By Kanni Wignaraja and Munkhtuya
Altangerel
Last week, governments from across the
world gathered in Geneva for the first session of the UN
Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and a presentation of the
inaugural report of the Independent International Scientific
Panel on AI. It marked an important step towards building
global rules for artificial intelligence.
While
unpacking what AI can do for the Pacific, let us also
consider what the Pacific can contribute to the future of
AI. Both questions are relevant and connected, especially
from a human development progress perspective.
The
initial instinct, even anxiety, in small, remote economies
could be to treat AI purely as a race from behind. And there
is indeed need for that catch-up. So, the Kingdom of Tonga,
for example, has moved through a national Digital Readiness
Assessment, brought commercial 5G online, and is rebuilding
its government services around a digital-first model,
including AI tools designed to help citizens interact with
the state in their own language.
Similar Digital
Readiness Assessments have also been undertaken across Fiji,
Samoa and Vanuatu, helping lay the foundations for AI
adoption and digital transformation for the Pacific. This
reflects strong national leadership and commitment across
the government, with a willingness from the very top to jump
into the race and speed up.
Foundational groundwork
like this gives countries like Tonga real standing to speak
on this issue from experience rather than aspiration. That
includes investing in the AI skills and digital capabilities
of people, to make the best use of the new data and services
AI can offer.
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However, framing the Pacific’s AI
challenge only as a catch-up exercise misses what the region
is better placed to see than almost anywhere else. In Tonga,
as across the Pacific, AI systems run into something they
were not designed to encounter. Much of what local
communities know about maritime navigation, weather, land
and the ocean is oral, relational, and held collectively,
passed down through practice and inter-generational
responsibility rather than stored in a database. Some of it
is sacred, and deliberately never written down.
The Pasifika
Futures Report argues that the real question is not
whether Pacific countries adopt AI, but whether technology
supports the futures Pacific people want for themselves,
especially younger generations. Digital Tuvalu offers
perhaps the clearest example: a nation on the frontline of
climate change using digital technology to preserve its
culture, heritage and identity for generations to come,
while advancing Simon Kofe’s vision of a future in which
Tuvaluans can connect with one another, explore their
ancestry and culture, and access new opportunities for
business and commerce.
This is not a barrier to AI
adoption. It is an opportunity to shape how these
technologies are designed and governed. Tonga is therefore
well placed to bring this Pacific perspective to the future
of AI, contributing views on identity, stewardship, culture
and knowledge systems that remain largely absent from
today’s models and debates.
This brings up a larger
missing piece in the current AI sphere – experiential and
non-written knowledge and decisions, as well as
intergenerational accountability, should not be viewed as
peripheral considerations. They are critical inputs that
remain largely absent from global AI governance discussions
today. Ask the AI frameworks and models how they would treat
a body of knowledge whose custodians choose not to digitise
it, and the answer is that they were not built with this in
mind. Not yet.
Tonga’s own digital transformation
gives it credibility to make this case precisely because it
has not rushed. The Lagatoi Declaration, signed by Pacific
ICT ministers in Port Moresby in 2023, set out a shared
regional approach to digital transformation, infrastructure
and governance long before AI dominated the conversation.
Tonga’s participation reflected a broader regional
commitment: that a digitally connected Pacific should also
be a secure and collaboratively governed one, built on
shared standards rather than each nation solving the same
problems alone.
The architecture exists.
What is
now urgently needed is to deploy it. The
Great Divergence that AI risks creating is not a distant
concept. In March this year, Tonga hosted the Pacific launch
of the report of that name, examining how the rapid
acceleration of AI and digital technology is widening the
gap between economies that build these systems and economies
and societies that will simply live with the
consequences.
Yet AI is already delivering results
across the Pacific, from satellite and AI-enabled fisheries
monitoring in Kiribati, which has helped recover around US$2
million annually in illegal fishing fines, to AI-assisted
health diagnostics in countries including Nauru and Vanuatu.
Digital innovation is advancing in Palau too, alongside
partnerships with the European Union and UNCDF that are
expanding digital services and AI-enabled financial
inclusion across the region.
These are real wins, but
they are wins within a system the Pacific did not design.
The region already knows what it means to be on the wrong
side of a divergence, in climate, in trade, in debt
vulnerability. AI follows the same logic at greater speed.
The difference is that the rules of AI are still being
written, which means the divergence is not yet locked in.
That window will not stay open for long. The time for the
Pacific to shape the outcome is now, not once the frameworks
are agreed and the tools are already being
deployed.
The Pacific has spent decades demonstrating
what it means to decide collectively, account for future
generations, and treat traditional knowledge as sacred
rather than extractive. These are not liabilities in the age
of AI.
This is where a Pacific contribution can be
pitched, while also driving for fairness in AI access and a
gain in capabilities to even the odds in the AI race.
Pacific representation in the forums shaping AI’s future can
and must emphasise the distinction this region brings to
shape AI models and applications of the
future.
Kanni Wignaraja is UN Assistant
Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Asia and
the Pacific and Munkhtuya Altangerel is the Resident
Representative of UNDP’s Pacific Office in
Fiji.
