The Department of Pacific Affairs (DPA) is leading a project which will observe the Solomon Islands General Elections, which will take place on 3 April 2019.

The project will support the integrity of elections in Solomon Islands and provide significant and robust data on elections and political participation that will benefit policy makers and the scholarly community. The project will be the second of its kind led by DPA in Solomon Islands, and the sixth of its kind in the Pacific region. For the 2014 General Elections in Solomon Islands, DPA implemented a large-scale observation across 12 constituencies. In 2019 we propose to cover up to 16 constituencies, spread across the country to ensure our findings can be considered nationally representative.

DPA Distinguished Fellow James Batley will lead the project, while constituency observation teams will be led by a Solomon Islander academic/researcher. Each observation team will also include an ANU researcher, and up to four Solomon Islands participants as observers recruited from civil society and the tertiary sector.

The project will:

• generate quantitative and qualitative data that might be utilised to strengthen the Solomon Islands Electoral Commission’s capacity to manage elections, particularly around voter registration and electoral roll improvement, electoral management, election logistics and coordination.
• generate quantitative and qualitative data that might be utilised to inform future country situational and political economy analysis, by providing insights into civic awareness, political participation including the participation of women in elections, money politics, changing political culture and local level development issues.
• build local capacity to observe, research and monitor elections, and
• lend credibility to the electoral process, through involvement of civil society and academia, and provide international actors with a detailed evidence-based assessment of the credibility of elections, challenges to electoral credibility and recommendations to improve the electoral process.