State Societyand Governancein Melanesia
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THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies State, Society and Governance in Melanesia StateSociety and in Governance Melanesia DISCUSSION PAPER Discussion Paper 2003/1 LAND REGISTRATION IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA: COMPETING PERSPECTIVES Like other post-colonial states, Papua New highly productive (drawing upon the example TIM CURTIN, Guinea continues to grapple with issues of a motivated and productive community in HARTMUT pertaining to land. In addition to being an Morobe Province), and that in any case, the HOLZKNECHT important source of group identity, in resource Melanesian socio-political context is likely to rich Papua New Guinea, land is an important confound attempts at land reform. & PETER source of economic prosperity. Vigorous debate LARMOUR however, has ensued over the relationship LAND REGISTRATION IN PAPUA between customary land tenure systems and economic growth, with official land registration NEW GUINEA: FIFTY YEARS OF being proposed as a more economically viable CONTENTION alternative to local systems of land tenure. This discussion paper, based on a seminar at AusAID, provides an overview of perspectives Peter Larmour on land registration, which as demonstrated by violent protests in 1995 and 2000 is a highly contentious issue in Papua New Guinea. ‘Customary land tenure’ consists of informal Peter Larmour provides a brief theoretical rights and obligations that precede the introduction followed by a chronological introduction of colonial land legislation, and overview of official thinking about land continue to exist in parallel with it. In registration in Papua New Guinea, concluding many parts of the developing world traditional with a practical consideration of the mechanics and informal systems of land tenure coexist of registering land in the country. Tim and sometimes conflict with land legislation Curtin and Hartmut Holzknecht then provide promulgated by a central, previously colonial, competing perspectives on land registration, government. Custom may be officially with Curtin advocating the establishment of recognised as an alternative to law, for some The contribution individual land ownership in Papua New Guinea places or circumstances, or for indigenous of AusAID to in order to accelerate economic growth, a people. Or the introduced legislation may simply this series is task for which he believes customary land be ignored, unknown or irrelevant outside the acknowledged tenure is ill equipped. Conversely, Holzknecht big cities, or in the shanty towns and squatter with appreciation. argues that customary land tenure systems are settlements that surround them. Over 98% of State, Society and Governance in Melanesia the land in PNG is classified as customary, than security. ‘Individualisation’ of communally 2 and traditional claims are often made over the owned land may challenge local values, even remaining ‘alienated’ land. if local farmers often, in fact, farm Land registration or land titling aims to individualistically. The story also depends on a formalise, and give legal effect to these number of other circumstances being in place customary rights and relationships. It involves – banks willing to lend, farmers willing to investigation, survey, and registration as well as mortgage land to borrow, and projects that are the creation of an on-going system to manage worth lending for. dealings in registered titles, once they have been created. It is partly a process of extending the Research Results reach of legislation to include new places, and The evidence for the effectiveness of new objects. It is also a process of discovery customary land registration as it emerged from and recognition. The extralegal arrangements sub-Saharan Africa was at best ‘inconclusive’ already exist. Traditional landowners, for (Platteau 1999: 6). There was no discernable example, are said to know where their impact of registration on investment behaviour. boundaries are – it is a matter of registering Customary rights were often very secure, and them, and allowing the title to be used for negotiable. Markets in land were emerging collateral. The process and effect of registration, without title. Lack of opportunities deterred of course, also changes them. investment more than lack of credit, and in any case farmers were reluctant to put their The Evolutionary Theory of Land Rights land at risk. The process of registration created The international orthodoxy used to be disputes rather than resolving them. Where land that the absence of title was an obstacle to was registered, the records were rarely kept up development. It was based on what Platteau to date. Registration could not grasp complex (1996, 1999) characterises as an ‘evolutionary bundles of rights, and so increased rather theory’ of land rights, which he decomposed than decreased transaction costs. Beyond semi into two elements. First, indigenous land urban situations, the cost effectiveness of tenure arrangements were evolving in the face centralised land registers versus decentralised of population pressure and commercialisation informal mechanisms was doubtful. There were (as he says, the ‘flexibility’ of custom is also unwelcome or unexpected effects on ‘tirelessly emphasised’ by scholars, 1999: 3). This distribution, as registration tended to favour the evolution tends towards individualisation and rich, well educated, well connected and male. formalisation. The second element is a public Similar conclusions were drawn by Atwood sector response to this spontaneous evolution. (1990), who noticed that clarification of By providing titles, governments can reduce the land rights might reduce transaction costs for disputes that result from the changes and induce outsiders, but increase them for insiders, who other economic benefits. Farmers with title will now had to pay survey and registration fees. It be more willing and able to invest, mortgage could also create as much as reduce uncertainty. and sell their land (and governments better able Modelling by Sjaastad and Bromley (1997) to tax it). These sort of arguments underpinned raised questions about the flow of causation. land titling schemes throughout Africa, Asia Rather than tenure determining markets, they and the Pacific. found tenures adjusted to markets that grew up, They have been more recently expressed or failed to, for other reasons. in Hernando de Soto’s influential book The Empirical evidence of the non-effects of Mystery of Capital (2000), which celebrates the registration was found quite independently of entrepreneurial abilities of the poor, and the the African research, in late colonial Solomon informal institutions of loans and rents they Islands. It helped put the nail in the coffin of create outside the formal legal system. He argues colonial schemes that politicians were ready to that countries failed to develop because their dump for other more political reasons (Neilsen legal systems were unable to convert assets held 1979, Totorea 1979a, 1979b) by the poor, including their land rights, into capital, which they could use to grow rich. Official Thinking about Land Registration in These arguments are plausible. They PNG sometimes have less resonance among people The development of official thinking about who, through colonial history, corruption or customary land registration in PNG can post-colonial conflict, see government be divided into roughly four periods: a intervention as a source of insecurity rather ‘modernising’ period in the 1950s and 1960s; Land Registration in Papua New Guinea: Competing Perspectives a nationalist reaction to it at independence; official networks and study tours, the nationalist a ‘liberal’ period in the 1980s; and the model was developed through a Commission of 3 current period of World Bank interest and Enquiry and the consultants they hired. These demonstrations against it. consultants were academics rather than colonial officials, and they brought to bear a different The Modernising Period set of models: from Maori land tenure in New In what was called ‘systematic adjudication’, Zealand, and from other Pacific Islands, rather government teams would move through the than Africa. The break can be seen in PNG country, region by region, interviewing farmers, in 1971, when Dr Alan Ward, a New Zealand surveying boundaries, adjudicating disputes and historian, intervened in parliamentary debates registering the results. Scattered holdings might about the Kenyan model. be consolidated. Individuals or groups might be The bills were running into opposition from registered as owners. Thereafter any dealings several directions: the legal profession, who in land would take place through the register. objected to the administrative provisions, and The system originated in colonial Sudan, and from Papua New Guinean politicians, who was taken up in Kenya, from where it was objected to lack of consultation (Bredmeyer transmitted to Solomon Islands, Papua New 1975). Ward was then a visiting academic at Guinea and Vanuatu (then called the New the University of Papua New Guinea. The paper Hebrides). It was transmitted by a group that he circulated among members was entitled of officials in the British Colonial Office, `Agricultural Revolution, Handle With Care’ which later became the Overseas Development (Ward 1972). In it Ward sharply criticised the Administration then the Department for assumptions behind the bills, and predicted International Development. Their careers had dire consequences if they were enacted. The intersected