Beyond cooperation: towards an Oceanic community JIM ROLFE Oceania, through the Pacific Islands Forum, is re-examining its processes and institutions in an attempt to become more effective as a region. Pacific leaders have adopted a ‘Pacific Plan’ that is designed to detail how the region will improve its governance, develop economically, ensure demo- cratic values and deepen its commitment to human rights. The Plan argues that more and deeper cooperation is necessary to achieve these outcomes. But the region’s states already cooperate closely in many spheres and there is no evidence that more cooperation will achieve anything but more cooperation. What is needed is the development of an explicit regional community within which the members (both states and citizens) can achieve their full potential unconstrained by the many structural and cultural barriers that exist with even the closest cooperative arrangements. Introduction Cooperation is a fact of life within Oceania. The South Pacific Commission (from 1997, the (Secretariat of the) Pacific Community, SPC) was established more than 50 years ago to promote technological cooperation, and from 1971 political cooperation was institutionalised with the formation of the South Pacific Forum (since 2000, the Pacific Islands Forum). Today there is a wide- ranging network of cooperative institutions and processes which actually or potentially cover all aspects of regional life. Cooperation is emphasised because it: achieves pragmatic results; gives economies of scale, particularly important in a region of (with exceptions) limited human and natural resources; allows sharing of resources, important for the same reason; aggregates the political power of otherwise internationally weak states; makes it easy for experiences to be shared systematically, again important where resources are limited and there is little scope for trial and error approaches to problem solving; and because it allows national political preferences to be shared, tested, mediated and managed with partner states in an institutionalised setting (Haas 1989; Ross 1993: 82 / 94; Crocombe 2001: 591 / 626). In the South Pacific specifically, regional leaders have been ‘eager to widen the political space available to them’ through cooperation (Camilleri 2003: 47). Overall, cooperation should give individual states more benefits than ISSN 1035-7718 print/ISSN 1465-332X online/06/010083-19 # 2006 Australian Institute of International Affairs DOI: 10.1080/10357710500494598 Australian Journal of International Affairs Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 83  /101, March 2006