Pragmatic innovations for parliaments in small island developing States

Parliaments in Pacific small island developing States face a unique set of circumstances, operating against a backdrop of geographical isolation and enormous distances. For these parliaments, it is often challenging to deploy and utilize IT solutions in order to provide the necessary parliamentary information services to MPs and the public.

In many cases, MPs are located across vast archipelagos where travel between the main and outer islands is often expensive. These parliaments also have less intensive parliamentary schedules, with plenary sessions happening only a few times a year. Their parliamentary administrations are small, ranging on average from 10 to 30 staff, and it is common for them to have a one-person ICT office – or to have no dedicated staff at all, with ICT support being provided by the government.

The CIP team has been closely observing digital transformation efforts in the region, through regular exchanges with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Pacific Office in Fiji. These observations – of practices in the parliaments of the Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (including the four state legislatures of Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei and Yap), Kiribati, Palau and Solomon Islands – reveal trends in terms of challenges and pragmatic innovations.

Management of (donor-funded) on-premise ICT infrastructure remains expensive and ends up being unsustainable: It is common to find ICT infrastructure – servers, network devices, etc. – from successive donor projects that is simply out of service. In some cases, parliamentary ICT staff are not sufficiently trained to maintain this equipment. In other cases, when key staff leave parliament for the private sector, these systems simply remain unmaintained. In addition, the parliaments are not sufficiently prepared to own and take over the maintenance of this infrastructure, including software-licence costs. As a result, there are risks to the sustainability of large investments. Lightweight solutions often make more sense.

Starlink has broadened access to the internet: The roll-out of Starlink has been a game-changer in the Pacific. The benefits of better internet are being felt right across the region, with parliaments – like many businesses – investing in their own Starlink equipment and subscribing to the service, the price of which compares favourably with local mobile network and internet service providers. For instance, the first organization to deploy Starlink in Kosrae (Federated States of Micronesia) was the state legislature, which bore the entire cost of the deployment and set an example for many others on the island. While making the most of the benefits of enhanced access, parliaments also need to manage the associated risks – including those stemming from reliance on a single provider, bandwidth management issues and the life cycle of satellite equipment – and have backup scenarios in place in case of need. 

Cloud-based solutions for document management are gaining traction: Better internet connectivity is making cloud-based services and solutions for document management more accessible to parliamentary administrations. By subscribing to online services for cloud storage, document management and circulation, parliaments are able to adopt a cloud strategy without the need for expensive and hard-to-maintain local infrastructure. Even in cases where the cost-benefit analysis reveals little difference between cloud and on-premise options, the former undoubtedly offer gains in terms of sustainability, security and data management. However, when adopting cloud services, parliaments need to build in resilience in case of issues with the provider or with internet access more generally. Contingency plans could, for example, include maintaining local copies of data hosted in the cloud, especially since latest-generation network attached storage solutions appear to be far more cost-effective and easier to maintain (even by non-ICT staff) than their predecessors. The eventual decision as to what to put in the cloud versus what to store on-premise must be guided by a clear parliamentary data policy and a strong understanding of data protection issues.

Video conferencing is becoming more embedded in parliaments’ daily work: The cost of travelling and meeting in person is high. Many parliaments that trialed videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic are now looking to further embed this technology in their daily work, especially for committees. Hybrid plenary meetings were also trialed during the pandemic, but this practice has not seen widespread, permanent adoption. However, the Parliament of the Cook Islands, with support from the UNDP Pacific Office in Fiji, has begun to revise its standing orders to allow for regular sessions to also be held in hybrid format. 

Citizen engagement requires content delivery across key social media channels: Pacific parliaments face challenges when it comes to communicating and engaging with citizens. National broadcast services and channels, both TV and radio, are still provided by governments, placing parliaments in a position of operational dependency. Yet there are positive signs of diversification, with many parliaments discovering the advantages of live-streaming plenary sessions on YouTube or Facebook – an approach that both automatically creates a video archive and makes it easier for members of the public to share content. However, internet access is still expensive for the average citizen, and older technologies such as radio still have a place. The House of Assembly of Kiribati, which faces the ongoing challenge of broadcasting proceedings via the national radio service, has expressed an interest in establishing a small parliamentary radio unit (inspired by the example of the National Assembly of Zambia, as discussed in Innovation Tracker Issue 2 ).

Inter-parliamentary knowledge exchange: In all the above, there is a clear need and interest expressed by the clerks and SGs and staff (both IT and non-IT e.g. library, parliamentary research, Hansard etc) to learn about how these similar challenges are dealt with in other parliaments in the Pacific. Inter-parliamentary knowledge exchange at these levels clearly makes sense, and CIP remains committed to working with the Pacific parliaments and partners like UNDP Fiji and others to enable these crucial exchanges.