In the insular Pacific, submarine cables have become important for the continuity of communications, digital governance, and certain public services, but the precise effects vary according to countries and relief mechanisms. The OECD identifies reliable and affordable Internet access as a critical challenge for small island states of the Pacific, where digital infrastructure now conditions governance itself. Cables are critical infrastructure for connectivity and resilience for island states, but do not alone constitute the backbone of the state.

The Essentials

  • In the insular Pacific, submarine cables have become state infrastructure as much as telecommunications infrastructure: without them, public services, elections, and administrative continuity falter.
  • The OECD qualifies reliable Internet access as a critical issue for the governance of small island states of the Pacific, directly linked to public data management and service delivery.
  • The financing of these cables now involves major political choices: who finances conditions who operates, and who operates can condition who governs.
  • Australia and the United States have multiplied initiatives to counter Chinese influence on these infrastructures, transforming a technical market into open geopolitical competition.
  • The fundamental question for Pacific states is whether they can transform infrastructural dependence into sovereign capacity, and under what regional conditions this transformation becomes possible.

An Island Without Cable Governs Blind

The Solomon Islands had signed a contract with Huawei Marine in 2017 for their first submarine cable; Australia financed an alternative project in 2018. Australia substantially financed the Coral Sea Cable, with contributions from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands; Vocus was engaged for its implementation. Submarine cables constitute critical infrastructure for connectivity, resilience, and digital services for island states.

Understanding why requires looking at how governments in this region actually function. In several Pacific states, administrative systems and public data communicate with the rest of the world through submarine cables. When a single cable is broken, communications and certain administrative activities can be severely disrupted; the extent depends on redundancies and relief means available. Tonga suffered a prolonged outage after the volcanic eruption of January 2022, which isolated the archipelago for several weeks. Remittance inflows were disrupted by the cable cut, with no evidence that they completely ceased.

Government communications were severely disrupted and limited, with restricted recourse to satellite means.

The state had no voice.

The OECD, in its peer review of Australia conducted in 2025 and published in 2026, explicitly emphasizes that digital connectivity now conditions governance and public services in these states. The OECD presents digital connectivity as important for governance and resilience, without establishing an explicit hierarchy with fiscal capacity or rule of law.

Cable Ownership Creates Dependencies That Politics Would Struggle to Undo

In the insular Pacific, submarine cable projects examined typically cost anywhere from several tens to around 135 million Australian dollars, depending on the route and connections. Most small island states of the Pacific mobilize mixed financing—public, multilateral, bilateral, and private—for their cable projects. They frequently resort to donors, development banks, and private operators, while often retaining public or local participation. These actors can influence design, routes, markets, governance conditions, and landing sites; this does not in itself prove a right of access to the content of data in transit.

Ownership, financing, and technical standards can create long-term dependencies or constraints, but their effects depend on contracts, licenses, national law, governance, and the regulatory capacities of the country concerned. Construction and maintenance contracts are established during project setup; rules for traffic monitoring and data sovereignty depend also on regulation, licenses, and service contracts. Once the cable is installed, commercial and operating agreements can be difficult to modify according to their clauses; but cables are not buried several kilometers deep: in international waters, they generally rest on the seabed, while burial concerns mainly vulnerable coastal zones.

Australia, Japan, and the United States coordinated financing for East Micronesia Cable; Australia and New Zealand co-financed Tonga Hawaiki. These projects are not established here as a joint initiative of the four countries under the Partners in the Pacific Initiative. The stated objective is to offer Pacific states alternatives to Chinese offerings, whose data access conditions are not always public. Australia thus co-financed the Coral Sea cable to the Solomon Islands and the East Micronesia cable connecting the Federated States of Micronesia; it also financed with New Zealand the Tonga Hawaiki cable, approved before the 2022 eruption and become particularly relevant for strengthening resilience after that catastrophe.

These investments are real and they change concrete trajectories. Island states must arbitrate between multiple partners and dependency risks, while retaining varying degrees of participation in project decisions. The question of who decides, and in whose interest, remains open.

Public Data Is the New Sovereignty Challenge

The cable is the plumbing. What flows through it is another matter. Citizen data, financial flows, classified or sensitive government communications: all of this transits through these infrastructures. Where these data are hosted, under what jurisdiction, with what access rights for operators and for foreign states that contributed to financing: these are the questions that are beginning to structure digital governance policies in the region.

Several Pacific states have engaged in reflection on the sovereignty of public data. The problem is that technical capacities to host government data locally are often lacking. Data centers are expensive, consume energy, and require expertise that states of a few hundred thousand inhabitants struggle to maintain. Recourse to the cloud can reproduce dependencies: depending on systems and countries, data can be hosted locally, in regional clouds, or with foreign providers, with varying legal consequences.

Regional initiatives are emerging to pool these capacities. The Forum promotes regional data governance and digital sovereignty. A shared regional hosting, legally removed from the great powers, remains to be built. Political tensions internal to the region complicate these efforts: some states maintain close relations with Beijing while others keep their distance. Interests diverge and common frameworks advance slowly.

The parallel with other digital governance issues is enlightening. An article published in this journal on AI in Asian administrations showed that digitization of the state does not automatically produce public capacity: it can instead create new dependencies on private or foreign providers. The same logic applies to cables and data: infrastructure alone is not enough; the rules that govern it are decisive.

Alternative Models Exist and Deserve to Be Taken Seriously

Dependence is not a technical fatality. It results from financing, architecture, and governance choices that can be made differently.

The community cable model offers a path. PICOT is a domestic submarine loop in New Caledonia, associated with OPT-NC infrastructure, and not a shared governance model among multiple Pacific states. The World Bank has supported models of project companies and public-private or inter-state partnerships, whose ownership and control arrangements vary by project. A model of public or local ownership can modify certain dependency relationships, but PICOT alone does not demonstrate an alternative inter-state model.

The other lever is regulatory. Pacific states are strengthening their data and cybersecurity frameworks with support from various partners; the existence of an OECD-UNDP program explicitly covering protection, portability, and localization of public data is not established. These frameworks do not move cables, but they mainly define individual rights, processing obligations, and transfer rules; states’ prerogatives over data depend on specific legal and contractual rules. This is a lighter form of sovereignty, less expensive, and which can be built even when infrastructure depends on outside actors.

Australia, the main donor in the region, has recently strengthened its commitments in digital capacity building in its Pacific development strategy. This includes training officials in data professions and support for developing national digital policies; a general commitment requiring hosting under local control is not established by the sources consulted. These programs are modest in volume, but they build something that cables alone do not build: internal administrative capacity.

Between 2030 and 2045, Connectivity Will Be a Test of Sovereign Capacity

Technical choices made today in the insular Pacific will have effects for twenty or thirty years. A cable laid with operation clauses favorable to a foreign actor is not easily renegotiated. A proprietary cloud architecture can entail significant dependencies and migration costs; their duration and reversibility depend on architecture, contracts, skills, and public decisions. Small Pacific states do not have the luxury of repeated error.

The question for the 2030s is whether connectivity can become a factor of empowerment or whether it will remain structurally a factor of dependence. Two trajectories are emerging, without either being inevitable.

In the first, external funders continue to lay cables according to their own geopolitical priorities, island states choose between competing offers without real capacity to influence conditions, and digital governance remains fragmented between incompatible systems depending on partners. In this scenario, connectivity improves services but does not strengthen state capacity: data remains outsourced, technical decisions remain made elsewhere, and dependence reproduces itself with each new investment cycle.

In the second, states in the region manage to build common governance frameworks around public data, to collectively negotiate cable conditions with their funders, and to develop sufficient internal expertise to audit the technical architectures proposed to them. This trajectory requires regional cohesion that the Pacific Islands Forum struggles to maintain today on digital issues. It also requires that donors accept supporting governance models that give them less operational control, without it being established to what extent Canberra and Washington have integrated this condition into their strategies.

What would distinguish the two trajectories is not primarily technical. Cables will be laid in both cases, connectivity will progress. The determining variable is institutional: do island states build, with the help of their partners, the administrative, legal, and technical capacities to govern their own digital infrastructure? This is a question that an article published in this journal on the state’s capacity for action raised in a completely different context, but with the same logic: tools are not enough if the institution using them does not have mastery of them.

The signals to watch are clear. The first is the evolution of data governance frameworks within the Pacific Islands Forum: if they gain in substance and constraint, it is an indicator that the region is building real collective capacity. The second is the nature of clauses inserted in the next cable contracts financed by Australia and the United States: if these clauses include requirements for co-governance and skills transfer, rather than simple operation guarantees, the model changes. The third is the development of local hosting and system audit capacities: small countries can pool these capacities at the regional level, as some Caribbean states have done for their civil and electoral registers.

None of these signals is yet decisive. But they point in a direction, and certain actors are working in this direction with serious methodology. Digital connectivity in the insular Pacific is not condemned to remain an affair of great powers.

Sources

  1. OECD, OECD Development Co-operation Peer Reviews: Australia 2025, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/12/oecd-development-co-operation-peer-reviews-australia-2025_c9cbcc1a/c58230a4-en.pdf
  2. Pacific Islands Forum, works on regional digital governance and data protection frameworks (Pacific Regional Data Governance Framework), Pacific Islands Forum, Suva
  3. World Bank, reports on submarine cable financing in the insular Pacific, including the East Micronesia Cable project, World Bank, Washington D.C.
  4. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), reports on digital governance in small island developing states, UNDP, New York