What can be learnt from the past? A history of the forestry sector in Papua New Guinea
This is an economic evaluation of the compensation to which Papua New Guinea’s customary landholders - wrongly dispossessed through Special Agricultural Business Leases (SABL) - might be entitled if they successfully sued the government. The evaluation involves the calculation of commercial loss but also, and probably more importantly, economic equivalent value loss. The framework identifies the relevant heads of value (not just priced transactions) and demonstrates appropriate methods for valuation. It does not pretend to be a price calculator
but rather a tool for advocacy.
This paper examines the current legal and institutional framework governing the administration of the forest sector in Papua New Guinea. From the evidence examined, the review concludes that the main requirements for reform at this stage concern fulfilment by the state of its responsibilities. This constitutes a more pressing issue than operator compliance, important as this also is.
Papua New Guinea’s is now in its 15th successive year of positive economic growth, with rates rising progressively until 2011, but declining since then, apart from the leap in 2014/15 associated with the commencement of production from PNGLNG.
We have been championing the case for an Independent Commission Against Corruption since 2010 and have urged for the implementation of the recommendations of various Commission of Inquiry, including those into the Department of Finance and the Special Agriculture Business Lease land grab.
Alluvium Consulting has been engaged by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the
Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA) to undertake an assessment of sedimentation
processes to provide an empirical baseline understanding of the existing sources and extent of sedimentation
within the Sirinumu Dam and the downstream Laloki River catchment. The work will inform the development
of the Sirinumu Dam Integrated Land Use Plan.
The global economy experienced sustained growth during most of 2018, led by the US but also with continued Chinese progress, despite growing uncertainty over China’s level of debt and the stability of its property market and increasing market nervousness at the year end.
Friday 27th September 2019, Port Moresby – A new report by Transparency International Papua New Guinea (TIPNG) has shown that the public are unable to access documents from Government Departments because there is no existing law to enforce the public’s Right to Information (RTI). At the launch of the Our Right To Know, Their Duty Tell Report, to mark the International Day for Universal Access To Information, TIPNG called for the Marape-Steven Government to prioritise the RTI Law as a means for citizens to stop public-sector corruption.
These are the findings from one preliminary and one main patrol along the Fly and Ok Tedi Rivers, surveying villagers on their level of understanding Ok Tedi Mining Ltd.’s (OTML) Community Mine Continuation Agreements (CMCAs). These agreements were signed by village representatives in 2000 as a means of binding local communities to the ongoing operation of the mine and to limit their abilities to pursue compensation for damages from OTML, and the mine’s obligation to pay them damages. A few people signed these for the majority of the villages circumstances.
While there is much theoretical study of the evolution of border disparities, there islittle empirical an alysis of development asymmetries across border regions, and their causes or solutions. Often disparities among countries hinder the ability of transboundary agreements and other development initiatives to generate sustainable development. This study quantifies development progress amongst communities in Australia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) covered by the Torres Strait Treaty, 26 years after its inception.
Customary exchange across Torres Strait is examined through a study of documentary sources, oral history and museum collections. The study includes an analysis of the material culture of exchange illustrating (he variety of artefacts of subsistence, ornamentation and dress, recreation, ceremony and dance, and warfare The idea that customary exchange across Torres Strait was a system of fixed, formalised, point-to-point trade routes is contested.
Remote transboundary regions in developing countries often contain abundant natural resources. Many of these resources are being overexploited to supply an ever-increasing demand from Asia, often via illegal cross-border trade. Understanding the systemic issues that drive households to engage in illegal activities in transboundary regions is a prerequisite for designing effective interventions and diverting livelihoods toward sustainable trajectories, but is rarely applied. This study analyzed the drivers of illegal trade in marine products, e.g.
There is an apparent convergence of interest on the part of several key stakeholders in the need for an integrated, transboundary approach to sustainable development and resource management in the ‘ecoregion’ which includes Southern New Guinea and the adjoining parts of Northern Australia (here provisionally limited to Cape York Peninsula and Torres Strait). On the PNG side, the outer limits of this ecoregion correspond roughly with the boundaries of Gulf and Western Provinces.
This report examines social development issues among the lagoon people of the Fly River—the Boazi, Zimakani, and Suki people—in that section of the river marked approximately by Cassowary Island and the Binge River. The lagoon people are closely related in culture, social organisation and the form of their ecological adaptation both to the ‘canoe people’, or Marind Anim, of the southern border area of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya, and east to the Gogodala people of the Aramia River (Crawford 1981).
The South Fly District of Western Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), is one of the poorest regions of the country. Drivers of change affecting livelihoods in the South Fly are accelerating in pace and magnitude. Population growth, climate change, sea level rise, gas extraction, over-fishing, ongoing environmental impacts of Ok Tedi mine, and the growing Asian market for illegally-harvested marine products are all undermining sustainable human development.
Within the context of the Purari Delta’s transforming materialities of resource extraction,and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku (‘hand head’) lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit-beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups’ identities manifest.
The Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea, is a rapidly changing geomorphic and cultural landscape in which the ancestral past is constantly being (re)interpreted and negotiated. This paper examines the importance of subsurface archaeological and geomorphological features for the various communities of Orokolo Bay in the Gulf of Papua as they maintain and re-construct cosmological and migration narratives.
Arriving in the Torres Straits in 1871, the London Missionary Society (LMS) commenced their attempts to convert communities along the south coast of what is now Papua New Guinea. Building upon their initial efforts in Tahiti (1797), their work in Papua was connected by belief, letter and the flow of objects to their efforts in Africa, China,
Whom and what do we touch, hear and see when we hold, listen and look at photographs? What histories are enfolded within photographs’ materiality? What elided pasts do they contain, and what possible futures can be negotiated with source communities by engaging with these artefacts in the present? In this paper I consider these related questions through an exploration of the nexus of relations, perspectives and histories enfolded within a particular glass plate (A6510,499) held in the National Australian Archives.