The Incorporated What Group: Ethnographic, Economic and Ideological Perspectives on Customary Land Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Land law and economic development in Papua New Guinea, by David Lea and Timothy Curtin. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK, 2011, 207pp. ISBN: 9-781443-826518.

The incorporated land group (ILG), created by the Land Group Incorporation Act (1974) in Papua New Guinea, was one of a number of results of the 1971 Committee of Inquiry into Land Matters that convened in Papua New Guinea just before Papua New Guinea independence in 1975. It allowed for the legal incorporation of customary land-holding groups and was designed to promote business and cash-earning opportunities in rural Papua New Guinea in the post-independence period of nation- and citizen-building.

In more recent times, the ILG however has been put under considerably more strain by being forced to acquire functions that were not envisioned by its architects in 1971—namely the receipt, distribution and investment of incomes from resource extraction projects. The ILGs set up by various resource projects (most significantly in the petroleum project areas of PNG) have all run into various and severe difficulties in meeting these requirements of resource income management and business development on a scale not ever anticipated in 1971. Using examples from Papua New Guinea's petroleum project area and elsewhere, I cast doubts on the capacities of contemporary indigenous landowning units to make incorporation work for them in the face of current organization and financial challenges.

Keywords:

• Papua New Guinea
• Landownership
• Customary Law
• Incorporation
• Production

Notes

My thanks to Colin Filer and John Burton for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to two anonymous reviews for Anthropological Forum for their helpful suggestions.

Although the recent spread of mobile telephony in PNG's villages promises a real revolution in remote communication in the country.

See M. Rodman, Masters of Tradition (1987) for a similar observation made in the Vanuatuan context.

See also the description of the Kongo Coffee Scheme in Simbu Province, PNG as described in T. Anderson and G. Lee, In Defense of Melanesian Customary Land (AidWatch, 2010).