A road to development? Rural perspectives on infrastructure maintenance in Solomon Islands

ABSTRACT

The Solomon Islands Government and its development partners are heavily investing in road maintenance programmes to promote development in the small islands least developed state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article challenges the future orientation of these programmes. Instead it emphasises rural Solomon Islanders’ past and present experiences with road-based mobilities and state-sponsored road maintenance projects. These experiences reveal roads and road repairs as a source of insecurity, immorality, and potential state violence that sideline, if not obstruct, hopes for any imagined future that a maintained road may (or may not) bring.

KEYWORDS:

• Aid – Development policies
• Environment (built and natural)
• Technology
• Oceania and Japan

Introduction

There is nothing easy about building and maintaining roads in Solomon Islands, a key development strategy of this small islands least developed state in the south-western Pacific. Part of this is due to the geography of the country that is difficult to connect with terrestrial mobility infrastructures: Solomon Islands stretches across six main islands and around 1,000 smaller ones. Its land area is defined by extremes, ranging from low-lying coral atolls a mere three metres above sea level to steep rugged mountains that rise up to 2,500 metres and are blanketed with deep rain forests and traversed by networks of rivers. Another part of this challenge is linked to the dominant customary land tenure system. Approximately 87% of Solomon Islands land is customarily owned and has not been systematically surveyed or registered to any particular clan, other communal unit, or individual. Negotiations surrounding the development of infrastructure projects have frequently struggled with ongoing land disputes and notable differences in customary land tenure regulations across the country’s over 60 cultural groups.¹

Few roads exist, and persist, in this environment. Two-thirds of Solomon Islands’ approximately 1,694 kilometres of roads are located on two of the main islands and provinces: Guadalcanal, which is also home to the capital, Honiara, and Malaita, Solomon Islands’ most densely populated province (World Bank 2018a, 4). Of these roads only around 126 kilometres are sealed (World Bank 2018a, 4), primarily in and around Honiara and Malaita’s provincial capital, Auki. Most other roads are surfaced with gravel, coral or earth. Roads officially operated by the Solomon Islands Government (SIG) and largely built by its predecessor during the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, are also primarily found in coastal areas.² Foreign logging companies have constructed most of the existing inland roads and they abandon them swiftly once timber sources along the road are depleted. This means that only around 20% of Solomon Islands’ predominantly rural population has direct access to roads (World Bank 2018a, 4). Also, as is often the case, access by no means guarantees usability. Faced with frequent washouts, roads require regular, costly maintenance in a context of ongoing budget shortages and a high dependency on international aid. Between 2010 and 2016, Solomon Islands ranked among the 5-15 most aid-dependent countries in the world, surpassed only by other small islands states and the West Bank and Gaza (World Bank 2018b).

Irrespective of these constraints, the SIG and its international partners have singled out investments into road networks as foundational ‘Roads/Routes to Success’ (ADB 2012), to economic development and with it, ideally, reduced reliance on foreign aid. Reflecting dominant development theories that promise development through spatial integration (Josa and Magrinyà 2018; Taaffe, Morrill, and Gould 1963), in Solomon Islands adequate roads are argued to:

(i) [improve] the accessibility of households to social services; (ii) [increase] opportunities for employment and income generation; (iii) [increase] external private sector economic participation in the areas served; and, ultimately, (iv) [improve] the social and economic status of the population by catalysing rural development (EU 2011, 2; see also ADB 2012).

This endorsement of road-based development is echoed in wider national debates. Editorials in the country’s two daily newspapers, the Solomon Star and Island Sun, feature frequent commentaries on roads and their development potential, as do reports and discussions broadcast by SIBC (Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation). The Facebook group of Forum Solomon Islands – International (FSII), Solomon Islands’ most influential civil society organisation, is plastered with pictures of deteriorating road conditions at locations not (yet) covered by funded maintenance programmes, while existing projects are carefully scrutinised for their use of funds and the quality of repairs. Though at times critical of particular implementation strategies, participants in these debates seem to agree that well-maintained roads are desirable as indispensable tools for development and, therefore, that road improvements are adequately prioritised when allocating government and donor funds.

My concern in this article is not the long-term viability of this expectation. Instead, in an effort to be “more fully attuned to the operations of infrastructural promises in the present” (Hetherington 2016, 41), I examine rural Solomon Islanders’ immediate reactions to the implementation of road-based maintenance projects and the way these reactions are situated in past experiences. I agree with Stengers (2005) and Hetherington (2016) that “a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us [can arise]” (Stengers 2005, 994) if we, as development researchers and/or practitioners, “slow down reasoning” (Stengers 2005, 994) rather than immediately jump to future hopes and predictions, both in the focus of our analyses and the assessments we can make.

In my research on road-based development in Solomon Islands, this “slightly different awareness” provides crucial insights into what Tarekegn and Overton (2011) identify as a core shortcoming of existing studies about spatial integration for development: a failure to acknowledge that roads may bring about little real change or even have negative consequences for rural communities and a subsequent failure to consider “whether [roads are] desirable or desired” (2011, 38) from the perspectives of those living alongside them.³ In their work, Tarekegn and Overton (2011) demonstrate why an Ethiopian village rejects the construction of the road. This village favours isolation as a development strategy, because isolation allows them to maintain “core values, customs and beliefs” (2011, 48) by shielding them against external modern influences that they fear travel alongside roads. My research in Solomon Islands identifies similar fears and illustrates how these fears are being realised and negotiated in a context where a road has already been built. I show how especially discussions about road maintenance reveal rural Solomon Islanders’ concerns about roads as sources of insecurity, immorality and potential violence; and caution against an uncritical endorsement of road maintenance projects that do not sufficiently address affected communities’ past and present experiences with the road and road repairs, in particular.

These findings are based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork on state-society relations in Solomon Islands (February 2014 to February 2015), including four months in the capital Honiara and eight months in the rural Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province. Combining participant observation, infrastructure surveys and in-depth interviews, most of the data for this article were collected during a detailed ethnographic study of one village, Gwou’ulu, located at the terminus of a feeder route to the North Road, North Malaita’s primary government road. I also travelled regularly on the road between Gwou’ulu and Auki and during these trips, engaged in various lengthy conversations with North Malaitans about the road, development, the state, and life in North Malaita more broadly.⁴ These conversations reflect my more detailed observations in Gwou’ulu and reveal shared experiences with, and debates about, the desirability of roads and road maintenance along the North Road.

The temporality of infrastructure maintenance

While infrastructure, including roads, has long assumed a central role in engagements with state-sponsored socio-economic change (e.g. Taaffe, Morrill, and Gould 1963), a more critical, concerted debate that presents the perspectives of affected communities and examines the power relationships embedded in infrastructural development has only emerged over the last two decades (see Bunnell 1999; Harvey and Knox 2012; Larkin 2013; Tarekegn and Overton 2011; Von Schnitzler 2008). This debate emphasises the unique analytical positioning of infrastructures as the “materiality of the civil link between citizens and the state” (Von Schnitzler 2008, 901) and as such, as an ongoing site of contestation with a distinct “social character – the perceptions, subjectivities, and affective relations that diverse social actors associate with or produce in response to [infrastructural] conditions” (Landa 2016, 720). From this perspective, development programmes that introduce infrastructures, like prepaid water metres, also renegotiate citizenship and convert, for example, welfare-recipients into consumer-citizens (Von Schnitzler 2008). Simultaneously, large-scale constructions such as the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia articulate progress-oriented national identities while offering a space for contesting who is and who is not to benefit from this progress (Bunnell 1999).

Foundational to understanding the material, social, and political embeddedness of infrastructures is Bowker and Star’s proposition that a defining feature of infrastructures is the temporality of their visibilities. Bowker and Star (2000) contend that infrastructures are meant to become invisible, to be absorbed into the routines of everyday life and, in turn, to become only visible at times of disruption, when infrastructures cannot be used as intended. Larkin (2013) points out the basic flaw in this argumentation: some infrastructures including the aforementioned Petronas Twin Towers require continued visibility to achieve their desired political effects, especially as symbols for (future) development. Still, I contend that the possibility of infrastructural invisibility matters. In many cases infrastructures such as roads or electrical grids are, first and foremost, designed to materially facilitate rather than symbolise development. For these infrastructures to be able to fulfil their development potential beyond semiotics they have to be functional enough to disappear into the background. This allows for reframing dominant public debates from calls for building (better) roads for development to discussions about development per se and with it, if at all, about how working roads may be utilised to bring about development (or not).

Infrastructures that have already been built but that are regularly not working, such as Solomon Islands’ roads, prevent this shift in perspective and require a more concise understanding of the politics that surround both disrepair and maintenance efforts. While, as Barnes (2017) notes, much existing research on maintenance has focused on teasing out and, to some degree, celebrating the (invisible) contributions of maintenance workers, a growing body of literature points to the importance of examining the politics of maintenance and disrepair, their transformative potential and their entanglement with broader social and political struggles (see Smith 2016; Trovalla and Trovalla 2015). This research asks “who decides what is to be maintained and how is it to be maintained?” (Barnes 2017, 148) and, most significantly for this article, it asks “when [does] maintenance work take place  …  with what goal in mind?” (Barnes 2017, 148) and “how is this act of maintenance perceived”.

Crucially, moments of disrepair and maintenance also explicitly encourage analyses that move beyond future-oriented properties of the initial construction of infrastructures (for development). As Smith (2016) points out, whenever decisions are made about infrastructural repairs the infrastructure itself is re-evaluated not only for its potential future use, but also its past and present usages. Raising the fundamental questions of “is and has this infrastructure project been worth it?” debates about upkeep can be even more intense than debates about future-oriented initial constructions (Smith 2016). Because ailing infrastructures are more about a “loss” than a “lack of” (Trovalla and Trovalla 2015, 54), they can reveal “interrupted futures” (Trovalla and Trovalla 2015, 48) and, thus, engender broader debates about the past, present, and future of the political system in which these infrastructures have been built.

Existing research on roads suggests that they offer a particularly useful entry point for examining the competing temporalities of infrastructure maintenance and its role in development discourses. Fundamentally tied to the flows and networks of modern statehood, roads “elicit powerful temporal imaginaries, holding out the promise (or threat) of future connectivity, while also articulating the political and material histories that often render these otherwise mundane spaces so controversial” (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012, 460). In other words, roads reveal dreams about a yet unfulfilled but potential globally-connected future that is facilitated by movements along the road, or, alternatively, deemed to be prevented whenever a road is not built (or maintained) (Dalsgaard 2011). Simultaneously, roads serve as a prominent reminder of, and connections between what was, what is, and what may come. In the following, I examine these temporal imaginaries as they are articulated in reference to state-sponsored maintenance of Malaita’s North Road.

The North Road in disrepair

The North Road was first constructed by the British colonial administration in the late 1960s and remains the only road that connects Auki to the densely populated northern half of Malaita Province. It is an approximately 108 kilometres-long dirt (often mud) road, except for about five kilometres in and around Auki. Gwou’ulu Village, the primary case study, can be reached by travelling along the North Road from Auki for approximately 80 kilometres before taking one of the road’s thoroughfares turning into the peninsula that delineates the northern border of the Lau Lagoon.

On an everyday basis only a handful of motorised vehicles travel along the North Road, primarily flatbed trucks that transport both cargo and people. These trucks offer the most affordable way for North Malaitans to move products such as copra or sweet potatoes to Auki or even Honiara (from Auki, Honiara can be reached via an, on average, six-hour ferry ride). These trucks also transport people to urban Solomon Islands and its services, from hospitals to secondary schools and universities, government agencies and banks, as well as waged employment opportunities. North Malaitans are, with few exceptions (e.g. teachers and priests), dependent on temporary, circular labour migration to somewhat reliably participate in the cash economy and, thus, to afford even basic goods such as clothing or pots (Moore 2007). Dinghies powered by outboard motor engines can also be used to reach Auki. However, the cost of petrol for the four-hour journey is prohibitive. Flatbed trucks and the road they travel along are often the only viable option for North Malaita’s subsistence farmers and fisherfolk.

The vast majority of my North Malaitan interlocutors had at one point or another travelled along the North Road and struggled to remember a time before its initial construction. The existence of the road has become routine-like in the villages along the road, and, with it, it has become exemplary for the limitations and deterioration of infrastructure maintenance. The ethnographic record offers an initial glimpse into this deterioration: During fieldwork in 2014 and 2015, my fastest road trip between Malu’u⁵ and Auki took four hours, with an average speed of 19 kilometres per hour. In comparison, when anthropologist Ian Frazer (1973, 2) travelled along the same route shortly after the construction of the North Road, he completed the journey in 90 min to two hours.

The unsealed North Road is regularly washed out and can become (nearly) impassable during, and without maintenance after, the six-month long wet season (Figure 1). Between May 2014 and September 2014, only three flatbed trucks were able to reach Gwou’ulu by travelling along the feeder road. Trucks were more readily available between Malu’u and Auki but their frequency had also dropped to about two per week (from multiple every day when the road is not extensively washed out).

Figure 1. The North Road about 1.5 km north of Malu’u in June 2014.

I was able to catch a ride on one of the trucks that dared to make the journey all the way to Gwou’ulu. The driver agreed to attempt the trip because the truck would be fully loaded with cargo and people from Gwou’ulu. The journey took us ten hours. For two and a half hours we were slowly creeping along the nine-kilometre long feeder road to Gwou’ulu. First, we had a flat tyre. Then a spoke broke that could only be provisionally fixed with small branches. Readjustments were required every 15 min. The passengers had long jumped off the truck. Walking alongside it, they removed obstacles and, at times, manually filled in potholes that had grown too large to be crossed without risking further substantial damage to the vehicle. This experience, I was assured, was by no means unique. Instead, it had defined much of the experiences of those living along the North Road and its thoroughfares over the years.

Maintenance as a source of insecurities

In October and just in time for the beginning of the 2014 national and provincial election campaigns, government contractors suddenly fixed the road. The many holes were filled in with gravel and the road surface was tamped. Rumours about the possibility of maintenance had been floating around for some time, yet the villages along the road had not been directly involved in, or consulted about, the repairs or their timing. Seemingly reaffirming the development promises of road-centric spatial integration, trucks began to arrive at least twice a week, sometimes even daily. Drivers were contacted on their mobile phones – their numbers were in many villagers’ contact lists – and one passenger was now sufficient to get flatbed trucks to make the trip to Gwou’ulu. Existing trade stores flourished and new ones popped up.⁶ Products could be restocked more easily and the trucks always brought potential new customers. The price of petrol dropped and villagers’ sea-based mobility by dinghy also increased. Still, few of my conversations revealed a positive attitude towards the newly maintained road. Instead, drawing on previous experiences with the repaired road, my interlocutors largely described the sudden increase in road-based mobilities as a source of immorality and potential violence.

Immoral mobilities

Shortly after the government machines rolled into the village, Richard rushed to our leaf house.⁷ He had been concerned with our well-being and the safety of our things since our arrival in the village, especially our electronics and solar power unit. He had come to warn us about the dangers of the functioning road and the daily trucks. Richard explained:

Gwou’ulu is now like town. You have to lock your doors, even if you just go to buy some tobacco … also during Church services. You do not know who comes to the village now … They come, they go and they come back. You do not know who they are, where they are coming from and where they are going.

Richard’s advice foreshadowed many of my subsequent conversations about concerns that the road would, like it had in the past, lead to an increase in theft and possibly violence. Hence, once the road had been repaired, I observed concrete changes in villagers’ everyday behaviours. Echoing Richard’s recommendations, those who had a padlock started locking the front doors to their main houses. Many families stopped storing their pots and other easily removable but valuable items in their freestanding kitchens, hiding them in their now locked main houses instead. With the road fixed, women were also increasingly less likely to walk through the village individually. Their male and older female relatives were insisting that they always move in pairs or groups. Women’s safety was one concern, another was that the road would facilitate sexual promiscuity, extramarital affairs and unwanted pregnancies now that unknown men were more likely to frequent the village. Particularly troublesome were campaign events since candidates often arrived with three or four trucks full of largely young, male supporters. Concerns about black magic were heightened during these road-facilitated events as well. As I strolled through the crowds I would frequently be pulled aside and redirected in my path. I was warned to avoid particular individuals, known practitioners of black magic, who were suspected to attempt to use their powers to influence election results. At the same time, rumours about “misbehaving” villagers from Gwou’ulu were on the rise. Many of my interlocutors expressed concerns that their kin and neighbours may (once again) be seduced into behaving immorally; after all, the road had also made it possible to more easily blame outsiders.

As indicated in Richard’s explanations, Gwou’ulu villagers’ overarching concern was the sudden increase of unpredictable and, thus, potentially immoral movements. In North Malaita and elsewhere in Melanesia, place is the “basis of social identity” (Bolton 2003, 1) and knowledge of the places that travellers are coming from and the place they are going to is used to assess the morality of travellers’ movements. While on the move, even when it just means crossing the village, one is commonly asked “go wea?” (where are you going?) or “stap kom lo wea?” (where are you coming from?), rather than, for example, “how are you doing?”. If someone does not disclose their place of belonging (the village they live in and their kin networks) and their goals (where they are going and why they are in Gwou’ulu), their movement and intentions are generally viewed with suspicion. In Bolton’s words, “it is not a good thing to be only on a road; one must be able to use a road in relation to a place” (2003, 71).

To “take a walk, go nowhere special” (Frazer 1985, 189), in Lau, liliu, or in Pijin, wokabaot, is not problematic per se. On the contrary, it is a core component of North Malaitan sociality. For example, an aimless stroll through a village and the unplanned conversations that emerge from it are recognised not only as a way by which information is exchanged and obtained but also as a means for strengthening and possibly even extending social networks (see also Frazer 1985). Thus, when asked “go wea?” it can be acceptable to respond with “liliu na” in particular, if and when, on the way back, some of the experiences and knowledge obtained during the walk are shared with those who had inquired about one’s walk in the first place. However, walking around aimlessly

is only acceptable within certain limits. No one should wander around too much or too often, for every [North Malaitan] belongs to a particular place with known people and should maintain a routine of productive activity built around domestic relationships. (Frazer 1985, 200)

Many respondents suggested that the fixed North Road, and the trucks that traverse alongside it, encourage disproportional, aimless movement that not only brings suspicious individuals to the village but that also encourages Gwou’ulu villagers to (temporarily) abandon their “productive [activities]” (Frazer 1985, 200). Both men and women would, at times unannounced, jump on one of the trucks to Auki, quickly declaring that they were going to visit family in Honiara. Usually, they would promise to be back in no time, to perhaps stay two or three weeks and then to swiftly return bringing back remittances from urban kin such as rice or a new mobile phone. I quickly learnt that not even those making these promises believed them. Often those travelling to town for no other reason than a visit would not come back to the village for months, even a year. They would frequently end up jumping between the households of their urban relatives while wandering through town, similarly aimless. As so-called Masta Liu (Masters of Walking), they

[relished] being spared the back-breaking work in the … fields that would have filled their days had they stayed in the village. All liu, boys and girls, will tell how easy life is in Honiara and how much they rest when they come to town. (Jourdan 1995, 210–211)

Those left behind in villages, on the other hand, lose valuable labour needed for the upkeep of gardens and households. At times, these absences are merely a nuisance but they can also challenge the sustainability of individual households. Tania’s case is exemplary. When all of Tania’s adult children left to liliu in town and without a husband, she was unable to reliably care for her two remaining adolescent children and the leaf house that they lived in. As the leaf house requires regular maintenance, it slowly decayed while her gardens shrank, limited by available labour. Eventually, she and her children had to move in with her brother’s family, contributing to their household rather than maintaining and growing her own (e.g. also to engage in market activities to earn cash for her children’s school fees).

In this context, the sudden maintenance of the North Road became to many respondents immediately and primarily visible a source of insecurity in everyday life, rather than as a source of a promised future stability. With the amplification of immoral movements, Gwou’ulu villagers lost, to some degree, control over the village environment and the people that visited but also lived in it. With this loss of control my interlocutors grew concerned about a potential increase in conflicts within and between families, fuelling a sense of distrust as well as uncertainty (rather than hopefulness) with regard to the future.

The temporality of maintenance and electoral violence

The particular temporality of road improvements further intensified this sense of insecurity. Many of my interlocutors were convinced that maintenance decisions had nothing to do with government promises to build better roads to facilitate development. Instead, they suspected that, in 2014 (and the years before), the road had only been fixed because of the elections, to give candidates and their supporters easier access to the villages throughout the constituencies that are connected to the North Road. Several of Gwou’ulu men (no women) joined particular candidates on their campaign trail/truck rides along the road (thus becoming themselves suspect travellers in other villages). However, many more expressed deep worries about this sudden, amplified connection with the national political process and the potential for violence that it entailed, especially during and after an election.

This is by no means surprising. Solomon Islands experienced a civil conflict (the Tensions) between 1998 and 2003 that revealed the violent potential of Solomon Islands’ shaky political and electoral system, including a lack of well-established parties, frequent “grasshopping” of MPs between the government and the opposition, and low overall support for elected candidates (Steeves 2011). During the Tensions, most state services and large-scale economic enterprises faulted, earning Solomon Islands the infamous title of the Pacific’s first failed (or at least failing) state. Large sections of the urban population were displaced and violence was rampant in urban but also in rural areas. In Gwou’ulu three village leaders were kidnapped and one assassinated.

When the Australia-led military and civil Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) arrived in 2003, it promised, and in many ways, achieved the end of violent altercations within months. Still, violence broke out after the 2006 election, the first after the Tensions. In 2006, “triggered by a deeply flawed prime ministerial selection process … which bore no relationship to any discernible popular mandate” (Fraenkel 2006, 83) and concerns about Asian interference in the process, disgruntled voters burnt down large sections of Honiara’s Chinatown. Considerably less well known is that, after the 2006 election, Gwou’ulu burned as well. The road had been fixed sufficiently ahead of the 2006 election and trucks could somewhat reliably reach the village. This sealed the fate of Gwou’ulu. Shortly after the results of both the national and provincial elections had been announced, trucks rolled into the village. The men who arrived on those trucks burned down several houses including one of the main trade stores. The village was also looted. Gwou’ulu had decided to “block vote” in 2006, meaning everyone voted for the same candidate.⁸ However, Gwou’ulu villagers had not chosen the “right” candidate, at least not from the perspective of the men raiding the village. The situation was particularly dire because barely any of Gwou’ulu men were in the village at the time. Since the road was functioning well, they had been invited to a soccer match in the southern Lau Lagoon. The road facilitated the men’s departure as well as the arrival of the attackers.

To prevent a similar event in 2010, everyone was instructed not to venture outside of Gwou’ulu for about two weeks after the results had been announced. In addition, guards were placed along the entrance of the road as a way to immediately warn the village should another attack occur. Ahead of the 2014 election, the village discussed the need for guards as well. The road had been fixed and an attack similar to that in 2006 was logistically possible. Eventually, the decision was made that guards would not be necessary because of the anticipated voting patterns in Gwou’ulu during this election. In 2014 Gwou’ulu did not block vote. Instead, votes were split among many candidates and villagers hoped that, as a result, no party would single out the village as problematic source of countervotes and launch a raid. Still, due to the functioning road, Gwou’ulu villagers decided to be vigilant. All men were advised to remain in the village or its immediate vicinity just in case an attack occurred.

Violence did not travel to Gwou’ulu after the 2014 elections, but the National Election and the way it played out along the road was not free from threats.⁹ During the campaign, the North Road was blocked at various locations to prevent other candidates from accessing villages for their campaigns and, more broadly, to demonstrate the power of individual candidates. Instead of two or three villagers putting branches on the road to demand compensation for repairs, groups of 20–30 men would build more permanent barriers, at times by simply parking a flatbed truck across the road.¹⁰ The atmosphere was often tense, fuelled by alcohol and the promises of individual candidates that, should they win, several perks would await their most dedicated supporters.¹¹

When lecturing me about why heading to Auki was, right now, a reckless idea, Nicolas, a retired police officer, explained:

You do not know what these men will do. Perhaps they know you support a different candidate. Perhaps they just take all your money and goods. No one can help you. You know, the police will not help you either.

Nicolas was proud of his former profession and a strong advocate for the role of the police in maintaining security across the country. However, he, like many others I talked to, was also disillusioned.

I think four police officers are stationed in Malu’u [the only police station in North Malaita]. What can they do against the supporters [of a candidate]?  … Perhaps they even support the candidate themselves. Someone told me they have locked themselves into the police station. They are scared and they do not even have guns to defend themselves … I would have been scared.¹²

Nicolas’ concerns echo broader uncertainties surrounding the capacities and commitments of Solomon Islands police. Trust in the police crumbled during the Tensions when police officers joined the militias and raided their armouries. Despite allocating significant resources to police-building, RAMSI has struggled with this legacy. As Dinnen and Allen (2013) note, Solomon Islands’ police force remains understaffed, underfunded and urban-centric. Most of all, the police have been unable to establish confidence among Solomon Islanders that individual police officers prioritise the needs and interests of the country over that of their kin networks and language groups. Thus, however often I asked, no one I talked to in Gwou’ulu or elsewhere in North Malaita expressed confidence that the police could or would prevent electoral violence (at least not in rural areas) or, really, any other crime committed along, and enabled by, the road.

In this context, Gwou’ulu villagers were particularly reluctant to recognise the latest round of road maintenance as anything but a “favour” for politicians on the campaign trail in North Malaita and as a simultaneous threat to the well-being of the communities located along the road. If not for the candidates, why else, many wondered, would the government have repaired the road just ahead of the election? Why would they do so at the very moment when violence is most likely to move along the road, and well-knowing that the handful of police officers in Malu’u would be ill-equipped to respond to any electoral violence?

A road to development?

Combining the temporality of the road maintenance, the potential for electoral violence, and broader concerns about the immorality of everyday movements along the road, explicit mentions of the development potential of the now more reliably functioning North Road were few and far between. During an extended conversation with male village leaders about the road and their development aspirations, their statements echoed broader national debates. They were convinced that a well-maintained road was indispensable for realising their immediate development goal, the construction of a tuna cannery between Gwou’ulu and neighbouring villages. However, they also failed to see a clear link between this goal and the recent tamping of the North Road. The men unequivocally agreed that they did not expect for this round of maintenance to last any longer than previous ones, in other words, until the next rainy season; and that, until then, their primary responsibility was not the development initiative but to ensure that life in Gwou’ulu could go on without any major interruptions and conflicts facilitated by the (temporarily) functioning road. Many others that I talked to similarly noted that they believed that road-based mobilities were crucial for development to arrive in North Malaita; yet, they also did not see a concrete connection between this conviction and the most recent (and previous) road maintenance projects.

For Gwou’ulu villagers this round of road repairs was merely another reminder for already and continuously “interrupted futures” (Trovalla and Trovalla 2015, 48) that underscore rather than counteract a persistent sense of insecurity linked to state-based development. Trapped in cycles of repair and disrepair, the North Road explicitly nurtures this insecurity in its continued failure to achieve what I described as the penultimate goal of most infrastructure projects, to become invisible and, thus, to be integrated into daily routines as a source of stability. Rather than being invisible, the North Road is, in particular at moments of maintenance, “hyper-visible” for its disruptive potential and because of this hyper-visibility, Gwou’ulu villagers are unable to shift their engagement with the road from one dominated by concerns about immoral and possibly violent movements to one that focuses on its development potential. Accordingly, instead of hopefully anticipating what the road may bring, whenever the road is temporarily fixed, Gwou’ulu villagers feel compelled to adjust their everyday lives to respond to their fears about who may be (immorally) travelling along the road. At the same time, road maintenance, at least when coinciding with elections, fuels villagers’ scepticism towards the interests and priorities of the Solomon Islands state and, thus, undermines, rather than contributes to, state stability more broadly.

There is nothing fundamentally surprising about North Malaitans’ experiences with road-based insecurities. As Dalakoglou and Harvey note, roads “can disconnect as effectively as they forge connections” and as such they can be as much perceived as a “threat” as they are considered to be a “promise” (2012, 460). Still, even if these insecurities are not wholeheartedly ignored, they are rarely taken seriously in development strategies and their implementation. None of the documents I surveyed for the Solomon Islands case account for them. Instead road maintenance and investments into mobility infrastructures are treated as largely non-controversial and not placed in dialogue with the broader challenges Solomon Islands faces on its ‘road’ to development, including a persistent distrust in the interests and capacities of the Solomon Islands state and its representatives, in particular, politicians and the police.

My research, thus, calls for an extended vision for roads (and other infrastructure projects) in development research and practice, one that pays more and explicit attention to the desirability of roads (see Tarekegn and Overton 2011) and how they are linked to past and current experiences with road-based and, so it seems to my respondents, state-sponsored insecurities. This extended vision is only possible when we shift away from research that considers, above all, the initial construction of infrastructures (for development) and their anticipated transcendence in an idealised “future perfect” based on “hopes that … current hardship will have been the necessary precursor to future prosperity” (Hetherington 2016, 42). Instead, building on Barnes' (2017) call for more critical engagement with the politics of maintenance, my research demonstrates how development research and practice can benefit from a better understanding of the long-term integration of infrastructures in everyday life and the way this integration is shaped by contested histories of infrastructural repairs.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants of the panel “A Contrapuntal Anthropology of Politics” at the annual meeting of the Canadian Anthropology Society (2018) for comments to an early draft of this paper. Special thanks also to Geoffrey Hobbis and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stephanie Ketterer Hobbis is a lecturer in Development Studies at Wageningen University and Research. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). Her research focuses on everyday experiences with foreign aid, state- and peacebuilding in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

ORCID

Stephanie Ketterer Hobbis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7038-7413

Additional information

Funding

Field research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (201211DVC-236411-303307).

Notes

1 The extent to which landownership should be fixed is itself contested. While the Solomon Islands Government and development agencies strongly support land registration and privatisation, anthropological research has emphasised the disruptive potential of this process that fundamentally contradicts flexible, communal histories of land management (rather than ownership) (e.g. see Burt 1994).

2 Solomon Islands gained independence in 1978, with many of the core road infrastructures having been built in the preceding decades.

3 An exception is Chung’s (1988) chapter on the long-term effects of a road in rural Fiji. Chung suggests that the road has failed to notably transform life in the rural areas that are now connected to the capital Suva. Any positive socio-economic developments that have occurred are traced to broader changes in the national economy and found to have spread relatively equally to settlements along and disconnected from the road.

4 All conversations and interviews, unless otherwise indicated, were completed in Solomon Islands Pijin, the local lingua franca, or in a fluid mix between Solomon Islands Pijin and the Lau language.

5 A small township that Gwou’ulu villagers can reach by road or by paddling for about 2.5 h in dugout canoes.

6 Many of these stores are ad hoc and only sell basic foods such as rice, canned tuna, and instant noodles.

7 All names are pseudonyms. I completed my fieldwork together with my life partner and anthropologist, Geoffrey Hobbis.

8 See Hobbis and Hobbis (2017) for a discussion of Gwou’ulu villagers’ decision-making during elections and how this decision-making is itself informed by a strong distrust in the motives of state representatives.

9 Following Gwou’ulu villagers’ advice, I did not use the road during the campaign and did not observe any of these threats myself. My descriptions are based on villagers’ accounts.

10 Several villages along the North Road maintain “their” section of the road regularly and independent from SIG. Roadblocks are frequently used as a way to pay for the labour of those involved. Based on my own experiences and recollections from my North Malaitan interlocutors these road blocks are usually no more than an irritant; truck drivers commonly pay the demanded fees or negotiate, and threats of violence are rare.

11 See Cox (2009) for a discussion of patron-client relationships in Solomon Islands’ electoral and broader political process.

12 A core component of the RAMSI intervention has been a disarmament programme that includes the police force. Only in 2017, shortly before RAMSI’s departure, were guns returned to Solomon Islands police.