Underwriting and Substitution: Australian Peacebuilding in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, 1997–2021

Australia's two largest Melanesian engagements ended differently. This article compares the Bougainville peace process with the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) and distinguishes two modes of engagement. Underwriting funds settlements that domestic actors have negotiated, leaving authority in local hands; substitution places intervening personnel in the line functions of the state where no domestic bargain exists. In Bougainville, Australia underwrote an agreement it did not write, and the settlement survived withdrawal, delivered the 2019 referendum, and still runs through its own machinery. In Solomon Islands, substitution restored order and public finance, but by taking over the state's coercive and fiscal core while the questions behind the conflict went unresolved, it concentrated contestation in the arenas left in domestic hands: government formation, confrontation with the mission, and constituency funds. Each of the riots of 2006, 2019, and 2021 was a contest over the prime ministership. Building on the critical scholarship on RAMSI, the article argues that the mode of engagement, not the volume of resources, explains the divergence, and that the failure lay not in the emergency response of 2003 but in defining the mission's end as the transfer of programs rather than the existence of a bargain.