Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how the small amount of 'alienated' land in Papua New Guinea can be subject to an ongoing process of encroachment by 'customary' landowners, even while the much larger area of 'customary' land is subject to a parallel process of encroachment by modern forms of property right.

Paper long abstract:

People who write about customary land in PNG commonly make the observation that it accounts for 97% of the country's surface area. If they are right, then the 'bare facts' of land tenure have not changed since Independence in 1975. In fact they are wrong, but the appearance of a static division of space continually motivates a seemingly interminable debate about what (if anything) should be done about the 'mobilisation' of customary land to facilitate some process of 'rural development'. Once we drill down beneath the ideological trappings of this argument, we find a rather curious double movement: on the one hand, a substantial increase in the proportion of 'customary' land which is subject to specific forms of modern property right; and on the other hand, a simultaneous increase in the area of 'alienated' land which is subject to successful rental claims by customary landowners. In this paper, I shall investigate one case of this double movement on 'alienated' land claimed by the Kakat Baining people of East New Britain to illustrate some of the contradictions embedded in arguments about the relationship between 'land mobilisation' and 'rural development'.