In May 2022, the Solomon Islands government signed a bilateral security agreement with China. The details of the agreement were not made public. A senior official, speaking candidly, described the negotiation process in terms that became the most-cited evidence in ISPI's democratic resilience research: the government did not have the institutional capacity to fully evaluate what it was signing.
Three years later, Chinese police are on their fifth rotation in Honiara — with 30 personnel deployed for the Solomon Islands' national elections in 2024. A letter from RSIPF officers published on social media claimed that Chinese police had been transferred from Kiribati and Vanuatu to bolster security for the elections without the knowledge of the Solomon Islands government. The potential for friction within the RSIPF between officers trained by Australian programs and officers trained by Chinese programs has become a documented institutional security challenge.
The international response to the Solomon Islands situation — from Australia, the United States, and the Pacific Islands Forum — has focused appropriately on the geopolitical implications. ISPI's research focuses on the institutional mechanism that made the situation possible: the governance capacity gap.
The capacity gap is the security vulnerability
A government of 650,000 people maintains a professional analytical workforce smaller than many U.S. county departments. The legal review, the strategic assessment, the technical evaluation of what a bilateral security agreement means in practice — these functions require specialized expertise that small island governments structurally cannot maintain in-house on a permanent basis.
This is not a Solomon Islands-specific failure. It is the structural condition of small island governance worldwide — and it is the mechanism through which any well-resourced external actor with a specific agenda can gain leverage over governments whose analytical capacity to evaluate complex proposals is constrained.
ISPI's Democratic Resilience and Governance Stability in Pacific Island Nations documents this mechanism in detail and identifies the specific capacity development investments that close the gap. The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat's 2025 Pacific Security Outlook identified institutional analytical capacity as the primary predictor of democratic governance resilience across Pacific Island nations — the same finding ISPI's research reaches from a practitioner-grounded evidence base.
Three years after Honiara, the Solomon Islands governance capacity gap that enabled the agreement has not been closed. The PIF Secretariat's engagement, the Pacific Policing Initiative, and bilateral U.S. and Australian security investments address the geopolitical competition dimension of Pacific island security. They do not address the institutional capacity dimension that ISPI's research documents as the foundational vulnerability. That gap is what ISPI's commission research is designed to close — one government, one policy brief, one assessment report at a time.
ISPI's regional page on Solomon Islands covers the full scope of applicable research. Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, Australian DFAT, and Solomon Islands government agencies are invited to contact ISPI at ISPIGlobal@proton.me.