HOTSPOTS VERSUS HANDOUTSILLUSIONS OF CONSERVATION AND

DEVELOPMENT IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Colin Filer

BASIC FACTS ABOUT PNG

About 5 million people, half upstairs, a third on the coast, and the rest in between

A formal economy which is heavily dependent on extractive industry

A low average score on the Human Development Index About 800 vernacular languages, and more than 10 times

that number of traditional political communities 98 percent of land and inshore marine resources under

forms of customary ownership which are barely documented And heaps of biological diversity

THE ARGUMENT

Hotspots and Handouts The Two Mentalities The Language of Dependency The Bridge and the Bower Regimes and Networks Retreat to the Beach

THE TWO MENTALITIES

The ‘hotspot mentality’ is used here to refer to the general idea that money spent on the conservation of biodiversity should not only be spent in places which contain a great deal of it in the first place, but also in places where people are likely to make a horrible mess of it if they are left to their own devices

The ‘handout mentality’ is a phrase used to deplore the tendency of other Papua New Guineans, most Papua New Guineans, or even we Papua New Guineans, to demand ‘development’ in the form of free goods, services and money

THE TWO MENTALITIES

Put a stop to ‘hand out mentality’

Lately, a lot of MPs have been getting onto the bandwagon of school fee subsidies. This is well and good if we all can do the ostrich trick and bury our heads in the sand in order not to notice that it is bad public policy to encourage the “hand out mentality” that in turn leads to sloth. As one writer to your paper once said, people grumble about school fees but do not think twice about buying beer, betting on horse races and pokies or in other selfish indulgences. I myself have a total school fee burden of K9780 for three children. I will pay for this out of my salary. The amount is over 50 per cent of my take home pay which has meant that I have had to forgo a few things and lead a rather spartan life. I do not have a single regret about this state of affairs because it is for the best of courses and I expect my children when they grow up, to do the same to their offspring. The last thing I expect them to do is to go cap in hand to their local MP and demand that he/she take over their primary obligation in life.

[Letter to the PNG Post-Courier, 12 March 2004]on in life.

THE TWO MENTALITIES

Conservation projects only seem to succeed in places where local landowners have not yet had the opportunity to extract rent from a developer, or (more rarely) where they have already decided to turn down an offer of ‘development’ because it does not meet their expectations.

In both cases, local landowners appear to support conservation projects because they offer another kind of development, but the conservationists are then left with the task of explaining why biodiversity values would suffer if this kind of development were not on offer at all, and the local custodians of biodiversity were indeed left to their own devices.

THE TWO MENTALITIES

One explanation claims that local landowners lack the knowledge or the motivation to resist an external menace which has yet to materialise, and money therefore needs to be spent on the fortification of their hearts and minds as a precautionary measure.

Another says that local landowners will make a mess of their own property, even if – or especially if – there is no ‘developer’ to do it for them, and money therefore needs to be spent to train them in the practice of sustainable resource management.

If taken to their logical extreme, these lines of argument end in the proposition that local landowners are either idiots or pests.

THE LANGUAGE OF DEPENDENCY

It is very difficult to have a sensible conversation about biodiversity in the version of Melanesian Pidgin English that is normally used when rural villagers are talking to other people who do not speak the local vernacular.

That is not just because the villagers are thinking with their stomachs, but also because, like most US citizens, they are creationists, not evolutionists.

So what is likely to happen if the outsiders divert the conversation to the topic of ‘ecosystem services’ instead?

There are three commonplace terms in Tok Pisin which are available for the purpose of translating this concept – sistem (‘system’), sevis (‘service’), and risos (‘resource’).

THE LANGUAGE OF DEPENDENCY

When people talk about the ‘system’, they are not talking about the ecosystems which provide free ‘services’ , but about the ‘one-talk system’ (wantok sistem) whose operation explains the government’s failure to provide the ‘services’ whose absence is driving the sale of ‘resources’ to the private sector.

Papua New Guineans talk about this ‘system’ in much the same way that Sicilians talk about cosa nostra, ‘our thing’, in other words the mafia. This ‘system’ is the informal, subterranean and mysterious network of primordial personal relationships which undermines all principles of good governance.

The ‘one-talk system’ and the ‘handout mentality’ are thus two sides of the same coin in the currency of public self-reproach.

THE BRIDGE AND THE BOWER

Is there an indigenous theory of knowledge (or ‘epistemology’) which is unique to Melanesian cultures as a whole, or does each of the world’s languages contains its own epistemology, and does the Melanesian ‘culture area’ therefore contain hundreds of these things?

Should we not try to avoid making assumptions about the relationship between race, language and culture which professional anthropologists have been questioning for several decades?

In the context of an ecosystem assessment, we should also avoid the assumption that the world consists of a set of bounded spaces in which systems of different types are piled on top of each like the layers in a club sandwich.

THE BRIDGE AND THE BOWER

When anthropologists go hunting for indigenous knowledge in PNG, they tend to end up in a subterranean warren of contested claims and questionable secrets, where it is not even possible to figure out which bits of knowledge belong to the ‘custom’ of one social group or another, which bits have been borrowed or imported from some other place, or which bits have been made up by their current owners to replace the bits which dead experts failed to pass on to their successors.

Instead of treating this form of indigenous knowledge as the cultural reflection of a diverse natural environment, we should think about it as the means by which indigenous people exaggerate and refine the ‘natural’ qualities of the landscape by branding them with their own personal identities.

THE BRIDGE AND THE BOWER

Consider this account of the behaviour of the Fawn-breasted Bowerbird (Chlamydera cerviniventris):

Males spend many hours every day at the bower, tending it or proclaiming territorial rights. The male is seldom quiet when at or near the bower: he mumbles, imitates other species and local bush noises, clucks, scolds and whistles almost continuously in a low, but penetrating voice (Peckover and Filewood 1976: 122).

Substitute ‘their culture’ for ‘the bower’, and you have the secret society syndrome in a metaphorical nutshell.

Indigenous (male) experts of my acquaintance would not only grasp the significance of this metaphor, but also take great pride in it.

REGIMES AND NETWORKS

In our sub-global assessment of PNG’s coastal ecosystems, we do not assume the existence of a single body of ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ which is opposed to ‘scientific’ forms of ecology.

That is because the characteristic national form of indigenous knowledge is not dedicated to the maintenance of ‘tradition’, nor does it have branches which mimic the conceptual architecture of modern science.

Instead, we treat all kinds of ecological or environmental knowledge as organic components of specific indigenous or sectoral resource management regimes.

REGIMES AND NETWORKS

Each indigenous regime consists of a food-cropping system and a number of other practices, as well as the values, institutions and ‘policies’ which are associated with them.

Local ecological knowledge is defined as a type of practical indigenous knowledge which belongs sectoral resource management regimes, where it is mixed up with scientific, bureaucratic, and other sector-specific forms of knowledge.

Traditional knowledge is that form of indigenous knowledge which fails to connect with any sectoral resource management regime, and is known to disappear when indigenous resource management regimes absorb a ‘modern’ classification of natural resources.

REGIMES AND NETWORKS

The language of dependency implies that the mismanagement of natural resources is a consequence of the unequal distribution of real power between decision-makers at different levels of the country’s social and political organization.

But the whole point about the ‘one-talk system’ is that decisions made at different ‘levels’ in the superficial hierarchy of political space are all equally personal decisions, as if they were in fact decisions made at different points in a one-dimensional network of personal relationships.

When Papua New Guineans negotiate the interface between sectoral and indigenous resource management regimes, they will mostly do so as customary landowners dealing with other customary landowners.

RETREAT TO THE BEACH

If Papua New Guineans all tend to approach the business of resource management with a single form of indigenous knowledge at the back of their minds, we still need to ask why the relationship between indigenous and sectoral management regimes is negotiated in different ways, and with different outcomes, in different parts of the country.

If biological diversity is the resource at issue, the argument should focus on those areas or ecosystems which contain a lot of it. But scientists cannot agree a common standard of measurement, local landowners can rarely understand what they are talking about, there is barely any market to clarify the costs and benefits of doing one thing or another, and the state has no capacity to impose a solution of its own making.

RETREAT TO THE BEACH

If one assumes that biodiversity values in tropical forest ecosystems are inversely correlated with the extent of human disturbance, or if one measures biodiversity values in a way that reinforces this assumption, then one is naturally led to seek the protection of those great swathes of ‘undisturbed’ forest which might as well be described as human population sinks, because they threaten to consume the small and scattered groups of ‘forest people’ who have taken refuge in them.

RETREAT TO THE BEACH

The relationship between ecosystem services and human wellbeing seems altogether different in those coastal areas where people have far more experience with the institutions of modernity, a reasonable rating on the standard indicators of social development, and an awareness of the fact that continued population growth will threaten the sustainability of indigenous resource management regimes if there is no increase in existing opportunities to participate in the formal economy.

RETREAT TO THE BEACH

Despite the apparent contrast between the folk who own the megadiverse reefs around the coastal fringe and those who own the megadiverse forests in the heart of darkness, it is still worth asking whether conservationists will get more value for their money if they spend it on the reef-owners rather than the forest-dwellers.

RETREAT TO THE BEACH

A strong case can be made for the argument that PNG’s terrestrial biodiversity, whether inside or outside of the space which is covered in ‘forest’ at any one moment of time, has been sustainably developed as an unintentional by-product of indigenous resource management regimes which have been evolving over a period of 40,000 years or more.

It is much harder to make the case that indigenous fishing or harvesting practices were responsible for the sustainable development of the country’s marine biodiversity.

RETREAT TO THE BEACH

In that sense, the conservationists may be closer to realising their own dreams of wilderness when they go diving around the country’s coral reefs than when they go walking around in the bush.

But since the reefs still belong to the territorial domains of traditional political communities, this does not make it any easier, and might even make it somewhat harder, for them to keep their dreams intact.

HOTSPOTS VERSUS HANDOUTSILLUSIONS OF CONSERVATION AND

DEVELOPMENT IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Colin Filer