Finding common ground: relational concepts of land tenure and economy in the oil palm frontier of Papua New Guinea.(Report)

Introduction

There is growing appreciation within geography of the value of relational concepts of the economy for providing theoretical insights into processes of economic change. Relational perspectives are now influencing research in a variety of contexts in both developed and developing countries (e.g. Amin and Thrift 1992; Lee and Wills 1997; Leyshon 1997; Curry 2003; Yeung 2005a 2005b; Gill 2005; Connell' 2007; Sidaway 2007), with much of this work drawing its inspiration from economic sociology and anthropology.

Relational perspectives offer some advantages over under-socialised perspectives like neoclassical economics and political economy for the study of resources, communities, institutions, firms and places. Boggs and Rantisi (2003) contend that in contrast to structural approaches, relational perspectives pay more attention to the role of agency in economic analysis with greater methodological emphasis on the micro level. Furthermore, as Boggs and Rantisi (2003, 114) note, rather than privileging one scale, a priori, relational perspectives consider the interrelations of global and local networks and scales. While it could be argued that some aspects of a relational approach are present in other approaches in geography, one key potential contribution of a relational perspective lies in its capacity to reveal how economy and society are co-constituted. This requires exploring how economic forms, activities and relationships are constructed from social relationships, rather than maintaining the conceptual distinction between the economic and the social (for a discussion of this concept in relation to the firm, see Yeung 2005a).

This paper contributes to these recent discussions by applying a relational approach to the study of resource rights and local-level processes of change in the oil palm frontiers in the provinces of West New Britain (WNB) and Oro, Papua New Guinea (PNG) (Figure 1). In these frontier zones, various actors (migrants, customary landowning groups, multinational corporations and the State) negotiate and regulate access to land for agricultural development. A relational approach appears particularly suited to investigating the dynamics of resource rights within frontier regions, because at these sites economic and societal forms are in a state of flux and resource rights are often highly contested. In the frontier context, a relational perspective offers three main advantages. First, it overcomes some of the limitations of market frameworks for understanding change by revealing the social processes and relationships giving rise to particular patterns of resource use rights. It therefore helps to reveal how these processes of co-constitution of economy and society operate in a rapidly changing context, where a range of agents draw on different values and concepts of property rights in land dealings associated with agricultural development. Second, a relational perspective allows for the recognition of the fluidity and indeterminacy of change because social relationships are constantly shifting, thereby altering the social context within which resource rights are determined. Third, it brings a different perspective to the study of global and local interactions by giving greater recognition to the role of place-based, local-level factors in shaping trajectories of change in the types of governance and regulation of resource rights.

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The paper explores how customary land tenure and resource access are changing in the oil palm frontiers of PNG in response to the rising demand for land for oil palm development, through focusing on the informal 'selling' and gifting of small parcels of land to people from outside the customary landowning group. In PNG, the gifting of temporary rights to land for subsistence food production to people with no customary birthrights to the land has been, and continues to be, widespread in the country's largely horticultural societies (e.g. Crocombe and Hidc 1971; Curry 1997; Ward 1997; Jorgensen 2007). However, granting or selling land for the cultivation of perennial export tree crops is much less common, and especially so where there are land shortages and where 'outsiders' (1) are from other regions of PNG without marital or trading ties with the customary landowning group.

This paper investigates how outsiders who have acquired land maintain access rights to that land over the relatively long cultivation cycle of oil palm (approximately 25 years) and in the context of the rapidly changing socio-economic and demographic environments of the oil palm frontiers in each province. While land dealings between customary landowners and outsiders appear to entail the commodification of land and the emergence ot a land market, we argue that this is far from the reality. Land tenure remains deeply embedded in social relationships. The social relationships from which land rights are derived and accorded their legitimacy are not pre-given, nor unchanging; rather, they must be constructed and carefully nurtured and from their existence, resource rights flow. The paper shows that by embedding land use rights and practices in social relationships with customary landowners, outsiders without birthrights to the land they occupy are able to locate their land claim in an indigenous morality that legitimises their access to land for the cultivation of oil palm. In exploring how these social relationships are constituted through the performance of particular kinds ot exchange relationships, the paper offers insights into the importance of relational concepts of land rights and why these are able to persist in PNG's oil palm frontier regions where resource struggles are of ten intense and where large migrant populations are seeking land for agricultural development.