In July 2022, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) launched its 2050 Strategy for a Blue Pacific Continent setting out regional priorities and inviting development partners to engage with a Pacific vision for their future. In this context, Dr Mathew Doidge reflects on the development relationship of the European Union with the Pacific Island states, and the possibility for reframing that the Blue Pacific Strategy offers. The Pacific Island states have a long history of engagement with the European Union (EU), mostly focused on the issue of development assistance. European engagement with Pacific development began as early as the 1950s: the original Articles of Association of the founding Treaty of Rome, an important precursor to a formal EU development policy, incorporated the French Pacific territories including what is now Vanuatu. But the big bang, as far as EU– Pacific relations is concerned, was the accession of the United Kingdom in 1973. The reimagining of development policy that this entailed resulted in the establishment of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) grouping of states through the 1975 Lomé Convention, to which the Pacific states were progressively added over subsequent years. It is that EU– ACP structure that has largely inhered ever since.