ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature on island governance, highlights weaknesses in substance and methodology, addresses the nature of islandness, and argues for an ecological framework for understanding the subject. It proposes seven patterns of island governance that have developed ecologically out of the confluence of geography and history, and outlines the characteristic elements of governance in each. Commentaries about the human ecology of islands single out the insularity of island communities. Island communities are commonly presented as being inherently democratic, though politics is just as often excoriated for traditionalism, parochialism and autocratic tendencies. Options for governance and development depend crucially upon the character and proximity of the neighbourhoods in which islands find themselves. For European islands, their neighbourhood, quite unlike other geopolitical spaces, has since the Second World War proven to be especially benign. An island civilisation's comparative security seems to favour constitutional stability. The island civilisation projects a well-rounded, vigorous sense of nationhood.
