ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the model has held and where its vulnerabilities now lie. It argues that the emergent structure did not have to be interpreted as an advocacy for sitting back and enjoying the subsidised life. Atiu is one of 15 islands in the tiny South Pacific country of the Cook Islands. The Cook Islands has in recent years become a major tourism destination, with tourist numbers reaching 145,000 in 2016 or roughly 35 per cent of the population on Rarotonga at any one time. Wind forward 30 years. Efforts in the late 1990s to revive development by refocusing on governance and building national elites as agents for performance had arguably yielded little more than a neo-liberal, neo-managerial apparatus for governance in places like the Cook Islands. Not all Rarotonga's contradictions, however, are quite so easily suspended in the deep ease that characterises public social life in the Cook Islands.