Rethinking Education System Resilience Through Pacific Worldviews

What does it mean for an education system to be resilient?

For those working within Western frameworks, resilience is often understood as a system’s capacity to absorb shock and return to a previous state, a technical process of bouncing back from disruption.  

Yet when a cyclone tears through a school's roof in Tonga, floodwaters cut off a village in Papua New Guinea (PNG), an earthquake disrupts classrooms in the Solomon Islands, or a drought affects drinking water supplies in schools in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), resilience manifests itself in a deeper way.

In Pacific communities, resilience has long been understood in a far richer, more layered way, one deeply rooted in identity, relationships and beliefs about what holds the world together. Early evidence from research conducted by the Pacific Community (SPC), in partnership with the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER), under the GPE KIX Observatory on Education System Resilience, confirms this distinction.  Conducted across four Pacific nations, Federated States of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tonga, the research found that resilience is best understood as the capacity of a system to continue functioning in the face of disruption – not as “bouncing back” but as sustaining continuity across generations. What stood out was the rich nuances beneath the concept of resilience. Across all four countries, resilience was described not as a single trait or technical capacity, but as a dynamic interplay between relationality, system structures and human capabilities, which reflects enduring principles found throughout Pacific Indigenous thought. 

At the core of this understanding is relationality. According to the insights surfaced, relationality reflects the relationships between students, parents, teachers, communities, schools, churches, education ministries, donors and development partners. This is best demonstrated by the reflections of a school leader from the Solomon Islands who described a resilient education system as “a system that involved all stakeholders and where the support within the education system is deeply rooted in the way the stakeholders approach education.” What they were pointing to is not a stakeholder mapping exercise. It reflects something more foundational: a relational perspective in which the individual, the family, the community, the land, and the spirit world are not separate spheres but dimensions of a single, interconnected whole.  

Pacific worldviews are, at their core, holistic and relational. For instance, a focused review of 86 Pacific texts identified five recurring principles underpinning Pacific worldviews: holistic systems, the collective family, spirituality, connection to the natural world and the relational theory of space and time embodied in the Samoan and Tongan concept of te vā (Teariki and Leau, 2023). None of these principles stands alone; each exists in purposeful, interdependent relationship with the others. 

Te vā, in particular, offers a powerful contrast to Western understandings of resilience. As the scholar Maualaivao Albert Wendt (1996) describes it, va is “the space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All.” It is not empty space, but relational space: the living, dynamic web connecting students, teachers, families, communities, churches, schools, education ministries, and development partners. When participants across the four countries emphasised relationships as the bedrock of resilient education, they were expressing a worldview in which all things, living and non-living, are bound together across time and space, and in which the quality of those bonds determines the health of the whole.  

Yet, emerging evidence from the field reveals growing tensions within this relational fabric. In the Solomon Islands, participants noted that the issue of drugs in the community had led to a school putting together mechanisms to support affected children. As one teacher explained: “We need to solve [the issue] of drugs ... I mean most children just attend [classes 1 to 6 and then] they leave [school] to join the group [of children using drugs].” In this situation, the positive environment the school aims to create to support learners is being affected by practices in the community, reflecting a widening disconnect between schools and their surrounding communities. This is not a rejection of relationality, but rather its erosion. As community ties weaken, schools are compelled to internalise resilience, shifting from a collective, relational model to a more bounded, institution-driven response. In doing so, the very essence of te vā is strained. This reveals that resilience in Pacific contexts depends not merely on the presence of systems or resources, but on the strength and continuity of the relationships that sustain them.  

This relational understanding is given concrete form in Pacific Indigenous concepts of belonging and place. Kāinga, the Polynesian concept of family, kin group and home community, expresses the idea that identity is never purely individual: it is always constituted through one's relationships with people, land, and ancestors. Similarly, vanua in Fijian thought refers not simply to land in a geographic sense, but to the living totality of people, culture, spiritual connections and environment as an inseparable whole. Tuwere (2002) describes vanua as encompassing “the interconnectedness of people to their land, environment, cultures, relationships, spirit world, beliefs, knowledge systems, values and God.” In this framing, a resilient education system is one that is relationally embedded in its vanua: a system that belongs to a people and a place, rather than being imposed upon them. Pacific kinship networks, such as the wantok systems of Melanesia, reinforce these bonds further, functioning as active social protection mechanisms that sustain communities through disruption across generations (Ratuva, 2014). 

Alongside holistic systems and the collective family, spirituality stands as a third, indispensable pillar of Pacific resilience. This is not simply a reference to church attendance, though Christianity does play a significant role across the Pacific. Rather, spirituality in the Pacific sense encompasses deep ancestral connections, sacred relationships with land and the natural world and a cosmological worldview in which all of life is interwoven. Spirituality, in this sense, is described in the literature as “the essence of Pacific people's existence,” shaping how people live their lives, express themselves and view the world (Teariki and Leau, 2023).  

Early evidence from this study points to the embeddedness of church institutions within community life and their influence on education systems. As one participant from Papua New Guinea observed, “Most of the disruptions come from community activities. We have three main churches here: United Church, United Reformed Church and Seventh Day Adventist. They have their own programmes like camps, youth weeks or children's ministry weeks. These are week-long programmes, often at night, so children attend and come to school tired the next day.” This account illustrates the extent to which church structures are interwoven into the rhythms of everyday life, shaping students’ participation in schooling and demonstrating that education systems do not operate independently of these community institutions. At the same time, the study participants emphasised that “deeply held customs and spiritual beliefs must be respected. You cannot simply impose a solution; you must be led by the local landowners,” suggesting that authority, decision-making and system functioning are grounded in culturally and spiritually embedded relationships. 

Within this relational and spiritual ecosystem, teachers were consistently described as the backbone of resilient education systems. Across all four countries, their capacity to improvise with limited materials, to teach in challenging conditions, to adapt instructional practices and to support student well-being was widely recognised as central to system continuity. For example, one participant from the Solomon Islands noted: “Despite the lack of basic resources, limited professional development opportunities and support from the ministry, it is ultimately the teachers who ensure that learning continues to take place.” Another participant from FSM reflected: “When I don't have school materials, I try to use local materials; whatever I have to accommodate the lessons.”  

Viewed through a Pacific lens, this is unsurprising. Teacher resilience in the Pacific is not simply a professional competency; it is deeply embedded within adaptive practices shaped by local contexts. Teachers who know their communities, who speak local languages and who understand the spiritual and relational fabric of the places where they teach bring a form of adaptive capacity that no external training programme can fully replicate. Developing these teachers requires investing not only in technical skills, but in the relational and cultural conditions that allow those skills to flourish. 

What our early findings suggest is that education resilience in the Pacific cannot be fully understood or supported through frameworks developed elsewhere and applied from above. Pacific communities are not simply vulnerable recipients of international resilience programming. They are the carriers of knowledge systems, relational practices and spiritual traditions that have sustained human life in some of the world's most geographically challenging environments for well over a millennium. As Indigenous Pacific scholars have argued for decades, mainstream resilience concepts “rarely question” their own Western foundations, and when they are applied uncritically to Pacific communities, they risk being “unquestioningly accepted, reframed for, yet not by, indigenous peoples” (Usher et al., 2021).  

The richer path is to start from within and centre Pacific understandings of relationality, spirituality, collective identity and cultural knowledge as the primary resources for building resilient education systems. By this, we do not mean ignoring the value of formal policy frameworks, disaster preparedness plans or development partnerships. System structures matter deeply, as participants in the research confirmed. Yet, those structures are only as resilient as the relational web that holds them in place, and that web is woven from threads that are distinctly, irreducibly Pacific.  

Resilience, in this sense, is not about bouncing back. It is about holding together: the relationships between people, generations, communities and their land and oceans, between the living and the ancestors who came before. It is, as one Pacific scholar puts it, about “cherishing and nurturing the va.” That is as good a definition of resilience as any this research has encountered.