it.

Crises as revelations, not anomalies

Episodes of political instability in Pacific island states are often read from the outside as democratic failures. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2026, which covers Oceania, notes persistent fragility in several archipelagos, linked notably to the weakness of formal institutions in the face of community pressures. This reading is correct but incomplete.

Formal institutions never had a monopoly on legitimacy in these states, and crises make it visible. In the Solomon Islands in 2006, rioters who set fire to the Chinese quarter of Honiara expressed frustration with a government perceived as external to local communities, a government that made decisions about natural resources without going through the chiefs who, according to customary law, are their legitimate guardians.

In the Solomon case, a regional intervention aimed to restore security and institutions. Academic work examines whether this type of intervention fits into a sustainable cycle.

This is an institutional design problem. Some researchers have raised the question of whether island states could design institutions integrating the plurality of legitimacy.

Lessons from the Pacific for state-building architects

The repeated failure of state-building programs is often attributed to exogenous factors. The Pacific case illustrates difficulties linked to the absence of prior resolution of legitimacy questions.

In Afghanistan, tribal jirgas and warlord networks exercised parallel authority for twenty years that the state of Kabul could not absorb. In the Sahel, chiefdoms and religious networks continue to manage functions that the formal state claims to occupy without having the means or the grounding to do so. In the Pacific islands, the same dynamic plays out on a smaller scale and in a less violent context, which makes it more legible.

Exported democratic models often underestimated the persistence of preexisting legitimacies. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007 opened a conceptual space to address this problem differently: it recognizes the right of indigenous peoples to maintain their own political institutions. It did not, however, provide the legal instruments to articulate these institutions with the formal states that encompass them.

This chapter joins a broader question about states’ capacity to act: when formal institutions lack grounding in local legitimacy, public resources, however abundant, produce disappointing results.

Toward hybrid forms: three possible trajectories for 2030-2040

The central question for the coming decade is not whether customary power will survive in the Pacific island states. It will survive. The question is whether regional political systems will find a way to formalize its role, or whether informal cohabitation will remain the only solution.

Three trajectories are emerging, though none is inevitable.

The first is explicit constitutional integration. Some states have already moved in this direction. Vanuatu inscribed in its 1980 constitution a National Council of Chiefs, the Malvatu Mauri, with a formal consultative role on customary matters. Some Pacific states have experimented with codifying customary law for land rights. These experiments show that formal hybridization is possible.

They also show its limits: the Malvatu Mauri remains consultative, without real blocking power, which generates recurrent tensions with chiefs who feel their authority is underrepresented.

The second trajectory is managed duality. The two systems coexist without being formally articulated, but practical coordination mechanisms develop. Judges trained in customary law, land services that recognize hereditary rights, mediation procedures that make room for chiefs. This path is less elegant legally but perhaps more politically robust: it does not impose a single solution on very different realities from one archipelago to another.

The third trajectory is capture. Certain chiefs or customary networks can instrumentalize their traditional legitimacy to block reforms that threaten their interests, particularly on land and natural resource issues. Customary legitimacy can also consolidate gender inequalities, hereditary hierarchies, and exclusions. This risk must remain present in any reflection on institutional hybridization.

The signals to watch in the coming years are clear. The Solomon Islands Parliament has begun a reflection on reforming the provincial system involving councils of chiefs. Tuvalu and Australia concluded the Falepili Union treaty, which came into force on August 28, 2024, providing a permanent mobility pathway. Several Pacific states are engaged in discussions on marine resource governance.

The possibility of designing a stable democracy in a context of plural legitimacy goes far beyond the Pacific. It concerns the capacity of states to act on their territory when their legitimacy is fragmented, a difficulty that consolidated democracies are themselves beginning to confront in other forms.

Lessons from these islands for other democracies

It would be convenient to treat the Pacific as an exotic case, too small and too particular to draw generalizable lessons from. It would be a mistake.

The Pacific island states are laboratories despite themselves. Their small size makes institutional dynamics visible to the naked eye. When legitimacy is dual in the Solomon Islands, you see it in the streets of Honiara. When a customary mediation system works in Tuvalu, you can document it in a single atoll. These cases allow analysis that the complexity of large states makes difficult.

In the Pacific, different sources of legitimacy coexist. Formal institutions produce variable results depending on their degree of local grounding.

The question for decision-makers, in the region and in international organizations that accompany Pacific governance, is not to choose between liberal democracy and customary power, which coexist. The question is whether to leave this cohabitation informal, with its risks of capture and instability, or to build legal bridges strong enough that the two systems reinforce each other rather than confront each other. Several constitutional architects are working on these bridges. Their work deserves more attention than it receives.

Sources

  1. Cambridge University Press & ANU Press, Governance and customary power in Pacific island states: https://journals.openedition.org/jso/16232?lang=en
  2. Jon Fraenkel, ANU, work on governance in the Solomon Islands (Australian National University, Crawford School of Public Policy)
  3. Ronu Mohanty & Peter Larmour, customary institutions and formal state in the Pacific (ANU Press)
  4. Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2026, Oceania (Bertelsmann Stiftung)
  5. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_F_web.pdf
  6. Constitution of Vanuatu (1980) and status of the Malvatu Mauri, text available via Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute: https://www.paclii.org
  7. Pacific Islands Forum, governance of marine resources and customary rights (Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat)