Every five years the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre's Global Strategic trends programme of research seeks to provide policy-makers with a context for long-term decision-making. The Oceania report describes a strategic context for defence and security looking out to the middle of the century, taking a comprehensive view of the future. Centre Director, Professor Karen Hussey and her colleagues set out to identify the key macro-level trends that are emerging in the Oceania region. They provided preliminary analysis of the likely strategic effects of those trends for the coming thirty years and identifyied key stakeholders in the regions that are ‘at the fore’ in driving the trends identified.
Through a review of literature and data produced between 2010 and 2016, the team adopted an analytical framework that identified the drivers, trends and knock-on consequences of a list of topics identified in the research brief such as infrastructure, planning, and education. A stakeholder workshop was convened with key experts and stakeholders in the later stages of the project to ‘ground truth’ the report’s findings and to identify lines of further enquiry.