Explaining sender–receiver gaps in signalling: Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’ and Solomon Islands’ multi-alignment
| Published date | 01 February 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481241254712 |
| Author | Patrick Köllner |
| Date | 01 February 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481241254712
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2025, Vol. 27(1) 20 –42
© The Author(s) 2024
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sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13691481241254712
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Explaining sender–receiver gaps
in signalling: Australia’s ‘Pacific
Step-up’ and Solomon Islands’
multi-alignment
Patrick Köllner1,2
Abstract
Amid growing strategic competition, regional powers have intensified their engagement with
Pacific Island Countries. This article examines Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’, a signature foreign
policy initiative of the Scott Morrison government (2018–2022), from a signalling perspective.
Through the Step-up, Australia sought to affirm its resolve to be partner of choice for Pacific
Island Countries. This was not cheap talk but led Canberra to invest substantially in its ties with
the region. Despite this and significant prior Australian engagement leading to a bilateral security
pact, Solomon Islands’ government signed an additional security agreement with China in 2022.
How can we explain this sender–receiver gap? I argue that close attention to the agency of
domestic actors on the receiver side and the context in which such agency occurs – in this case,
an extended history of insecurity in the Pacific country – provides us with analytical leverage when
examining concrete instances of signalling.
Keywords
audience, Australia, foreign policy, Pacific Island Countries, Pacific Step-up, security, sender–
receiver gap, signalling, Solomon Islands
Introduction
In 2018, the government in Canberra launched a substantial policy response to what was
perceived to be a serious strategic challenge to Australia’s preeminent regional position;
namely, China’s growing influence in the Pacific Islands region (henceforth simply ‘the
Pacific’ or ‘the region’).1 In line with China’s global rise, the region has witnessed a sig-
nificant expansion of the country’s diplomatic and economic presence. The local effects
of stiffening strategic competition between China and the United States (plus the latter’s
allies and partners) have become ever more visible since the late 2010s. The region has
1GIGA Institute for Asian Studies, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany
2Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Corresponding author:
Patrick Köllner, GIGA Institute for Asian Studies, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA),
Rothenbaumchaussee 32, 20148 Hamburg, Germany.
Email: patrick.koellner@giga-hamburg.de
1254712BPI0010.1177/13691481241254712The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsKöllner
research-article2024
Special Issue Article
Köllner 21
effectively become a strategic arena, with Australia responding to China’s increased pres-
ence by ‘stepping up’ its ties with the Pacific. New Zealand followed suit with its own
‘reset’ of relations with the region. More recently, external powers – including the United
States itself – have also become very active again in this part of the Pacific (Köllner,
2022; Wallis et al., 2024; Zhang, 2020).
Pacific Island Countries (PICs) have welcomed the increased attention and resources
devoted to their region. Employing sometimes ‘very tactical, shrewd, and calculating
approaches’ (Ratuva, 2019b) to dealing with foreign powers, PICs have sought to use their
political agency to leverage strategic competition in order to pursue national policy goals,
to gain material benefits, and to elicit diplomatic concessions (Cavanough, 2023: 6; Wallis
et al., 2023b: 279–280). They have also sought to use such competition to commit external
powers to their collective ‘Blue Pacific’ vision and strategic narrative which emphasises
their collective stewardship of the Pacific Ocean (Wallis et al., 2023a).
Renewed strategic competition in the Pacific, and PICs’ efforts to deal with these
dynamics, are bound to increase the interest of International Relations (IR) scholars in
this vast and diverse world region. This leads to the question of how analytical tools from
the discipline and its subfields can help make sense of regional dynamics. The reverse
also applies: How does empirical evidence from the region speak to IR research agendas?
In line with this special issue’s focus on foreign policy signalling in the Indo-Pacific, I
analyse in this article Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’, a signature foreign policy initiative of
the Scott Morrison government (2018–2022), from a signalling perspective. With respect
to the sender side, I ask whether the Step-up constituted a signal to the region – and, if so,
what exactly that signal was. Turning to the receiver side, I sketch the responses of Pacific
leaders to the Step-up before addressing in more depth the case of Solomon Islands.
The latter is of particular interest to scholars and policymakers alike because geopoliti-
cal competition has intensified in the Solomons since the country switched diplomatic
recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019. As Solomon Islands’ scholar Transform
Aqorau (2023) notes, the country now ‘lies at the heart of geopolitical tensions between
the West and China [in the Pacific]. The nation provides a fertile ground for studying the
evolving challenges of a country navigating complex choices among varying develop-
ment partners’. Viewed through the lens of rationalist signalling theory, the case of
Solomon Islands is a puzzling one. Why would a ‘small power’ – a ‘microstate’ even in
terms of population size2 – not be wooed by the costly signalling of Australia, a ‘super-
power’ in the region (Wallis and Wesley, 2016: 26)? Why would it sign an additional
security pact with a power whose regional interests do not align with those of Australia?
Rationalist signalling theory itself is of limited use in solving this puzzle, I suggest,
because it gives short shrift to the agency of local actors on the receiver side and the con-
text in which such agency occurs. In the Solomon Islands case, the domestic situation –
including a long history of security challenges – helps to explain why its government, led
between 2019 and 2024 by Prime Minister (PM) Manasseh Sogavare, opted for an addi-
tional security ally rather than relying solely on Australia. The country’s response to the
Step-up underlines how domestic issues and considerations on the receiver side can dull
even costly signals; it also indicates the need to engage with agency and context on the
receiver side when examining concrete instances of foreign policy signalling.
The remainder of the article is structured as follows. In the next section, I delineate my
theoretical and methodological approach, focusing in theoretical terms on costly signal-
ling and sender–receiver gaps. The subsequent two sections are devoted to the empirical
analysis. First, I examine this foreign policy initiative from a signalling perspective. I
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