As has been argued thus far, entanglements of customary and modern forms of relationship to land are destabilising structures of power, in ways that leave open multiple possibilities existing for their reconfiguration. In the previous chapter, I pointed particularly to the possibilities for creative agency, and for the reassertion of customary autonomy by the Rai Coast communities negotiating the extension of modern political authority over their land.
However it is also the argument of this thesis that recognition of the agentive and creative potential of entanglements must go hand in hand with recognition of the structures of power and inequality that permeate them. A desire, and even a political impetus, to find spaces of liberatory potential within the contested landscapes of Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste should not obscure the fact that the experience of destabilisation can also be deeply fraught.
Indeed, if entanglements give rise to possibilities for reasserting customary autonomy, such outcomes must be recognised as counter-hegemonic; possibilities carved out against the grain.
If there is a dominant tendency emerging out of the destabilisation of structures of power, it is to the diminishing of local autonomy. It was this dynamic to which our attention was drawn in the ultimate loss in the Supreme Court of the legal challenge to the dumping of mine waste in the Basamuk sea.
In this chapter, I focus on the transformation of people’s connection to land through the extension of relations of property and land ownership. Particularly, I examine the effects and implications of processes of codification and state recognition through which customary communities become landowners. The ethnographic data upon which the chapter draws comes from communities in Madang Province, PNG, who are negotiating the presence of industrial tuna fishing and processing activities on their lands and waters. In Rempi, one of the
communities whose customary land forms part of the site of a new Pacific Marine Industrial Zone development—a 216 hectare ‘Special Economic Zone’ intended to house wharfing, berthing and tuna canning facilities—members of the Bomase clan experience exclusion and disempowerment because they are not formally recognised as landowners. The clan are struggling with what might be required of them to secure such recognition, including the public release of sacred—tambu—stories. Twenty kilometres down the road, in the Nobnob and Siar areas, local communities are negotiating complex and sometimes fractious social relations to which forms of landowner recognition have already given rise. These communities are drawn into relationships with the one tuna canning facility that is already in operation in the Province, run by Philippines company RD Tuna. In their negotiations with the company and with the state, the process of becoming ‘landowners’ has involved the codification of landowning clans through written, legal documentation, and through the formation of a
‘Landowner Company’ as a legal entity able to enter into contractual agreements. These landowner groups have themselves become implicated within intra-community disputes as well as within contestation with the state and the RD Tuna company.
The primary argument made in this chapter is that the remaking of land as property lends itself to the diminishing of the autonomy of local communities, as power in relation to land shifts to agents, sites and processes associated with the state and with globalising capital. However, if the modernist remaking of land as property can be seen as disempowering for local communities, the second argument made here it is also the case that customary and modern forms of connection to land are already entangled within the Rempi, Nobnob and Siar communities. This fact reflects the existing presence of foreign-owned industry, the legacies of the colonial period, and the presence of hegemonic ideologies of development. In this context, forms of codification and accommodation with state-run processes of land reform can be rendered necessary or desirable, even as such processes also generate effects that are experienced negatively. This fact speaks acutely to the ambivalences and destabilising potential of entanglement.
The third argument made concerns the opportunities for community agency that are generated through the entanglement of customary forms of relationship to land with modern, codified relations of property and land ownership. However coercive it may be, the extension of modern forms of connection to land does not simply replace existing ones. The
entanglement of the customary and the modern—particularly, the gaps and overlaps between these two distinct ways of being—also creates space for agency and manipulation, including through the assertion of ‘landowner’ as a basis for leveraging claims against the state and company, the manipulation of ‘clan’ identities and histories, and the continuation of customary practices of contestation over land claim through the mechanisms of the modern legal system. Opportunities for manipulation, however, can be exploited by companies and the state as much as they can be by the communities themselves. Possibilities for reasserting local autonomy exist, but they exist within a structural field marked by vast imbalances of power.
Finally, this chapter considers the implications of entanglements for power dynamics within communities. Here, the argument made is consistent with one made in the previous chapter, in the context of the Rai Coast villagers’ engagement with George, the young activist originally from Bongu, who had been formally educated and was living in town. In conditions of entanglement, I argue, power within local communities often shifts to those best able to negotiate across the ontological difference of the customary and the modern. From here, a discussion of land, land reform and development in Papua New Guinea serves to introduce the analysis of the particular communities which are the ethnographic focus of the chapter.
Land and development in Papua New Guinea
The extension of property relations sits in the nexus of intersecting processing of change. The codification of land systems is, fundamentally, an aspect of state-building—the drawing of forms of land use and governance within the legislative, administrative and judicial mechanisms of the modern state. Particularly in Papua New Guinea, however, such forms of codification have in large part been catalysed by the extension of capitalist systems of production and exchange, particularly forms of large-scale resource extraction led by foreign corporations. To this extent, then, land reforms are a product both of state-building and of economic globalisation. Where these two modernising processes of change converge is the practices and ideologies of ‘development’. At the time that Papua New Guinea gained its independence, in 1975, the writers of the Constitution had a commitment to a model of small-holder led development, captured in the ideal of the ‘Melanesian Way’ (James et al. 2012;
Jorgensen 2007). It was this commitment that informed the decision to enshrine customary land tenure as a key feature of the social, political and cultural landscape of the new nation-state. In effect, what the state did was to mandate its own exclusion from the organisation of
land. In the two decades after Independence, however, neoliberalism developed as the dominant political-economic ideology on the global stage—propagated by international financial organisations such as the World Bank, by the governments and foreign aid agencies of key donor countries, including Australia, and increasingly by the political elites within Papua New Guinea. This in turn generated a shift in the way that development was envisaged and pursued, with significant implications for land policy.
The neoliberal approach to development emphasises pro-business deregulation, liberalization of trade, privatization of services, corporate-led economic activity as a means of poverty alleviation, and the use of Gross Domestic Product, economic growth rates, official employment statistics and other formal-sector economic indicators as units of measurement (Gore 2000). Until recently, the neoliberal attitude to land reform was to decry customary land tenures as inefficient, and to call for the introduction of individual freehold title, along with liberalised land markets, as essential preconditions for the expansion of these modernist (capitalist) relations of production and exchange. This was the position of the World Bank, established in its 1975 ‘Land Reform Policy Paper’ (Deninger and Binswanger 1999), and shared by a number of Australian policy advisors influential in shaping Australian foreign policy in regards to the Pacific in the early 2000s (Curtin 2003; Gosarevski, Hughes and Windybank 2004a, 2004b; Hughes 2003, 2004; and for critiques Allen 2008; Fingleton 2005; Holzknetcht 2003).
It was under the influence of this neoliberal model that previous attempts to implement the registration of customary land in Papua New Guinea—in 1995 and 2001—were made.
Widespread popular opposition, led by an emergent, vocal civil society, led to the abandonment of plans on both occasions. Since that time the approach of both the Papua New Guinean elite and international actors has shifted somewhat, moving away from an emphasis on straight-forward tenure conversion (from customary tenure to a private property regime), towards advocating hybrid systems which seek to find a ‘middle-way’ between customary land tenure with modern, Western legal frameworks (AusAID 2008; Deninger and Binswanger 1999;
Fitzpatrick and McWilliam 2005).
Beneath a language of plurality, however, the political and ideological foundations of ‘middle-way’ land reform differ little from those of their predecessors. The World Bank—the ‘global purveyor of conventional development wisdom’ (Watts 2001: 284)—has ensured that the dominant development paradigm remains premised on neoliberal foundations (Wade 1996).
‘Social capital’, as Bergeron (2003) notes, has become just one more kind of capital to be utilised in the pursuit of economic growth, while the rhetoric of ‘corporate social and environmental responsibility’ has not shaken the commitment to market expansion as the basis and measure of development (Bebbington et al 2008; Eastwood 2011). Likewise, if
‘property rights’ are no longer automatically equated with individualised rights, the Bank continues to emphasise ‘a framework of secure, transparent and enforceable property rights as the critical precondition for investment and economic growth’ (Quan 2000: 38; cf. Peters 2004).
It is this neoliberal approach to development and land reform—firmly grounded in modernist, economistic terms—which has informed the policies of the Papua New Guinean state in recent years. In the absence of mechanisms for widespread land registration—mechanisms which have since been introduced in legislation which came into effect in 2012—two key legal instruments have been utilised to facilitate what is widely described in PNG as the
‘mobilisation’ of customary land ‘for development’. Principal amongst these are the Land Groups Incorporation Act (1974) and the lease-leaseback scheme. In the first of these, legislation allows for the incorporation of landowning groups as legally recognised entities, able to contract with other entities, particularly corporations. In the lease-leaseback scheme, land is leased from customary owners by the state, which then leases it on to another entity (usually, a corporate developer) through what is termed a Special-purpose Agricultural Business Lease (SABL). It is these two mechanisms that have now been entrenched with the passage of land reform legislation—the Land Groups Incorporation (Amendment) Act 2009 and the Land Registration (Customary Land) (Amendment) Act 2009 (Customary Land Act). Both of these mechanisms—the use of Land Groups and of lease-lease-back arrangements—have been central to the dynamics of the tuna industry in Madang, and the relationships between the Rempi, Nobnob and Siar communities, the PNG state, and companies.
What the oft-heard notions of ‘mobilising’, ‘freeing up’, or ‘making available’ customary land
‘for development’ speak to, ultimately, is a process of making land tenure commensurable
with the requirements of modern, capitalist practices of production and economic activity. In PNG, this generally means large scale resource extractive and agro industries—logging, mining, oil palm development, gas and, as will be discussed through this chapter, industrial fishing. The process of ‘mobilising’ land is a process of making land into property, and the people connected to land into ‘landowners’. In practical terms, this involves such steps as the titling of land and codification of systems of land governance, the determining and recording of boundaries, and also the determining and recording of ‘landowners’. Far from a process of simple translation—from customary into modern systems of administration and organisation—this is rather a process of profound social transformation. Nominally concerned to bridge the customary and the modern, these ‘middle-way’ approaches remain firmly lodged within an economistic, modernist frame of reference. Landowners are not simply identified through these processes of reform and codification— they are created.
The recent controversy over the issuing of Special-Purpose Agricultural Business Leases illustrates vividly the ontological tensions which are both created and obscured by the middle-way approach. In 2011 it was revealed that 72 of these long-term leases had been issued by the PNG government in the preceding eight years, over what amounted to a staggering 11 percent of the country’s land mass—5.1 million hectares of customary land (Centre for Environmental Law and Community Rights et al. 2011; Filer 2011; Greenpeace 2012). These leases have overwhelmingly gone to foreign-owned corporations, and have been used particularly for logging and, to a lesser extent, oil palm industry. They have often been issued without the informed consent of landowners, and sometimes without any consent at all. A key way in which this has occurred has been through manipulation of the Incorporated Land Group system, including the incorporation of ILGs with no substantive connection to the customary communities they subsequently acted on behalf of. The SABL scandal has highlighted the extent of the problems plaguing the land administration system—including corruption, inefficiency, and a gross lack of resources and technical capacity. At a deeper ontological level, though, it points to the need to distinguish between the alienation of land in formal legalistic terms, and alienation of land in the experiential sense (including by those who remain formally recognised as ‘landowners’).
A key plank of the middle-way approach is that, through Land Groups and long-term leases, land can be ‘mobilised’ for development, without being alienated from customary landowners.
In the words of the 2007 report of the National Land Development Taskforce: ‘customary lands shall be forever owned by the landowners, in perpetuity, through their Incorporated Land Group’ (NLDT 2007: 88). This assumes, however, that these two things—customary
‘landowners’ and an Incorporated Land Group—are equivalent, that one is simply the legal articulation of the other. It assumes, too, a strictly legalistic conception of ownership that does not necessarily correspond in any substantive way to lived, customary connection to land. In the case of the SABL controversy, what we see is large numbers of communities who remain formally recognised as ‘customary landowners’ but nonetheless alienated from their land in a practical, lived sense. Here, the notion of ‘customary landowner’ is largely emptied of substance, reduced to a modernist, legalistic status with little if any correspondence to a substantively customary form of connection to land.
Far from a flat pluralism—a ‘harmonious’ (AusAID 2008: xii) translation of customary land tenure into modern legal terms—the use of Incorporated Land Groups and long-term leases effects a deep, fundamental transformation in the nature of social connection to land, and in the nature of power. Made into property, land becomes something to be considered independently of the social world; something that can be bought, leased, ‘developed’. This wresting of the natural from the social world is, then, itself a transformation of the social world, of the ways in which sociality is conceived, articulated and practiced. It involves, as well, a rearticulation of the relationship between people and land. Abstracted out from the intimate and particular relations of belonging, land is stripped of its own agentive capacity and potential. Human agents, only, are to be endowed with the capacity to control and effect change in relation to land. The creation of property is also the creation of property owners, and, in relation to these, also renters, investors, squatters, and trespassers. As land is
‘mobilised’ to be used as an asset within the spatially extended relations of the market, it becomes necessary to create structures for regulating those human agents so that their relations are uniform, predictable and ‘legible’ (Scott 1998) across space and linguistic and cultural variables, and independently of known, embodied interaction or shared identity.
Abstracted property and market relations require abstracted structures of law, regulation and administration: property law, contract law, commensurate systems of currency exchange, land titles offices, cadastral registries. Through these, more human agents are invested with power in relation to land: lawyers, bureaucrats, policy-makers, judges, cartographers. Collectively, these agents, institutions and structures form the foundations of a modernist cartography of
power in relation to land, and it is with these that customary structures of sociality, law and governance are entangled.
The tuna industry in Madang
The communities which are the focus of this chapter are located on the north coast of Madang Province. Nobnob and Siar are located just outside the Madang Town boundary, with Rempi located 23 kilometres further north. In different ways, each of these communities is currently bound up in complex dynamics related to the presence of industrial tuna fishing and processing activity in the Province. The Nobnob and Siar communities live on and around the site of the Province’s existing tuna canning facility, run by the Philippines company RD Tuna, which was granted a 99 year lease over the 6.5ha block of land in 1996. The Rempi community, meanwhile, live alongside a much larger, 216 ha piece of land upon which the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone (PMIZ) is being constructed, and within which RD Tuna’s existing wharfing and berthing facilities are located. The PMIZ development represents an attempt by the PNG government to massively expand the scale of its on-shore tuna processing industry, and through doing this to shift PNG’s position within the international division of labour in the global tuna industry (Havice and Reed 2012). This is envisaged as a value-adding process, with PNG no longer simply providing raw materials, but rather establishing itself as an exporter of processed, and more profitable, canned and loined tuna products. Demarcated as a Special Economic Zone, the PMIZ will function as an extra-legal area intended to attract spatially-concentrated foreign investment through ‘such measures as accelerated depreciation of plant, double deductions for export market development costs and staff training, and tax holidays’
(Business Advantage 2011: 43). Once initial infrastructure development is completed operations will be run through the private sector, and the site is forecast to include wharfing, berthing, and processing facilities. A reported ten extra canning factories (additional to RD’s existing cannery) will be housed within the site.
The forms of codification of customary land use affecting the Madang communities—leases, negotiations over ‘benefit-sharing’ agreements, and the formation of Land Groups—are, then, bound up both in processes of state-building and of economic globalisation. The communities’
experiences of becoming landowners (cf. Hirsch 2001) however have their roots in processes that long predated the arrival of RD Tuna in 1996. In both cases—for the Nobnob and Siar communities on the one hand, and the Rempi community on the other—the alienation of
experiences of becoming landowners (cf. Hirsch 2001) however have their roots in processes that long predated the arrival of RD Tuna in 1996. In both cases—for the Nobnob and Siar communities on the one hand, and the Rempi community on the other—the alienation of