This timely and ambitious volume-a product of close research collaboration with the United Nations Multi-Country Office for Micronesia-is conceived as a holistic "journey" across various domains of progress in a region that, despite fundamental common traits, remains vast and diverse. Pacific island countries and territories (PICTs) have (too) often been identified with elements of vulnerability, whether these be social, economic, or environmental in nature. While these factors cannot be overlooked, this volume aims to showcase not only the long-standing and emerging challenges but, perhaps more importantly, the opportunities, the resilience, the resourcefulness, and the ambition that local socioeconomic development patterns in the Pacific already encompass. Beyond PICTs themselves, we hope that the analyses collected in this book will contribute to highlighting the global significance of the human-nature nexus in the current Anthropocene. Often captured in the concept of "small islands, big oceans", the importance of the region and its islands and peoples transcends the geographical remoteness and small size of many PICTs.
