[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies. Views expressed do not reflect the position of the editorial board.]

Introduction

Over the past decade, a growing number of small island states have strategically mobilised narratives emphasising oceanic scale, stewardship and leadership in specific diplomatic and policy venues. Often articulated through framings such as Big or Large Ocean States, these narratives draw on the expansive maritime jurisdictions enabled under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and long-standing debates about size, vulnerability and authority in the international political economy of small states, and have been deployed most visibly in climate, ocean and development fora, including within Commonwealth spaces (Baldacchino, Citation2022; Sutton, Citation2011). This mode of claim-making builds on an established tradition in which small states have leveraged vulnerability as moral authority within multilateral politics, particularly in climate governance (Benwell, Citation2011; Ramphal, Citation1984). They are typically advanced as corrective, seeking to move beyond portrayals that foreground smallness, fragility or dependence, and instead to reclaim agency by emphasising sovereignty, custodianship and leadership over vast ocean territories (Hume et al., Citation2021). These framings are frequently celebrated as unambiguous gains – evidence of agency reclaimed and political authority expanded. In this sense, these framings should be understood less as identity shifts and more as strategic interventions in how small states are positioned within existing classificatory and institutional arrangements aimed at expanding the repertoire of claims available to them within international governance (Baldacchino, Citation2012).

This pattern of strategic deployment warrants careful attention – not because such reframing is inherently misguided, but because reframing is never politically neutral. Read against the political history of small island developing states (SIDS), in particular, narratives of leadership and competence can do more than reshape perception. They can quietly recalibrate expectations of responsibility. In international politics, categories do not simply describe reality. They organise authority, obligation and expectation, often through deliberately imprecise and negotiated definitions (Sutton, Citation2011). As earlier climate negotiations demonstrated, small states’ moral authority derived not only from leadership claims but also from their continued positioning as disproportionately exposed and least responsible (Benwell, Citation2011). For SIDS, whose access to finance, institutional standing and political leverage is mediated through classificatory status, changes in language can recalibrate responsibility even where formal definitions remain unresolved or intentionally ambiguous (Robinson & Dornan, Citation2017; Sutton, Citation2011). Where leadership framings begin, in practice, to substitute for vulnerability claims rather than complement them, they risk relocating obligation onto island states without a corresponding redistribution of resources. How states are framed influences how claims are interpreted, how obligations are distributed and how support is justified across governance arenas.

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The SIDS category did not emerge as a descriptive convenience but as a political settlement forged through sustained diplomatic effort aimed at securing recognition, obligation and differential treatment within international regimes (Robinson, Citation2020). As Benwell’s (Citation2011) analysis of climate negotiations makes clear, the effectiveness of small states’ leadership depended on maintaining this settlement, not transcending it. Its lack of formal criteria and its internal heterogeneity were not accidental features but politically expedient ones, enabling flexibility, coalition-building and repeated claim-making across issue areas (Robinson, Citation2020; Sutton, Citation2011). Within this settlement, vulnerability functioned not simply as a diagnosis of exposure to risk, but as a negotiating instrument, anchoring demands for concessional finance, special case recognition and shared responsibility for harms overwhelmingly generated elsewhere (Robinson et al., Citation2023).

It is against this political history of deliberate classificatory flexibility that contemporary reframing efforts must be understood. The selective mobilisation of alternative narratives of scale, stewardship and leadership does not occur in a political vacuum. Rather, it intersects with an existing infrastructure of negotiated ambiguity that continues to structure access to resources, authority and responsibility. Where earlier leadership strategies operated alongside explicit vulnerability claims, newer framings increasingly risk being read as substitutes rather than complements (Hume et al., Citation2021; Ramphal, Citation1984; Sanders, Citation1997). This shift sharpens a long-standing tension in the small states literature between the political utility of classificatory imprecision and institutional pressures to harden categories into benchmarks of capacity and responsibility (Baldacchino, Citation2022; Sutton, Citation2011). It is within this wider context that the implications of contemporary reframing merit closer scrutiny.

Stacy-ann Robinson, Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.