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The purpose of this paper is to discuss a tool for evaluating resilience of housing, which was tested in the Cook Islands. The Pacific Islands is widely known as being highly vulnerable to climate change impacts. In addition to long-term impacts such as sea level rise, current impacts such as tropical cyclones wreak havoc and the housing sector is often most severely affected. There is therefore a critical need for assessing the resilience of housing in the region. In response to that need, an evaluation tool for assessing housing resilience was developed, discussed in this paper.

The analytical framework of the tool consists of five main factors – inputs, output, result, impacts & effects and external factors – and the tool was tested in the Cook Islands. Two housing case studies implemented and/or facilitated by Australia-based agencies on two different island locations were examined: On Aitutaki, it was a reconstruction project built after Cyclone Pat in 2010; in Mangaia, it was a program for strengthening roofing against cyclones.

It was found that in different ways both the projects had improved the resilience of the beneficiary communities. However, a number of challenges were also evident in meeting the wider needs of the beneficiaries and long-term sustainability. The sustainability of these interventions, and indeed that of the islands facing severe resource constraints and rapid demographic and environmental change, posed serious questions.

The study allowed confirming the importance of the evaluation tool in the global context of climate change and consequent widespread disaster occurrence, and the devastating impact on the housing sector. In that respect, while there are obvious implications for other Pacific islands, the findings of the study offer wider global lessons for the multiplicity of agencies engaged in housing reconstruction, disaster risk reduction and development.

On 22nd June, 2000, after a good deal of speculation, the much anticipated list of non‐cooperative countries was made public by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). They had assessed 31 countries before deciding on the final 15, deemed non‐cooperative as their laws and practices were construed as providing an impediment to the fight against money laundering. They were the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Dominica, Israel, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Panama, Philippines, Russia, St Kitts & Nevis and St Vincent & Grenadines. Unfortunately for the Dominican Republic, a number of news sources from around the world substituted them for Dominica, assuming the two names referred to the same country.

Australia and New Zealand are two very special economies of the South Pacific. The settlers of these two economies came from Europe, mostly the UK. Indeed, both were colonies of the British Empire and Her Majesty, the Queen of England, continues to be the constitutional head of Australia and New Zealand. The original peoples of the two economies acceded to the authority of the European settlers. Some went on to complete an English education and earned places of official rank and accommodation under the new regime. It was only recently, on February 23, 2008, at the initiative of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia, that the Australian Parliament resolved to offer an official apology to the indigenous peoples of the land for their past suffering.

This chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Building on semiotic theories in sociology and theories within critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, it presents an interpretive analysis of state, military, and academic discursive strategies. The US empire-state attempts to construct colonial narratives of race and sovereignty that rehistoricize the history of Hawaiians and other Indigenous peoples. In order to make claims to sovereignty, settler-colonists construct narratives that build upon false claims to superiority, advancement, and discovery. Colonial resignification is a process by which signs and symbols of Indigenous communities are conscripted into the myths of empire that maintain such sovereign claims. Yet, for this reason, colonial resignification can be undone through reclaiming such signs and symbols from their use within colonial metanarratives. In this case, efforts toward decolonial resignification enacted alternative metanarratives of peoples' relationships to place. This “flip side” of the synecdoche is a process that unravels the ties that bind layered myths by providing new answers to questions that underpin settler colonial sovereignty.

This chapter presents a brief selective review of recent literature from which the operative definition “sustainability diamond” emerges. Subsequently a tourism penetration index is developed for 40 small islands with populations of less than three million. The index scores loosely arrange destinations into three development stages across the life cycle: emerging, intermediate, and high impact. Descriptive profiles of the characteristics of these three stages are presented, followed by a means difference analysis employing a dozen socioeconomic variables. The chapter concludes that these are three empirically distinct stages of development, each having major policy challenges.

A wide variety of factors influence international tourism; the number of trips taken, the distance traveled, the destinations selected for visits, and so forth. An understanding of these factors and their impacts is essential for the optimum development of tourism. The objective of this paper is, however, not to analyze or even identify all such influencing factors but rather to provide a framework for quantitatively examining the major elements or factor‐groups that influence travel in order to facilitate an identification and understanding of the various factors. The paper seeks to present a model or a tool that can be used for this needed analysis; the Pacific basin is used as en example.

Indigenous peoples are often alienated from their lands and culture. This has arguably resulted in Indigenous peoples figuring disproportionately in the social and economic statistics. The right of self-determination is often touted as a panacea to these statistics. The focus of this paper is to rethink the notion of self-determination and examine whether the process afforded by the United Nations Decolonization Committee can assist or whether the sway of State politics and State power impedes this right for Indigenous peoples.