European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Land, resources and state formation

Coordinator(s)

Colin Filer

Session presentation

Control over land and natural resources looms large in the political economies of contemporary Melanesia. These struggles for control play out at multiple scales, in myriad institutional spaces, and involve diverse sets of actors. They are shaped by institutional and regulatory arrangements and by what Filer has described as the ‘ideology of landownership’. The results of these struggles often have salient gender, inter-generational, and ethnic dimensions.

Struggles over land and the benefits that flow from so-called “resource development” are reorganizing political space and reshaping institutions in profound ways. In this sense, they are central to the on-going processes of state formation in region. This session will explore the interactions between land, resource development and state formation in contemporary Melanesia.

Potential topics will include the political economy of “land grabs” in Vanuatu and PNG; the implications of the shift from logging to mining in Solomon Islands; the proposal to reopen the Panguna mine on Bougainville; and the relationships between gender, land, natural resources and state formation.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

The Road to Hell Is Paved with Incorporated Land Groups

Colin Filer (Australian National University)

Over a 20-year period between 1992 and 2011, about 13,700 land groups were formally incorporated under the terms of PNG’s Land Groups Incorporation Act 1974. The initial wave of incorporation in the 1990s was encouraged by policy innovations in the forestry and petroleum sectors of the national economy, but in some parts of the country, the practice of incorporation then came to be seen as a precondition, rather than a consequence, of any realistic prospect of ‘development’. The cult of land group incorporation, as a concrete expression of what I have elsewhere called the ‘ideology of landownership’, then gave rise to a paradoxical process in which customary landowners were expropriated without being compensated for the ‘development’ which the cult was meant to produce. This paper will document the spatial and temporal dimensions of this ‘double movement’ of incorporation and expropriation. It will then consider the effects of legislation that became effective at the beginning of 2012, which makes it possible for incorporated land groups to create collective freehold titles over all or part of their own customary land if they are able to produce additional evidence of their authenticity to a national government agency whose own corruption and incompetence appears to be proof against all attempts to reform it. Needless to say, the net result is a horrible mess.

Custom against Custom in East New Britain

Keir Martin (University of Oslo)

The forced displacement of people following the Rabaul eruption of 1994 was taken by some as the chance to promote individual land tenure. Custom (Tok Pisin: kastom) is often presented as an impediment to economic growth by state officials in favour of this change, yet in practice their attitude towards custom in more contradictory. They often blame relocated villagers for failing to maintain resources that state agencies have provided them and explain this failure to be the result of the villagers’ abandonment of custom. Rather than the problem from the bureaucrats’ perspective being the persistence of custom, it is instead a problem of their inability to manage the contexts in which relations that are considered to be imbued with customary obligations are either acknowledged or disavowed.

Enacting the absent state: state formation on the oil-palm frontier of Pomio, East New Britain

Tuomas Tammisto (University of Helsinki)

In 2008, a Malaysian company established a large oil-palm plantation in Wide Bay, located in the rural Pomio district of East New Britain. In Pomio, the state and state services are peripheral and the plantation is a part of a plan to develop the economy and infrastructure of the area. For the rural population, the plantation is not only a site of earning meager salaries and using money, but of controlled labor and regimented life. The plantation is an enclave of services, like schools and aid-posts, and governance with its police and elected representatives, provided and funded by the company.

In this paper I analyze the plantation as a part of state formation where private companies provide services and governance previously associated with the state. In the case of the Wide Bay plantation this is a result of two seemingly contradictory tendencies. On the one hand it is a top-down process in which the company assumes state-like powers – resembling the early colonial era when trading companies administered the colonies and established plantations for export crops. Despite growing new crops, the companies reproduce old labor regimes as well as colonial ways of governance. On the other hand, the rural workers have contributed to the organization of the plantation in an attempt to emulate the state. By creating certain modes of state order in a situation where the state is absent, the rural workers show not so much a willingness to subject to the state, but what they expect from it. On the surface these tendencies seem to contribute to company governance, but the claims made by the rural population can also challenge company interests.

How the Meto belong and why it should matter: ‘development’, destruction and the invisibility of the local in Timor-Leste’s new special economic zone.

Michael Rose (Australian National University)

Oecussi is a small coastal exclave of Timor-Leste surrounded by Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggara province. Isolated from Dili by distance and the linguistic and cultural distinctiveness of its Meto speaking population, after more than a decade of independence many there still struggle to access education, health care, serviceable roads, fresh water and adequate nutrition. In mid-2014 the national government announced the creation of a special economic zone intended to transform the district into an industrial and tourist hub. This paper looks at how the project as been experienced in Mahata, a seaside village where the narrow road through the community will be widened into a major transport route. Inspired by Heat-Moon’s concept of ‘deep mapping’ as way of writing the land that engages time, memory and lived experience, I make a case study of the Ena family, one of many in the area who will see part of their family smallholding (seimu) acquired and the buildings, gardens and trees within destroyed. Attached to their land (naijan) through localized systems of belief and belonging rather than state authorised cadastral, ‘development’ or fiscal perspectives, the Ena find themselves uncertain of their rights regarding compensation and the nature of their future tenure. Drawing on James Scott and Arturo Escobar I explore how, in Oecussi, Meto ways of being on and of the land have become ‘illegible’, or simply irrelevant, in the face of the state’s drive to ‘develop’ Oecussi as a place that is attractive for foreign investors.

Land use dynamics and environmentally-induced migration as driver of change: Analysis of patterns and opportunities for the Pacific region

Dalila Gharbaoui (Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM), University of Liege)

Eric Vaz (Ryerson University)

Land Management is crucial to resettlement planning in the context of climate change. The adverse effect of sea-level rise on Small Islands States in the coming decades is alerting us that planning ahead issues around land is particularly challenging. Developing innovative approaches in order to address those future challenges is crucial. Is land use change a key driver for environmentally-induced relocation in the Pacific region? What is the impact of environmentally-driven Islands relocation patterns on land use dynamics? Firstly, through the study of land use change dynamics using landscape fragmentation metrics in New-Caledonia, Papua-New-Guinea and Fiji, this paper intends to assess potential co-relation between land use change and environmentally-induced island relocation patterns. Secondly, the study attempts to demonstrate the role that
customary land tenure has had on this process to finally draw conclusions on the opportunities for future planning and decision-making related to land use and relocation in the context of climate change in the Pacific region.

Strategies for participation of indigenous communities in mining industries

Matthias Kowasch (University College of Teacher Education Styria)

Across the globe, large scale commercial mining seems to offer little local economic benefit, when it takes place in regions far from centres of political power where indigenous populations are numerous. Their claims on mining companies are often unmet, and their participation in the industry, despite recent efforts in Australia and elsewhere, is low or biased towards less lucrative occupations. The extraordinary irony of “poverty in the midst of plenty” is described by several authors (for example Bebbington et al 2009, Auty 1993). Regardless of the numerous negative features deriving from mining projects, including long term environmental damage, we ask what strategies can permit local people to benefit from mineral extraction on their territories?
We present four different strategies in which indigenous local communities commonly pursue, or could pursue, relationships with mining projects and their owners. These are refusal (aiming to halt mining operations); benefit-sharing (negotiating a share of revenues, or compensation payments); direct participation through labour and subcontracting; and indigenous mine ownership. We will illustrate these strategies from fieldwork in New Caledonia, and comparative review of other cases. In particular, the Koniambo project in northern Grande Terre is often cited as an example of a “participation strategy”, or “ownership strategy”, but it is also enmeshed in a geopolitical struggle. We focus on whether “ownership” through indigenous majority control, still an extremely rare thing, can provide more than revenue, but also a level of economic and political independence lacking in the other strategies.

Governmentality, politics, and mining compensation in New Caledonia

Pierre-Yves Le Meur (IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement)

Claire Levacher (EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

Governmentality is about measuring, controlling, governing populations through various instruments and apparatuses; it is also a way of problematizing a field of action as a public issue of government. Politics is about recognition and the right to speak and participate; it is a matter of citizenship and constitutes in that respect a limit to governmentality. Against this background, the notion of compensation has recently entered the mining policy debate in New Caledonia. Compensation has been long discussed in the field of Melanesianist social anthropology. More specifically it has become a policy tool belonging to the broader issue encompassing the environmental and social impacts of mining. In New Caledonia, it has gone by different channels, illustrating disconnections between how public institutions, mining companies and local populations deal with its conception, qualification and measurement. The will to normalize mining compensation falls within new regulations as regards mining and environment through different processes: among others, an agreement between the South Province and Vale; and a group launched by public administrations working on a doctrine of ecological compensation. Parallel to these trends, other companies develop compensation strategies abiding with global standards whereas local populations craft a hybrid view of compensation mobilizing different local and global registers (indigenous rights, environment, sustainable development but also local taxation) and thus highlighting the social dimension of compensation. If the latter seems to be absent of the framework developed by state institutions, the South Province approach of compensation highlights its reflexive adaptation to a “risk society”. Finally, the disconnections of compensation strategies in terms of actors, institutions, procedures, localization and conception of nature, reflects the tension between politics and governmentality – negotiation and measurement – constitutive of policy and state-making processes.