Oceania and Japan

As a result of globalisation and changing technologies, young people are increasingly required to engage with the broader world beyond their local and national communities. This raises significant questions about the ways and spaces young people will need to engage as active citizens, and the new tools and resources young people will need to equip them for their futures. The Global Connections Program has been developed to address these identified needs.

This article examines a 40-year history of women’s organising in Fiji in order to show how the political goals pursued by active citizens can be shaped by an interplay of domestic and international political contingencies. This approach challenges the common and somewhat idealised definitions of active citizenship that focus upon actors’ capacity to mobilise collectively behind political goals independent of those that motivate the state or the market.

Active citizenship and participatory community development approaches have evolved partly in response to perceived aid dependency among rural communities. In Solomon Islands these methods have met with mixed success. This article reflects on the frustration often felt by local and international development workers when working with rural communities and questions some of the assumptions that shape the way development workers and programmes understand the types of communities which make up Solomon Islands.

Since the mid 1990s, squatter settlements in Fiji have been expanding at a phenomenal rate, largely due to the non-renewal of agricultural land leases and inadequate urban governance. In response to squatter growth, the Government of Fiji has implemented a squatter resettlement scheme. This scheme threatens the livelihoods of squatters engaged in urban agriculture, or ‘farming squatters’. In this article, interviews with key informants and squatter residents will reveal contrasting attitudes and approaches to the issue of ‘farming squatters’.

Trade unions are typified as having `two faces'--one of social justice and the other of vested interest. This article examines the tensions and difficulties confronted by trade union movements in the South Pacific seeking to balance the `two faces' of unionism during a period of political and economic instability in the region.

Some indigenous peoples are attempting to explore approaches to defining and implementing sustainable development in ways appropriate to them. In 1998, four Maori iwi (tribal) organisations embarked on a research project with a research team from the University of Waikato on planning for their own sustainable development.

Many farmers in less developed countries (LDCs) lack comprehensive information detailing the acute and chronic health impacts of pesticide use. Even at low levels, the use of pesticides can have significant chronic health implications. The results of research conducted among sugarcane farmers in Fifi demonstrate significantly higher occurrences of illness and disease among farmers using pesticides compared with a control group. Government agencies, NGOs, and donor groups must provide farmers with information describing the short- and long-term health risks in using pesticides.

Communication among stakeholders within international aid projects has long been recognised as problematic. The authors interviewed five different stakeholders on a Chinese-Australian project to explore whether (a) stakeholders have exclusive worldviews; (b) farmers and donor agencies see farming as a system; and (c) stakeholders can be arranged on a learning spiral, incorporating techno-centric, socio-centric and balanced socio-biological system views. In this sample, the stakeholders had distinct views, with only the donor agency espousing a balanced systemic view.

Women's groups in Papua New Guinea, often under the influence of colonial and church governance in the past, still have an ambiguous function which serves to isolate women and `women's issues' rather than spread gender sensitivity. The author concludes that the existence of these forums for women actually encourages the continued marginalisation of women from governing and decision-making structures, since women's groups `tend to operate from separate and unequal spheres of influence'.