Profile
Asterio Takesy
SPREP’s New Boss Settles In
For most of the staff at the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme in Samoa, their new boss speaks English with an odd accent. In a country where spoken English usually has Australian or New Zealand roots, Asterio Takesy’s accent is flat, very American.
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“I speak English with a funny accent,” he admits, while sitting in his spacious office at SPREP’s campus like headquarters in Apia. And that’s not the only change SPREP staff, and their new director, are getting used to.
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“Being the first Micronesian to head SPREP puts me under the microscope,” says Takesy, originally from Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia. The American-educated Takesy, who served in a number of FSM national government posts dealing with foreign affairs, is aware of another challenge working in the heart of Polynesia.
“Establishing presence,” he says. “I am physically disadvantaged! Polynesians, especially Samoans, are bigger than Micronesians.”
Takesy is one of only three Micronesians to lead a major regional organization in the Pacific Islands. Lourdes Pangelinan of Guam now serves as Secretary General of the Pacific Community (formerly the South Pacific Commission) in Noumea, New Caledonia. Victorio Uherbelau, a Palauan, is the former director of the Forum Fisheries Agency, which is based in Honiara, Solomon Islands.
Takesy’s major challenge is two-fold: get to know the strengths and weaknesses of his staff, and to make sure SPREP is providing high value for its donors. “I want them to know that SPREP is getting things done, and done darn well,” says Takesy.
As for what needs to be done, the new director is aware of the need to match the necessity of conservation with the reality of the need for economic growth. And in doing so, Takesy says, SPREP can also fulfill its mandate to donors to provide measurable results.
“SPREP’s major donors support the core program of nature conservation that will accrue to the benefit of local inhabitants. They are not just looking at conserving biodiversity for future posterity. They are also interested in helping the region to derive economic benefits from such resources as eco-tourism, for instance,” Takesy says.
He is also sensitive to the need to make sure SPREP helps local and national governments to manage their own natural resources. Donors, he emphasizes, expect regional countries to assume gradually greater responsibility for the sustainable management of the environment.
As for the state of the Pacific environment, Takesy says the region is in fairly good shape. “About 80 percent of its biodiversity is intact, and its standing tuna stock is healthy,” he notes. But there are substantial challenges.
“The bad news is that unsustainable harvesting of terrestrial and in- and near-shore resources is on the rise—and it is rising at an alarming rate,” says Takesy. “Fresh water sources are being depleted and polluted, outstripping the region’s ability to meet its population’s basic needs, not to mention those of commerce. And the region is producing waste beyond its ability to manage it for now, and in the foreseeable future.”
To meet the challenges, Takesy says he will examine the very structure of SPREP, an organization he has found to be more bureaucratic than he expected. With his long experience in managing bureaucracy, expect Takesy to shake things up in Apia.
“I’ve got to know whom I am working with, whom I am working for, who pays the rent, what all the foregoing want, and what they need,” he says. “I subscribe to the proposition that you cannot please everyone all the time; do the best you can for the majority most of the time.”
And Takesy, being a veteran of many bureaucratic battles, knows what’s at stake for his nascent administration: “I am expected to perform miracles in the face of rising expectations of members, and donors.” SPREP, he says, “has been around long enough that results should meet expectations.”
