Idyllic No More: Pacific Island Climate, Corruption and Development Dilemmas by Giff Johnson (review)

Ieremia Tabai, the first president of Kiribati, once quipped, “The Pacific is paradise for those who don’t have to live here.” In his book Idyllic No More: Pacific Island Climate, Corruption and Development Dilemmas, Giff Johnson seems intent on proving Tabai right. For those who are familiar with Johnson, who has served as the editor of the Marshall Islands Journal for more than thirty years and has lived in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) even longer, his approach to the issues of development and corruption should come as no surprise; many of the arguments he makes here have been fine-tuned from his numerous signed and unsigned editorials in the Journal. Most of Johnson’s examples also come from his direct experience in the Marshalls; other regions of Oceania are perhaps implied, but with the exception of a brief mention of the Fiji government’s crackdown on free speech and a few references to the politico-economic similarities between the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau, one should come into this book understanding the Marshallese context from which Johnson is writing.

The book is roughly divided into two sections: the first half is a critique of development, donors, and corruption, while the second half is a more in-depth exploration of specific dilemmas and possibilities. Johnson certainly has plenty of examples of governmental malfeasance to choose from. A favorite example, which he repeats numerous times, is that of travel by national leaders and other, lower-level bureaucrats, necessitated by big-donor meetings in such metropolises as Sydney, Suva, Washington dc, and, with the push for global climate initiatives, various cities in the European Union. And there is enough blame to go around, from the administrative functionary who takes full advantage of donor-sponsored travel and therefore has little time to actually perform her job duties to the Western donor states or to the agencies themselves, some of whom Johnson calls out for meeting so frequently that achieving any actual benchmark of progress during the shorter and shorter periods in which there are no meetings scheduled borders on Kafkaesque absurdity.

A glaring issue with Johnson’s book, however, is that it is, arguably, not a book. Rather, as Johnson explains, he has collected a series of blog postings that he originally wrote for the Pacific Institute for Public Policy, a nonprofit think tank based in Port Vila, Vanuatu, between 2013 and 2015. While the blogs have been edited and grouped according to theme (corresponding more or less to each “chapter”), there is little notion of chronology—that is, whether they are presented in the order they were originally written—and as a result there is quite a bit of repetition of ideas, themes, and passages, notably in the first half of the book. Additionally, Johnson refers to events that happened “this year.” However, without any temporal context (or date of publication of the original blog posting), we can only guess as to when he is referring. Moreover, the first three chapters are rather jumbled and at times often rehash the same arguments. Johnson makes no effort to draw distinctions between the concepts of corruption, development, and good governance, and it is left to the reader to discern those differences for herself. To be sure, what is missing here, and for the book as a whole, is a workable summary analysis of what the main issues and topics in relation to Pacific Island corruption and development are and how they can most usefully be accessed by the nonspecialist reader.

The second half of the book, made up of five shorter chapters, is much better organized and clearer in scope, covering issues (in order) of Pacific fisheries; climate change; noncommunicable diseases; nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands; and out-migration to the United States...