Landownership as exclusion

Drawing on an ethnographic analysis of communities living in the vicinity of industrial tuna fishing and processing facilities in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), this chapter explores and critiques some of the claims which are made by proponents of land formalisation in PNG. Far from securing people’s access to the promises of development, globalisation, and statehood, it argues, mechanisms of land formalisation for these communities have, in many cases, facilitated and exacerbated experiences of exclusion. The chapter considers two key ways in which this has occurred: first, through the introduction and privileging of particular practices of boundary making associated with modernist and regulatory approaches to land organisation; and second, through the use of incorporated land groups and lease-leaseback schemes which claim to reconcile customary and modern land systems. The intention here is not to suggest that all forms of legislative response to issues of land organisation should be avoided. Indeed, as the Madang communities find themselves entangled with the structures of both globalising capital and the nation- state, forms of institutionalised response can become both necessary and desirable. The argument, simply, is that more critical acknowledgement be made of the ways in which mechanisms of land formalisation can, themselves, function to exclude.