This article examines disaster risk governance for island case studies, focusing on Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS). SIDS examples are used to examine two main areas in line with this special issue's themes: power and knowledge in disaster risk governance. The interactions between those themes are explored for three SIDS governance scales: regional, national, and sub-national. Linking the theoretical discussion with empirical examples demonstrates how bypassing government can be suitable for disaster risk governance.

Superstorm Haiyan made a devastating landfall in the east-central Philippines on November 8, 2013, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction that draped the whole country in a pall of grief. The Philippines has since been reeling from this disaster. The typhoon buffeted the most vulnerable of Filipinos, 40% of whom live below the poverty line (i.e., $1.25 a day). Many of them fished for a living. Their livelihood compelled them to live dangerously close to the shoreline of western Pacific. The highest ground on which some of them found their perch was just one meter above sea level. When the storm swelled, with waves as high as six meters, its poor victims were defenseless. The crashing walls of water swept away all that they possessed. The cumulative losses in lives and livelihoods, homes and hearths, businesses and infrastructure have no parallel in recent Philippines history, just as Haiyan stands out in the annals of meteorology. Two years on, 13 million Filipinos, of whom 5 million are children, are still scarred by the destructive fury of Haiyan, while 600,000 remain homeless. The number of deaths from the superstorm surpassed 6,000.

“What if your community had to decide whether to leave its homeland forever?” The documentary film There Once Was an Island (http://www.thereoncewasanisland.com/): Te Henua e Nnoho (On the Level Productions 2010) asks this universal and archetypally complex question of its subjects and its audience. An all too real story about sustainable ecological heritage and cultural continuity is played out on a tiny Pacific atoll called Taku (pronounced Tau'u'u, also known as The Mortlocks). Residents of Taku live on a very small island located 250km northeast of Bougainville Island, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Filmmakers Briar March (director) and Lyn Collie (producer) follow the lives and decisionmaking processes of three people who have grown up on Taku and are struggling to reconcile themselves to the likelihood that their entire Polynesian community of 400 people will be forced to relocate to Melanesian Bougainville, the nearest seat of government. Satty, Endar, and Telo each take a different position on the joint problems of relocation and cultural preservation. The film highlights the interplay of post-colonial PNG politics and the expertise of scientist outsiders, showing how this dynamic influences these three individuals’ unique and occasionally conflicting perspectives.

In September 2015, several hundred mainly foreign academics and journalists received unsolicited copies of two poorly written books from Japan, accompanied by a signed letter from politician Inoguchi Kuniko. “In East Asia, the regional history of the 20th century has been incorrectly distorted (sic) by some individuals due to their current domestic political ambitions,” said the letter. “I believe it is important for you, as a highly esteemed member of the academic and policy circles (sic), to look into the books which I am enclosing with this letter.”