Prime Minister Mark Brown has a favorite way of describing his country's footprint in the world. The Cook Islands' resident population today sits below 20,000 people, yet its global community now exceeds 120,000, spread mostly across New Zealand and Australia. "I see this as an expansion of the Cook Islands," he says, a diaspora that has become a bridge of talent, skills, and capital rather than a drain.
That optimism runs through everything as the nation celebrated 60 years of self-governance last year. Over six decades, the Cook Islands has transformed from an economy reliant on agricultural exports into a tourism-driven one, and recently graduated under OECD rankings to high-income status. The milestone is a source of pride, but it has also closed the door on many traditional forms of development aid. "We must now build partnerships with other countries based on mutual benefit," Brown explains, through trade, expanded tourism markets, and strategic collaboration.
His foremost priority is economic resilience: sustaining growth while strengthening the country's ability to absorb shocks like the COVID-19 crisis that froze global travel in 2020. Just as important, he says, is preserving identity, "our own territory, our own ocean space, and a culture that remains central to who we are." Infrastructure is the persistent challenge. Spreading energy, transport, and connectivity across scattered islands carries disproportionately high costs for a small population, which the government is meeting through a mix of domestic financing, climate funds, and private investment.
Connecting those islands falls largely to two gateways. The Cook Islands Ports Authority handles roughly 97% of imports and is widening and deepening the wharf channel at Aitutaki, while studying a costly fix for Rarotonga's narrow harbor entrance. The airport, meanwhile, is "the front door to the country," in the words of Airport Authority chairman Edward Herman, now slated for terminal expansion and safety upgrades to handle larger, more frequent jets. Both gateways face the same squeeze of high capital costs, shrinking donor funding, and rising seas, and both share an ambition that resonates with this readership: re-establishing a direct air link to Los Angeles.
Brown is firm that the Pacific should not be seen as an arena of geopolitical rivalry. "We do not see the Pacific as a region of competition," he says. "We see it as a region of collaboration and cooperation." What matters, in his view, is that relationships with partners, New Zealand, the United States, Australia, and neighboring island states, align with the country's own development goals.
Diversification beyond tourism is well underway. Financial services, a sector the Cook Islands pioneered in the 1980s, today markets itself as a well-regulated, compliant home for legitimate wealth planning; its flagship asset-protection trust is widely regarded as among the strongest in the world. Fisheries, managed through a regional framework, have grown more sustainable and more lucrative over the past 15 years. And the country is carefully studying the critical minerals locked in its seabed nodules, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and rare earths essential to the global energy transition. There, the watchword is caution: regulators stress that no decision to mine has been made, that the work remains strictly in an exploration and science phase, and that any potential footprint would be tiny relative to the nation's roughly 772,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) of ocean.
That ocean is the heart of the story. Through the Marae Moana Act of 2017, the Cook Islands designated its entire exclusive economic zone a marine-managed area, banning commercial longline fishing and mineral activity within 50 nautical miles of every island. "Leadership is fundamentally about stewardship," Brown says, describing it as a modern expression of the conservation practices his ancestors used on land and in the lagoons.
Climate change sharpens every decision. On mitigation, renewable energy now anchors the country's strategy, with solar grids long established on outer islands and Rarotonga and Aitutaki transitioning now. On adaptation, seawalls, cyclone shelters, and emergency financing, the country has often had to pay its own way. Brown cites the World Bank's finding that every dollar spent on resilience saves eight in recovery.
As a member of the Pacific Islands Forum, the Cook Islands has taken on a louder voice at the United Nations and beyond. With the United States, Brown wants stronger air links to the mainland and deeper cooperation in scientific and deep-sea research.
His closing message to readers is an invitation. "The entire island becomes your destination, not just the resort where you stay," he says. Visitors, he notes, return again and again for the lagoons, the cleanliness, and above all the people, "warm, welcoming, and deeply connected to their culture." Come to Rarotonga, come to Aitutaki, and see for yourselves.
.png)
