ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Meg Keen analyses the intersection between health, climate and human security cooperation within HADR, highlighting the interplay between security and development. Keen argues that platforms for coordinating HADR were largely missing in the region, as while emergency management, defence, police and environmental bodies inform and frame related issues, they are often siloed. Keen identifies lessons from the regional response to the COVID-19 pandemic for improving HADR integration, particularly through the model of the Pacific Humanitarian Pathway for COVID-19, which she argues exemplified a well-integrated regional response. Based on that example, Keen argues that future security cooperation should focus on ‘how we are bringing the hard and soft security sectors together and build capacity between the agencies themselves’, rather than on capacity-building individual sectors. In addition, Keen highlights that the travel restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic had meant Pacific states had to manage emergency situations without external partner assistance, which had created ‘transformation by necessity’, forcing localisation of HADR decision-making and implementation not through architecture but through ‘practice and power’.
