The price of fish: problematising discourses of prosperity at the Pacific marine industrial zone

Through a case-study of the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone (PMIZ), currently under development in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), this paper seeks to problematize the dominant criteria against which development projects in PNG and elsewhere are assessed. Notions of prosperity, it suggests, are too often uncritically economistic in their framing, and indeed uncritically modernist, valorising economic criteria of value above others, prioritising the formal sector above the informal, and taking no account of the tensions between customary and modern ways of being and belonging. The paper uses a multi-methods approach, drawing on statistical and discourse analysis of existing documentary material, as well as ethnographic data from the project-affected Rempi and Kananam communities.