Papua New Guinea:
A Nation in Waiting
The Dance of Traditional and Introduced Structures
in a Putative State
By
Bruce M. Harris
East Asia Environment and Social Division
The World Bank
May 2007
(The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank.)
Contents
Introduction 3
Part I: The Political Economy of Papua New Guinea 4
A. An Explanatory Framework 4
B. The Physical Foundation 5
C. The Traditional Societies of Papua New Guinea: Diversity in Melanesia 6
a. The Pre-History of New Guinea 6
b. Social and Economic Structure of New Guinea 7
c. The Big Man Complex: Achieved Systems 8
d. The Chiefly Complex: Ascriptive Systems 12
e. Matrilineality in PNG 13
f. Societies with Extensive Trading Relations 14
g. Similarities and Differences among Traditional PNG Societies 15
D. Modern Political Developments 18
a. Early Colonial History 18
b. The Regional Reaction to Independence and Inclusion 18
E. The Emergence of the Current System 21
a. The Westminster System and Traditional Institutional Rules 21
i. The Structure of Government: A Majoritarian and Consensus Cocktail……..22
ii. Electorates, the Electoral System and Big Man Politics……………………...23
iii. Parties, Governments and the Fragility of Power……………… ………….24
F. Changes in the System 29
a. Introduction 29
b. The Public Service (Management) Act 30
c. The Organic Law on Provincial Government and Local Level Government 30
d. The Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties 33
e. The Limited Preferential Electoral System 34
G. Identity and Nationhood 35
Part II: Ways Forward 37
A. Introduction 37
B. From Conflict to Consensus at the Local Level: From the Bottom Up 37
a. Some Integrative Local Level Processes 38
b. Some Lessons of Local Level Development Activities and Potential Areas of Inquiry 40
C. The State as Nurturer of National Identity: from the Top Down 43
a. Oversight Institutions 43
b. The Importance of Consistency and Reliability of State Support 44
c. Different Strokes for Different Folks: Equity in Resource Transfers 45
d. Assessing Provincial Differences 47
D. Where the Top Meets the Bottom: The District as Entry Point for Improving Governance and Development Outcomes 49
a. National Parliamentarians as Stakeholders 50
b. CDD in the Context of Trans-Local Groups 50
PART III: CONCLUSION 52
Introduction
This paper is a partial analysis and assessment of the political economy of Papua New Guinea. I take an encompassing view of political economy, as the study of the interrelationships between political and economic processes, with both political and economic seen in the context of social and cultural structures. This includes not only national level processes, but the relations among local, district, provincial and national levels, and interactions between the variety of pre-existent traditional forms and those introduced from outside the country.
The analysis is not academic. It is intended to answer the basic question posed in this paper: why has the state of Papua New Guinea failed to consistently provide resources, services and good governance to the citizens of the country. Why has there been a failure of development; a failure of governance?
That there has been a failure of governance, of development, is well accepted. Many characterize PNG as an example of a “failed” or “fragile” state. I think it more useful to think of PNG as a “putative” state. The geopolitical structure of the country is an accident of its colonial history; there is little sense of nation, centrifugal tendencies remain strong among the regions, and there is little feeling among citizens that membership in the “state” of PNG is of benefit to people at the grassroots level. PNG is a state, a nation, that may develop in future, but at present is only a state in prospect.
This is an important distinction. If the state has never been fully viable, the question is not how to reinvigorate state institutions and processes, but how to create them[1]; how to allow them to emerge. Reasonably, then, we need to understand why the state has not fully emerged; what are the factors that have worked against establishment of a viable state? Once we understand the reasons for the failure of state development, it should be possible to begin to identify strategies that will promote the development of a sound state.
The paper is organized in two parts: Part I is an analysis of the political economy of Papua New Guinea arranged in several sections. In the first section I analyze the social and political structure and processes of the traditional societies of Papua New Guinea to understand the pre-existing situation in the country. I then look at the nature of the imported system and the rules by which it is intended to operate. Following this I look at how the two systems have interacted to produce the distinct political economy of Papua New Guinea today. Part II is a discussion of the way forward in which I try to draw the lessons of the analysis to outline some strategies for state building and the promotion of sustainable development outcomes.
Part I: The Political Economy of Papua New Guinea
A. An Explanatory Framework
There are a variety of explanatory frameworks available as heuristics to structure this analysis. I will make extensive use of the tools of the new institutional economics[2] or exchange sociology to characterize traditional and imported systems and to conceptualize the interplay of the two and the implications of those interactions for the quality of governance. This framework is well suited to conceptualizing a situation in which pre-existing traditional institutions come into contact with introduced institutions leading to potential ambiguity and mixed signals as well as opportunities on the part of the actors in the system to exploit those ambiguities.
The approach distinguishes between institutions and organizations. Institutions are the shared and agreed “rules of the game” ordering interactions among actors and providing an incentive structure which establishes the preferences of those involved in the exchange under consideration, be it political, economic or social. They consist of formal constraints (including rules, laws, constitutions), informal constraints (such as norms of behavior, conventions, self-imposed codes of conduct), and their enforcement characteristics[3]. These rules determine those kinds of behavior that are culturally and socially appropriate in trying to achieve goals or objectives. As such they generate expectations about the rights and obligations of players within the context of a given interaction.
While institutions consist of the rules of play, organizations are the “teams” people form in order to play the game. These may be political, economic or social groups, or some combination of the three. Organizations are established to achieve some objective; the ways in which those objectives may be attained are powerfully influenced by institutions, the rules for playing the game. The institutions define the opportunities available in any social arena; organizations emerge so groups of people can cooperate to take advantage of those opportunities.
This framework suggests three basic questions we need to answer. First, what are the rules of the game that define the important institutions in traditional Papua New Guinea societies, and what is the nature of the organizations, the teams, that emerged to exploit those rules? Second, what are the institutions and organizations characterizing the introduced system and how did those institutions and organizations interact with the pre-existing structures? Finally, how can adjustments be made in both sets of institutions so the organizations responding to the rules of the game are oriented towards objectives that will work to the benefit of the country as a whole, and lead to good governance and positive development outcomes?
B. The Physical Foundation
Before I discuss the traditional societies of New Guinea, a brief word about the island itself is in order. The physical nature of the island is the underlying reality to which all human societies occupying the area have had to adapt and has fundamentally conditioned the nature of that adaptation. It is impossible to understand the reasons for the emergence of the particular kinds of traditional societies that came to populate the island without understanding this physical substrate.
The sheer size and diversity of the island is infrequently appreciated. If superimposed on Europe the “island” would stretch from Portugal in the west to Romania in the east, and at its midsection would reach from the Mediterranean in the south to the English Channel in the north. The island is larger than Turkey, over twice the size of Zimbabwe. The country of Papua New Guinea alone, composing something more than half the island, is half again as large as Germany and nearly the size of France.
The physical environment has been categorized into over forty distinct geographic and biodiversity areas[4], ranging from montane and alpine wilderness in the higher elevations of the Highlands (with many permanently snow-capped mountains higher than any in Europe or the continental U.S.) to mid- and lower montane, heavily forested mixed growth regions, through old growth wet rainforest, savannah and riverine gallery forest, lowland alluvial forests, coastal swamps and plains and a variety of environments on the larger offshore islands. The island and country are huge; few countries on earth contain the range of environments of PNG.
Though the country encompasses a stunning range of physical environments, in general it can be divided into at least four large and largely distinct regions: the Highlands, the south (Papuan) coast, the north (Momase) coast and the Islands. There is a good deal of variety within regions, but each region has nonetheless historically been relatively separate from the others and the societies in each region have greater similarities and more intense relations with one another than with societies and cultures outside the region.
These physical factors have important consequences. Though technically an island, most of the population is not oriented towards the sea, but instead resides in a mountainous, rich and largely inaccessible interior, in lowland forest or savannah or in riverine/ lacustrine environments and traditionally lived their lives without ever seeing the sea. Problems of communication, transport and all other aspects of access are those of a large and rugged landmass with substantial offshore islands, not those of a small island or series of islands. At the same time the richness of the physical environment has meant local groups are able to be generally self-sufficient and insular. This brings us to the traditional societies of PNG and the sociocultural context.
C. The Traditional Societies of Papua New Guinea: Diversity in Melanesia
a. The Pre-History of New Guinea
The physical realities of the country are reflected in its sociocultural structure. Papua New Guinea is one of a set of Melanesian countries stretching roughly from Timor Leste and Halmahera in the west to Fiji in the east, and to Vanuatu and New Caledonia in the south. Melanesian societies are ancient. The most recent work (much of it based on mitochondrial DNA analysis)[5] indicates much of Melanesia was peopled through an ongoing migration beginning in Africa about 150,000 years ago and moving through New Guinea and into Australia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago. Most estimates are that these people had developed horticulture by at least 10,000 years ago, and some theorise they began practicing subsistence horticulture as early as 25,000 years ago, before any other human population[6].
These early groups were Australoid hunter-gatherers, but around 5 - 7,000 BC a secondary movement of Mongoloid horticulturalists began from mainland China and Formosa (Taiwan) that eventually moved along the coasts of New Guinea and into the Pacific[7]. These people brought both more advanced horticultural practices and the Austronesian group of languages[8]. The Austronesian languages are represented particularly in the larger offshore islands (New Britain, New Ireland and Bougainville) while the languages of the mainland are generally classed as Papuan or Trans-New Guinean.
Both Papuan and Trans-New Guinean are language groups defined by exclusion – they are defined as all the languages of the area that are non-Austronesian languages, but do not actually represent linguistic phyla of their own. These are the languages that pre-dated the arrival of the Austronesian speakers, and dominate the New Guinea mainland. In fact, they consist of hundreds of distinct languages; the latest estimate by Ethnologue is that there are 820 living languages in PNG alone, with at least another 270 in the Indonesian half of the island, for a total of over 1,000 languages on the island as a whole[9].
Human populations, then, have occupied New Guinea for probably 50,000 years, and for at least 10,000 years they have been primarily subsistence horticulturalists, supplemented by hunting and gathering. The richness and diversity of flora and fauna in New Guinea has allowed efficient subsistence (supplemented by hunting and gathering) without moving over large tracts of land. A given area could support a larger number of groups than in less rich environments, and this is one reason horticulture, or basic gardening, did not lead to more intensive settled agricultural practices, or large-scale field cropping, as occurred in other locations.
Both the linguistic and anthropological evidence point to the likelihood that from an early time the societies of Melanesia, and particularly those of mainland New Guinea, took on a distinct structure. They were relatively constrained in the areas they occupied, relatively small scale, socially and culturally compartmentalized and fragmented and with modest levels of contact with groups at any distance from themselves. This is supported by the linguistic evidence indicating most of the languages of these groups developed locally, rather than representing imported language groups[10]. This small scale, compartmentalized social structure is an enduring feature of Melanesian life that flows as an unintended consequence from the richness of the environment in which these groups found themselves.
b. Social and Economic Structure of New Guinea
From the time of the earliest ethnographic work these basic features of Melanesian life were identified as underpinning the social and economic existence of the vast majority of New Guineans. Groups are arranged by a number of different social principles with respect to descent, inheritance and status. Descent groups range from patrilineal groups to matrilineal and cognatic (through both lines); inheritance may also be through the partiline, the matriline or both. Status and power may be achieved, as in the big man complex, or ascribed, as in inherited chiefly systems.
However, overall there are some general similarities. To the extent that we can speak of “tribes” (or ethnic/cultural groups) such tribes generally consist of a series of residential groups related by kinship. Each of these groups is fairly independent and generally amounts to no more than several villages or a village and a group of associated hamlets. Perhaps the defining feature of these groups is that they are what Sahlins has called “segmental”[11]. That is, each of these relatively small groups of kin-related members is independent of other, surrounding groups, has independent control over its land and economic resources, and is the general equivalent of all others in the area in political power and status.