In November 2023, Australia and Tuvalu signed the Falepili Union treaty, a historic agreement that has been described as the first “climate migration” visa program. The agreement entitles up to 280 Tuvaluans per year to move to Australia to live, work, and study on an indefinite basis. The inaugural ballot for the Falepili Mobility Pathway visas opened on June16, 2025, and the first visa-holders will soon be selected at random from amongst the pool of applicants. Tuvalu—a network of low-lying reef and atoll islands in the Pacific with a population of only around 11,000 people—is one of the countries that is most vulnerable to climate impacts such as sea level rise, ocean acidification and storm surges. The visa program is designed to enable at least some of those on the frontlines to adapt to a changing climate—not by building sea walls, but by moving to safer (and higher) ground.
“Fale pili” is a concept in the Tuvaluan language that refers to “looking after one’s neighbor as if they were family”. But critics have argued that this ethic of neighborliness is not realized in the agreement. For one thing, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions record suggests that the agreement is best interpreted not as a selfless act of charity, but as a rather modest response to the environmental damage that Australia has itself wrought, and continues to wreak today. For another, the conditions of the agreement—Article 4 of which requires Tuvalu to “mutually agree with Australia any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other State or entity on security and defense-related matters”—raise concerns that the right to migrate has been secured only at the cost of significant constraints being imposed Tuvaluan sovereignty.
Rising sea levels present a potentially existential threat to Tuvalu, as well as to other small island states such as Vanuatu, Kiribati, and the Maldives. The inundation of these states is by no means a foregone conclusion: as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has argued, aggressive climate mitigation could significantly limit the impact of sea level rise in the Pacific. But given humanity’s track record in climate mitigation, there is a real possibility that these island states could become uninhabitable in the long term. The Falepili Union treaty creates one avenue for protecting the rights of individual Tuvaluans seeking safety. But it does little to address the threat that sea level rise presents to the collective rights of Tuvaluans—as a people—to govern their own affairs. Tuvaluans face the threat of “state extinction” due to sea level rise. How can their rights—both their individual rights to a safe and livable environment, and their collective rights to self-determination—be protected?
The predicament of small island states raises complicated philosophical and legal questions about the relationship between sovereignty, territory, and self-determination. The status quo in the international order is the norm of territorial sovereignty, according to which the right to self-determination is realized through the exercise of jurisdictional rights by legally sovereign states over defined geographical spaces. Some have argued that the territorial sovereignty of small island states could be protected by other states ceding part of their territory, so that states like Tuvalu could reconstitute themselves in new geographical spaces over which they would exercise jurisdictional rights. This would in some ways be the most straightforward way of enabling the continuing self-determination of small island peoples. But redistributing territory raises significant moral questions about the rights of incumbent residents, and the history of redrawing borders gives us reason to worry about whether suitable territory for small island peoples could be found without conflict or the domination of minority groups.
An alternative proposal aims to protect self-determination by “deterritorializing” sovereignty. On this model, small island peoples would elect a “government-in-exile” that could represent its people at the international level, provide goods such as healthcare and social insurance, and extract resource rents from its former territorial waters, even whilst its citizens were spread across other countries as a diaspora. On a stronger version of this model, the state could even exercise some degree of legal authority over its citizens through personal (rather than territorial) jurisdiction, where the government-in-exile’s laws would apply to its citizens wherever they are in the world (just as parents exercise authority over their children on the basis of who they are, not where they are). But this proposal also faces significant challenges. In its weaker form, it is doubtful whether the deterritorialized state could really enable self-determination in any meaningful sense. After all, its citizens would still be subject to the laws of the country in which they reside, and without effective legal authority this model looks more like a civic association than a form of self-rule. Tuvalu’s recent stunt of digitally recreating itself in the metaverse is a particularly striking illustration of the limits of this approach: although it may help to preserve cultural heritage and some sense of identity, it is clearly no substitute for effective powers of self-government. The stronger version of the deterritorialized state proposal fares better on this score, but it raises its own problems, such as how to manage the conflict of legal orders that arises when citizens of different states who reside in the same geographical space are each subject to their own state’s laws.
Between these two proposals lie myriad possible intermediate models of “nested autonomy”, in which small island states could enjoy powers of self-government whilst being (partially) incorporated into another state(s). Legal scholars have examined a variety of constitutional orders—minority and Indigenous rights treaties, self-governing territories and autonomous communities, and (quasi-)federal and power-sharing systems—which present a range of source materials that could be combined in novel ways to create tailor-made autonomy arrangements for small island peoples, if an agreement could be made for territory to be made available on such terms. There are a range of institutional models here, ranging from independent systems of “free association” along the lines of the Cook Islands and Niue vis-à-vis New Zealand, through the systems of “asymmetric federalism” that characterize the relationship between the Åland Islands and Finland or between Greenland and Denmark, all the way to federal systems where small island peoples would be constituent units of federations, akin to Hawai’i in the U.S. or Tasmania in Australia. The proposal for nested autonomy clearly involves a less extensive conception of sovereignty, but its advocates have argued that it can be a way of reconciling self-determination with the rights of incumbent residents, for example by building in constitutional provisions that guarantee their occupancy, property, and linguistic rights.
None of these proposals are ideal, and each of them comes with trade-offs and sacrifices. Lying behind them is the question of how we should understand the concept of self-determination. Is self-determination about legal and jurisdictional independence from others? Or about ensuring the continuity of a culture and a way of life? Or about governing oneself in relations of non-domination—though not necessarily independence—with others? When these dimensions of self-determination conflict, which of them should be prioritized?
Tuvaluans and other small island peoples who are negotiating these questions are themselves engaging in the practice of self-determination. If it is to mean anything, self-determination must include constitutive self-determination, where a community together decides its own fate. That fate will inevitably have to be negotiated with others, through agreements like the Falepili Union treaty. But in the future, such agreements will need to recognize the stakes of climate change for small island peoples—not only their individual rights to safety and dignity, but their collective rights as self-determining political communities.
Jamie Draper
Jamie Draper is an Assistant Professor in the Ethics Institute, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, at Utrecht University. His research is in political philosophy and focuses on issues in social, environmental, and global justice such as climate change, migration, and urban politics. He is the author of Climate Displacement (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of The Political Philosophy of Internal Displacement (Oxford University Press, 2024).
