Global Democracy as Talanoa: A Pacific Perspective

Sitiveni Halapua and Peau Halapua

East-West Center, Honolulu

Talanoa is a cross-cultural process of storytelling derived from Pacific islands traditions. It emphasises the need to tell stories without concealment of what is, and what is not, important. Talanoa is a way to speak, hear, learn and build inter-subjective understandings. As such, it offers a method of working through conflict in different situations. Indeed, talanoa has figured centrally in our own engagement with political instabilities in Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Tonga.

Drawing on these experiences, we reflect on the implications of talanoa for ways of understanding global democracy. First we explore how the concept and method of talanoa constructs outside/inside boundaries of social identity to realise a distinction between people who are affected by rule-makers and ‘the people’ for whom rule-makers are specifically responsible. The emphasis is on the commitments and needs of affected people who see themselves outside the boundaries within which rule-makers and ‘the people’ develop and implement policies on the basis of certain rules. We then consider the inter-subjective understandings of rule and accountability that have emerged from our work with this storytelling process. Then we assess how talanoa can measure accountability and contribute to building peaceful and stable relations within the moral space of global issues.

Regarding the concept and method, talanoa combines two Austronesian terms. Tala signifies the point, or message, of a story. Noa signifies the responsibility and capability of participants in storytelling to detach their perceptions, thoughts and feelings from prior commitments. A situation of noa enables listening to, and learning from, the tala without the burden of a predetermined agenda. Only after that listening and learning do the parties reattach to their respective commitments and inter-subjectively come more deeply to understand one another’s values. The process of talanoa thereby provides a way for people to communicate their experience of policy effects to rule-makers in a global context.

People participate in talanoa by authoring their own stories. These stories disclose their evaluation of the power that affects their lives. In our experience of talanoa, people disclose the effects of power (i.e. the exercise of the right to make and implement rules) largely based on their and other’s experience of pleasure or pain. For all its intangibility, their experience of pleasure or pain tells us more about their view of power than any material product produced by that power. People talk of the names, institutions and places responsible for rules, the nature of those rules, and the effects that extend beyond the boundaries that rule-makers take into account. Rules that accommodate the commitments of a people are evaluated positively, while rules that suppress those commitments are evaluated negatively. Peace, or conflict, generally relate to support for, or opposition to, rules and places of power. It is therefore important in creating conditions for global stability (or ending instability) that there is a way, embodied by talanoa, to speak, hear, learn and build inter-subjective understandings about the global effects of rules.

Talanoa has been particularly invoked around experiences with the global effects of policy in the Pacific. People have with their storytelling evaluated the rule-makers they hold accountable for past, present, and future (possible) effects on their island societies. They have talked of how policy implemented on behalf of ‘the people’ affects people beyond rule-makers’ specific bounds of responsibility. These talanoa processes have in turn generated inter-subjective understandings about whether to maintain or change the rules, including the construction of new kinds of democracy.

Although talanoa is a practice of the Pacific, it arguably offers inspirations for building new understandings and positive practices of global democracy. In a global context, the situation of noa would enable storytellers of different cultures to listen and learn what their respective tala reveal. They could then use this inter-subjective understanding to arrive at positive or negative evaluations of existing conduct and arrangements of global power based on the pleasure or pain that they generate. On this basis, accountability could be cross-culturally evaluated and measured with some degree of clarity, and rule-makers could know whether to maintain or change the rules that affect people globally.

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