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This paper aims to highlight the localised shelter solutions to fulfil adequate and disaster resilient housing needs of urban informal settlers of Honiara, the capital city of Solomon Islands, in a way that is sensitive to their unique challenges, values and aspirations, is gender- and disability-inclusive, and considers housing from the complete lifecycle of a disaster (pre-, during- and post-).

Qualitative data was gathered through empirical research through five community workshops at five hotspot settlements, two stakeholder workshops and a stakeholder interview. Semi-structured questions as well as photographs of housing and settlement were used for data collection. With an emphasis on self-recovery, the identified shelter needs were then matched with the roles and responsibilities of the Government to support a process of “assisted” self-preparedness and recovery.

The output of the research was the Solomon Islands Shelter Guide. This paper draws from the Guide to present some of the findings. One of the key findings was an emphasis on shelter self-preparedness and self-recovery. However, in order for them to do that, they needed a combination of assistance – technical knowledge, materials and financial support – which is tailored to their settlement’s specific needs and based on hazard damage assessment. While the Guide provides one form of the assistance (i.e. technical), this paper is a call for action from the Solomon Islands Government and shelter responders to fulfil the rest of the community needs for shelter adequacy.

The paper contributes to existing scholarship on shelter after disasters by adding “assisted” in front of self-recovery, in line with the limited access to resources by the most vulnerable to recover, despite housing being” a human right and definition of adequate housing (UN-Habitat, 2015, 2021), which includes freedom of choice, entitlements and meeting minimum adequacy criteria.

There are many implications of this research. Since the publication of the Shelter Guide, there is excitement among most humanitarian and development agencies, government authorities and the local communities in Honiara. The Guide forms the first step in contributing to identified needs and strengthening community capacities to self-build, self-recover or self-retrofit one’s house based on their own choice of materials, design, social and economic circumstance. However, it provides one of the three elements identified as needs by the communities, as i) technical guidance, and a kit-of parts for multi-hazard safe housing, ii) financial and economic assistance and iii) a political voice or being supported and heard by the government. The research team are working with the same five urban informal communities in 2022–2023 to develop and operationalise local disaster plans (in partnership with local non-government organisations), capacity-building activities and translation of the Shelter Guide into technical posters (for local builders) and graphic novel in local pidgin language, as part of the Climate Resilient Honiara project (funded by the United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) Adaptation fund and administered by UN-Habitat). In the longer term it would be worth evaluating the practical implications of the Guide or to examine whether the proposed socio-technical and governance guidance will find roots in the local culture.

While the Guide adhered to internationally agreed concepts of self-recovery, incremental shelter and core space, it contributes to existing scholarship on shelter after disasters by adding “assisted” in front of self-recovery, in line with housing as a human right and adequate housing (UN-Habitat, 2015, 2021), including freedom of choice, entitlements and meet minimum adequacy criteria, all of which require materials and financial assistance by the relevant in-country authorities.

Discussions about progressive gender reform across Melanesia highlight the need for more gender-inclusive policies and improved conditions for women and girls throughout all sectors. However, for many of these countries, attempts to address the problems are marred by insufficient resources and low prioritization of the issue and traditional, cultural and religious perspectives about gender and gendered roles. This article discusses how police responses are coordinated to address domestic and family violence (DFV) and provides a critical reflection on both internal responses and the complexities of multi-partner operations beyond urban spaces.

This article draws on the findings from a stakeholder engagement focus group with 20 participants from four Melanesian countries – Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu – to provide insight into policing innovations in rural contexts.

There is a need for improved multisector partnerships, increased police presence and greater reliance on indigenous strategies to improve responses to DFV in resource-constrained contexts.

The article provides insight into an under-researched area and makes recommendations for improving responses to DFV in rural areas in small-island developing states.

This paper aims to investigate the practice of accounting in the Seventh-day Adventist church of the Pacific Islands and pays particular attention to the coexisting of two control devices: accounting and religion.

This paper implemented a qualitative field study design collecting interview data from church members from the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Fiji. Data were also collected through focus group discussions, document reviews, website analysis and participant observations. Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking on symbolic violence, doxa and capital are used to interpret the findings.

This paper’s main contribution shows that while there is a divine and profane divide, social agents, given their agency, can move back and forth from one side of the divide to the other. Accounting as a control device does not include features such as faith, which is helpful for decision-making; accordingly, religion is relied upon when it comes to decision-making. In contrast, accounting has features that are useful for stewardship purposes. Accordingly, when it comes to the church’s stewardship function accounting in the form of financial reports is relied upon.

Pacific Island culture almost permeates all facets of life, including church life; however, this study did not clarify this. Later studies can explore the implications of culture on the deployment of accounting in a religious setting.

This rich empirical study describes the control dynamics and the tension between accounting and religion in a religious organisation. Accounting needs to adapt to churches’ unique characteristics, whereby religious/doctrinal beliefs must be accounted for and respected. Unlike in the corporate world, accountants in churches cannot fully practice their training or exercise the kind of influence they usually hold in organisations due to their religious belief systems.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of a few studies on the religion-accounting relationship. While the focus of earlier studies was generally on a secular and sacred divide, this study looks at coexisting of accounting and religion. This study adds to the sparse literature on accounting and religion and their controlling influence.

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are complex and have multifaceted effects on countries in an unpredictable and unprecedented manner. While both COVID-19 and the climate crisis share similarities, they also have some notable differences. Being both systemic in nature with knock-on and cascading effects that propagate due to high connectedness of countries, COVID-19, however, presents imminent and directly visible dangers, while the risks from climate change are gradual, cumulative and often distributed dangers. Climate change has more significant medium and long-term impacts which are likely to worsen over time. There is no vaccine for climate change compared to COVID-19. In addition, those most affected by extreme climatic conditions have usually contributed the least to the root causes of the crisis. This is in fact the case of island economies. The chapter thus investigates into the vulnerability and resilience of 38 Small Islands Developing States (SIDs) to both shocks. Adopting a comprehensive conceptual framework and data on various indices from the literature and global databases, we assess the COVID-19 and climate change vulnerabilities of SIDs on multiple fronts. The results first reveal a higher vulnerability across all dimensions for the Pacific islands compared to the other islands in the sample. There is also evidence of a weak correlation between climate change risk and the COVID-19 pandemic confirming our premise that there are marked differences between these two shocks and their impacts on island communities.

This chapter presents a survey of education development in Oceania, a region of diversity held together by its commonalities, shaped by the largest ocean on the planet. The chapter outlines the regional contexts of Oceania and offers a brief historical overview of formal education. Oceania, like most regions, has struggled to mediate between global agendas and national and regional aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination. The chapter recounts ongoing efforts to navigate education in the post-colonial period, efforts to negotiate some of the aspirations of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Education for All (EFA), and other global agendas of the early 2000s with, more recently, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this survey, we hope to demonstrate collective efforts to respond to global agendas, to shape and strengthen regionalism, while maintaining sovereignty in a globalized world. We also highlight the evolving identities of the region, in particular the relationships between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific countries that collectively make up Oceania.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns were implemented to achieve two goals: (1) to reduce the number of COVID-19 cases and (2) to reduce the number of COVID-19 deaths. In this paper, the authors aim to look at empirical evidence on how effectively lockdowns achieved these goals among small island developing states (SIDS) and for one specific SIDS economy, Guam.

The authors reviewed existing studies to form two hypotheses: that lockdowns reduced cases, and that lockdowns reduced deaths. Defining a lockdown as a positive value for Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker, OxCGRT's stringency index, the authors tested the above hypotheses on 185 countries, 27 SIDS economies and Guam using correlation and regression analyses, and using different measures of the strictness, duration and timing of the lockdown.

The authors found no evidence to support the hypothesis that lockdowns reduced the number of cases based on data for all 185 countries and 27 SIDS economies. While the authors found evidence to support the hypothesis in the case of Guam, the result required an unrealistically and implausibly long time lag of 365 days. As to the second hypothesis that lockdowns reduced the number of deaths, the authors found no evidence to support it for 185 countries, 27 SIDS economies as well as Guam.

From the review of the existing literature, the authors are the first to conduct this type of study among SIDS economies as a group and on Guam.