Pala Molisa, from Wellington’s Victoria University, said the Pacific was becoming the new hunting ground for predatory countries wanting to invest.

He said the Kiribati government had a fine balancing act between trying to attract investors and ensuring sovereignty and good development.

He said consultation with local communities was key.

“If you look closely at a lot of these experiments too, they’ve often been ways of practising a kind of cultural imperialism that actually runs roughshod off the voices and concerns of communities especially at the lower grassroots level.”