New Brief For Forum's Greg Urwin

Greg Urwin, the Australian foreign service Pacific Islands expert who took over at Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat's Suva headquarters in January as its new secretary-general, now has a brief to turn the Forum's grand Pacific Plan vision into practical reality.
"It is a very broad ranging report with a broad ranging set of recommendations," Urwin told journalists after his return to Suva from the Forum's Auckland extraordinary retreat.

"An exercise like this has not been conducted before in the life of the Forum. The secretariat itself was reviewed in 1995 but this report will set the agenda for our work for the next few years.

The general instruction to the secretariat was to keep "very, very" closely in touch with the Forum leaders so as to deal with their priority concerns at any time.

"There is also an instruction that we should be more pro-active in identifying, anticipating and putting the Forum in a position to respond to various regional crises as they come up.

"It identifies the key work of the Forum and Secretariat as being matters of economic growth, sustainable development, governance and security.

"I think what we are being asked to do now is really to examine the work of the secretariat in the light of the priorities set out here. We have got to make what we do as demonstrably responsive to those priorities as we can.

"I've been going to Forums for a long time, and there is a sense that the whole process does need refreshing in order to put it into a position to meet some of the situations we now face."

Urwin doesn't doubt that the leaders regard the Forum as being "a pretty useful institution" but felt that it now needs to do more in other areas in new ways.

"What is evolutionary, in particular, is this notion of a Pacific Plan. What the leaders clearly want us to do is to develop some recommendations for the next possible practical stages in regional co-operation, see where we are after that, and see whether we want to take it further."

Urwin doesn't feel that the new tack taken by the Forum was influenced particularly by the law and order and economic collapse in the Solomon Islands.

"There is in my view an appropriate reluctance not to generalise from the Solomon Islands situation and to make a general prescription out of that.

"One thing that comes very strongly out of the Auckland meeting and from the report on which it was based are the special needs of the small islands states. There is definitely a feeling that their requirements and needs are special, and that perhaps they have not quite been addressed in a concerted way as they need to be. Those kind of needs are going to require us to do some particular things to make sure, in the words of the report, that their concerns are mainstreamed.

"There is an acknowledgement in the region that there is obviously a need to respond in an appropriate way to the international agenda of security concerns. God knows some of those concerns are real enough. We see that all the time. But I think that is matched by a sense that we will have to address the notion of security in this region as having particular regional characteristics. Security in a small island state may not be so much about terrorism, but may well be about economic and environmental survival. That, for certain is people definition of security.

"Leave aside the fact of whether or not I would accept the description (by some commentators of Melanesian countries) of an arc of instability. I just think that's the kind of superficial description which hides more than it reveals.

"In terms of the need to respond to security situations, what the report says, and what the leaders endorsed, is that I and the secretariat simply need to be a lot more pro-active in anticipating, assessing, analysing situation and advising the Forum on ways in which it can play a role in those situation at a stage where it might have some remedial effect; to in a sense try to respond to situations so that you don't get to the stage that the Solomon Islands did that required military and police intervention.

"In the end, you can't ensure anything. What you are able to do in an organisation is support countries and the region to address situations where one is called upon to do it.

"It needs to be repeated that the internal affairs of countries are very much their own affair, and it is really only in those situations where Forum leaders as a whole decide they can be helpful in a situation of perhaps instability in one of the counties of the region that the Forum can play a helpful role. That's got to be the basis on which it happens."

The Pacific EU idea simply didn't arise at Auckland, Urwin says.

"That idea, and some of the things that have been said about an EU-type Pacific Union, I think originally derived from think tanks in various countries. The leaders want us to get on with practical measures for cooperation for the kinds of things happening between countries now. There was no real discussion about a common currency and European-style union."

While Australia and New Zealand, the Forum's main suppliers of money, intend to support the preparation of the Pacific Plan with more funding for the secretariat, Urwin doesn't expect the secretariat which has a staff of around 70 to become a larger organisation.
"There is one thing I would say, and this is my own sense of it at the moment, and that is I don't see a lot of sense in multiplying the number of divisions. What I do see value in is strengthening the horizontal links across the divisions in making connections in things like governance and the economic and political dimension."