ABSTRACT
The South Pacific Forum (SPF), an organization comprising fourteen Pacific Island countries plus Australia and New Zealand, has engaged in active regional cooperation for almost three decades. Indeed, the SPF has been quite highly regarded as a sub-regional organization of developing countries. Norman Palmer mentioned the SPF as one of ‘the three most important comprehensive subregional organizations in Asia and the Pacific’, along with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SARRC) (Palmer, 1991: 34). Similarly, William Tow considered the SPF to be a ‘relatively more successful’ sub-regional security organization, together with ASEAN, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Organization of East Caribbean States (OECS) and the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (at present the Southern African Development Community – SADC) (Tow, 1990: 8). Both considered the SPF to be a consistently functioning regional organization in international society.
