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
2
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 them1; 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.
1
This is not to say there has been no progress in the development of the state, only that it has been
incomplete and there is much work remaining to be done.
3
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 economics2 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 preexisting 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
characteristics3. 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 preexisting 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?
2
See. E.g., North, D.C., The New Institutional Economics and Development, Washington University in
St. Louis, also at www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/NewInstE.North
3
See Benham, Alexandra, A Glossary for the New Institutional Economics at
http://www.coase.org/nieglossary.htm#REFInstitutions
4
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 areas4, 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.
4
See, e.g., J.F. Swartzendruber, Papua New Guinea Conservation Needs Assessment Synopsis Report
at: www.worldwildlife.org/bsp/publications/asia/papua_synopsis/synopsis.html
5
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 population6.
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
Pacific7. These people brought both more advanced horticultural practices and the
Austronesian group of languages8. 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 predated 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
5
See Melanesian mtDNA Complexity, Jonathan S. Friedlaender, Françoise R. Friedlaender, Jason A.
Hodgson, Matthew Stoltz, George Koki, Gisele Horvat, Sergey Zhadanov, Theodore G. Schurr, and D.
Andrew Merriwether at
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17327912
6
See, e.g., Background to Pacific Archaeology and Prehistory by Patrick V. Kirch at
http://sscl.berkeley.edu/~oal/background/background.htm
7
It is generally accepted that the original Australoid migrations penetrated as far as New Guinea and into
Australia, but it was not until the later migrations originating in Formosa that Vanuatu, New Caledonia,
and, eventually, Fiji were populated.
8
The Austroneisan group of languages has about ten primary branches, all but one of which are found on
Formosa (modern Taiwan), thereby establishing Formosa as the most likely point of origin. All the
Austronesian languages of southeast Asia and the Pacific are in the primary branch known as MalayoPolynesian.
6
Indonesian half of the island, for a total of over 1,000 languages on the island as a
whole9.
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 groups10. 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
9
This represents about one seventh of the total number of languages on earth, which Ethnologue now
estimates at around 6,900. Ethnologue can be visited at http://www.ethnologue.com
10
See Papuan Pasts: Cultural, Linguistic and Biological Histories of Papuan-speaking Peoples, ed.
by Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Jack Golson and Robin Hide in which it is argued that “The
northern third of New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse part of the planet, containing a
concentration of disparate language families consistent with in situ diversification in the late Pleistocene.”
11
See Sahlins, Marshall D. Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and
Polynesia in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1963, Cambridge University Press.
7
economic resources, and is the general equivalent of all others in the area in political
power and status.
The groups do not aggregate into any larger political entity – they are not, as in
Polynesia, pyramidal, with smaller segments combining into larger segments that, in turn,
come together in yet larger and more encompassing polities crowned by an overall
political (and often religious) authority. In PNG, social interaction, trust and
interdependence is intense within each group, but drops off precipitously between groups.
Relations between groups are highly ritualized, revolving around such activities as
marriage links, ceremonial exchanges and feasts, tribal war and other conflicts arising as
a result of disagreements over land or other perceived slights or insults. This radical
disjunction between the institutionalized rules of behavior within the group as opposed to
between groups is perhaps the central aspect of PNG social life and constitutes, as we
will see, both the greatest challenge and main opportunity in the process of nation
building.
c. The Big Man Complex: Achieved Systems
It is in both intra- and inter-group exchanges that economic and, by extension, political
power are built in most Melanesian societies. In most of mainland PNG a defining
characteristic of Melanesian society is that political power and authority are achieved, not
inherited. The “big man” of Melanesian society12 becomes such through his own efforts,
not through ascription as a member of a chiefly lineage or as a result of a position in a
feudal structure. To achieve the position of “big man” requires, above all, the creation of
a group of followers, a faction. The larger the faction the more power accrues to the
leader. However, not everyone is a potential big man – to be such requires demonstration
of certain qualities such as oratorical ability, valor in tribal war (including, often, the
ascription by his followers of supernatural abilities), and qualities of personal and social
persuasion13. Probably the most critical skill is the ability to effectively utilize social
reciprocity to one’s advantage, a process through which one gradually constructs a
faction of supporters.
The skilled big man above all has the ability to choose his spots for support of others by
distributing to them things of value and articles of wealth, such as food, pigs, and shell
money, in public arenas in which those on the receiving end of the big man’s
“generosity” are publicly indebted to him. In order to do so he must start by mobilizing
12
The big man institution is characteristic of most of the Highlands of PNG, and extends along the major
rivers (the Sepik, the Fly and the Purari) to the foothills and lowlands towards the shore. Along both the
north and south shores, and into the main offshore islands the complex weakens and a variety of other
institutions order society, including ascriptive societies as discussed below.
13 There is a lively discussion of the extent to which Highlands, and other, societies in New Guinea
conform to the standard view of “big man” societies as egalitarian systems in which big men achieve status
through skillfully playing the “reciprocity game”, and there are a number of nuanced interpretations of the
system. See, e.g., Inequality in New Guinea Highlands Societies. Andrew Strathern, ed. Cambridge
Papers in Social Anthropology, 11. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. However, it is safe to
say there is general agreement that the outline of the picture presented in this paper is a real reflection of
sociopolitical organization in much of Melanesia.
8
additional labor to generate economic goods. Initially this may be done by enlisting his
own family in gardening and the raising of pigs. Sometimes aspiring big men adopt
children from families who cannot fully support them or offer a home to social isolates in
the village; this avails him of additional sets of hands to work in the garden to produce
more food for distribution or as fodder for pigs.
As he builds his wealth he may begin to provide resources for relatives for ceremonial
purposes when required, thereby building obligations on their part to reciprocate when he
demands it. Another strategy is to marry into several families in the immediate locality;
increasing his access to land and labor. He may then begin to provide brideprice for
promising younger men, adding to the group who are obligated to him and building his
cadre of followers. As his wealth and the size of his faction grow he can provide support
to wider groups for marriages, death ceremonies, other rites of passage and construction
of public buildings such as a men’s house. All these exchanges bring the big man not
only the indebtedness of those he has assisted, who must return to him at his request all
he has provided in addition to what is effectively an interest payment, but also public
reputation as a generous and powerful man.
Once he achieves a certain level of wealth and has a core of followers, the big man on the
move will turn his attention to building his reputation beyond the local group from which
he emerged. He will then take primary responsibility for leading his faction in
interactions with other groups, led by other big men in the area. These activities may
include tribal war, ceremonial feasts during which negotiations are held and
compensation paid following a tribal war, marriage ceremonies and exchange or other
ceremonial occasions bringing separate groups together. In many areas of the Highlands
large scale feasts are held that amount to little more than a challenge on the part of one
big man to another to see who is able to provide the greatest amount of largesse for the
greatest number of people.
The genuine big man is, therefore, a compelling figure, in the full sense of the term. He
has impressive oratorical skills, the instincts of a shrewd businessman able to manipulate
the system of reciprocity and exchange to his own ends, and is, above all, a populist
political leader with charismatic qualities who has gained the unquestioned allegiance of
a large group of dedicated followers who have nearly unquestioned faith in him. The big
man also stands astride the dividing line between the two social arenas, that of his lineage
group and that of surrounding groups. But though his motivation for action in both
arenas is ultimately personal power, his strategies differ depending on the arena.
Within the arena of the lineage from which he sprang his strategies revolve around
support in the provision of resources for those who require it, extension of key links
(through marriage, adoption, and the like) to expand his base of support, frequent
redistribution of resources to continually build support and provision of status to his
group through his own rise in status. The big man also may serve as an adjudicator in
cases of intra-group dispute, working always toward consensus through a process of
negotiation and accommodation.
9
With respect to groups outside his own the strategies are more competitive (and often
violent). His interest is to attempt to lead his supporters to victory in any conflicts, to
shrewdly extract advantage in compensation negotiations, to shame other big men by
eclipsing them in provision of resources for feasting and exchange and to establish
dominance over others in the area through his own accumulation of wealth and social
standing. As we will see below, both the constitution of these teams and the strategies by
which they play the game have served as basic models for operating in the modern
political arena.
There is an essential contradiction at the core of the big man complex. As Sahlins and
others have pointed out, the heart of the support for the big man is his “faction” of
supporters, those who he has indebted through his redistributive practices. As the big
man becomes a big man for an area exceeding his original lineage and supplants other big
men, he becomes responsible for redistributing resources to an ever larger group if he is
to maintain his status. However, this leads to a need to increase the productive levels of
his home group, and can restrict his ability to meet his redistributive responsibilities to
them as he is forced to channel redistribution into a wider area to maintain control. This
can lead to defections from the ranks of supporters, and is one reason the big man system
is inherently unstable.14
At base this instability grows out of the nature of legitimacy in the traditional system.
The big man embodies what Weber called charismatic authority. The big man’s
legitimacy, status and power are based on personal qualities; when he dies or is removed
from the scene his faction rarely survives him. Even if a big man is successful in
extending the area of his prestige and control well beyond his natal group, and manages
to overcome the obstacles to maintaining that control in the face of the increasing demand
for goods and wealth, there is little chance that power will survive his death. There are
always many big men in the same area waiting to step into the breach and to hive off
followers when a vacuum in authority develops.
Big man status is not often passed from father to son. There is little likelihood his child
will embody the same rare combination of skills necessary to assume his position, and
even if the child did have such skills potentially, their possession only guarantees one has
the possibility of becoming a big man in future. Members of the big man’s “faction” do
not have a social obligation to carry over their debts and allegiances to another
generation, and will quickly desert to another individual who is able to meet their
immediate needs and expectations.
Thus the topography of power and charismatic authority where the institution of the big
man holds sway changes frequently and oscillates wildly over time. Even while the big
man is active he is always at risk of losing the trust or allegiance of his followers, and he
is under constant pressure to both redistribute resources to them and impress them with
his abilities in a number of arenas. The big man’s organization – his team - is in constant
flux and at constant risk. In similar fashion, his relations with other big men are
impermanent and subject to change, often sudden and dramatic as allies abandon him for
14
See, e.g., Brunton, R. 1989. The Cultural Instability of Egalitarian Societies in Man (N.S.) 24, 673-81.
10
another big man to mount a challenge to his authority. The nature of the rules of the
game, and the incentives for the actors engaged in the game effectively prevent the
permanent establishment of more extensive political groups and structures. The political
lesson of the insituttion of the big man is that there is no permanence to political
organizations; the organizations change as circumstances dictate. The institution of the
big man can never lead to the kind of large scale political structures found in Polynesia.
Finally, the institution of the big man is a socially exclusive form in the most rudimentary
sense. The institution, and the organizations formed to “play the game”, are, as the name
implies, the purview of men alone.15 Women need not apply. In the traditional big man
complex women have two roles. The first is as a social and, importantly, economic
alliance between households or kinship groups through the marriage link. The important
aspect is the link, not the woman, and the status and access to resources the link affords.
The male pays handsomely to establish it, and the more powerful the family into which
he marries the higher the brideprice to be paid, confirmation that it is the link and not the
woman being purchased. For the aspiring big man this is an instrumental decision of
some importance and is made in the context of his assessment of its utility for his future
career.
The second role of the woman is as a source of labor, both in the “ordinary” household
and in the household of the emergent big man. In these societies women take primary
responsibility for most of the labor-intensive activities. Women tend the children,
procure water, firewood and other necessities several times a day, often requiring a
substantial journey and considerable weight on the return trip (perhaps including the
additional weight of an infant who is taken along). Women also bring all the foodstuffs
from the gardens and prepare meals and keep house. This is the lot of a woman in an
ordinary household. In the household of an aspiring big man the burdens are even greater
as the woman is under pressure to increase her production of foodstuffs so the big man
has more resources for his ceremonial purposes, important transactions, or for more pigs
which are then translated into greater wealth. Often a hierarchy emerges in which one
wife is dominant and is responsible for overall organization of the household, with other
wives subordinate to her.
In sum, in these societies the relations between the sexes are exceptionally inequitable.
This is most starkly illustrated in the sexual division of labor. At base women are the
producers, the source of labor, while men are the transactors, the ones who play the game
of power, wealth and status. To play that game the men require resources; it is women
who produce them. Though women invest much more labor in the production of goods
and wealth, the fact that men are the transactors means that men monopolize the
decisionmaking process in virtually all arenas - political, social, and economic. Women
produce the wealth; men mobilize the wealth and tend to monopolize the benefits.
See Garap, Sarah Women Caught in a “Big Man” Culture: Challenges for Future Democracy and
Governance, State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project, SSGM Conference Papers,
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. 2004.
15
11
d. The Chiefly Complex: Ascriptive Systems
This discussion of big men has been extended, partly because some form of the big man
complex is widespread throughout PNG, and particularly on the mainland. However, the
charismatic authority of the big man and his achieved political position is not the only
model present in PNG. Melanesia is also home to broadly ascriptive systems based on
inherited position in which certain lineages continue, as long as they produce offspring,
to provide individuals who inherit leadership positions. This is a common model in
Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, and, though less frequent, in several of the major
offshore islands of PNG, as well as, at least incipiently, in a number of the shore areas of
the main island. On the offshore islands the institution is notably widespread on the
island of Bougainville and in the Trobriands of Milne Bay Province.
The “chiefly” system in Bougainville16 (mainly in the south and north of the island, as
well as on the nearby island of Buka), the Trobriands and other areas of the country leads
to a style of social and political life distinct from that characterizing areas in which the
big man complex is entrenched. In these areas political power is based on what Weber
called traditional authority; authority flows from linkages to ancestors established
through real or claimed lines of descent. This has several consequences that distinguish
the political and social system from those in which the big man flourishes.
First, political stability is greater because position is inherited and does not have to be
achieved with each generation; there are clear rules establishing who assumes authority
with the passing of someone with traditional authority. The death of a leader does not
produce the chaos of a political vacuum provoking a scramble among contenders for
political leadership. This imparts a political predictability to society absent in the areas in
which the big man dominates. Second, the chiefly system promotes greater stability in
relations among groups, since neither the locus nor the extent of political power shifts
dramatically with the loss of a key political figure or with the passing of power from one
generation to another. Third, the chiefly system provides at least a latent mechanism for
establishing more encompassing and stable political structures extending over larger
geographic areas.
The main institutions of the chiefly system are therefore more stable and persistent and
the organizations formed lead to a more stable political system than those of the big man
complex in which the turmoil of constantly shifting personal alliances and allegiances
expend much of the political capital of a society. But though these systems were more
stable, in PNG the chiefly systems almost never led to more encompassing jurisdictions
as occurred in some areas of the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji and throughout Polynesia.
16
There is considerable discussion of the extent to which the systems in southern and northern Bougainville
and Buka were actually systems in which there was strict inheritance of political position – i.e., the extent
to which they were ascribed systems. Today there is a general notion in the province that the traditional
systems were “chiefly” systems, and there is little doubt that traditionally certain lineages tended to inherit
certain positions, even though this was certainly not as ascriptive as many Polynesian systems nor did it, at
least traditionally, lead to the “pyramiding” of political systems to a political apex as occurred in Polynesia.
12
Interestingly, it was with the difficulties, particularly in Bougainville, during the postIndependence period that the traditional chiefly structure was called on to serve as a
framework for wider political processes in the province.17 Thus, following the
withdrawal of the PNG Defence Force in 1990 a series of councils of chiefs was
established based on “traditional” structures. This included a three level system of Clan
Councils of Chiefs (CCCs), Village Councils of Chiefs (VCCs) and Area Councils of
Chiefs (ACCs), though, in fact, such “councils” had not generally existed traditionally.
The subsequent history of Bougainville has seen a number of shifts in this system, but
even today there is a general feeling in the province that traditional leaders and traditional
leadership structures have an important role to play in the Autonomous Province.
The chiefly system is also distinct from the big man complex in the role of women. In
most chiefly societies women play an important role, and in some, notably those that are
matrilineal, women have control of the most important social and economic resources,
including land. In PNG there is substantial overlap of matrilineality and chiefly systems.
e. Matrilineality in PNG
In some parts of Bougainville, as well as in New Britain (particularly among the Tolai of
the Gazelle Peninsula) and some parts of Manus and the Trobriands, societies were
organized along matrilineal lines. Though the details vary according to locality, this
means that in many of these societies women wielded considerable power, politically,
economically and socially, in contrast to their position in traditional societies in most of
the rest of the country.
Overall, the situation of women in the traditional societies of Papua New Guinea, and
particularly in the areas characterized by the big man complex, is as inequitable as that in
any country of the world18. However, among the matrilineal societies noted above
women are in a generally stronger position, and there is less resistance to women
participating in decisionmaking processes and sharing authority in general, with clear
consequences for inclusion and governance in the modern state.
In these matrilineal societies women are more than mere producers or instrumental links
to powerful families to be exploited through marriage. In much of Bougainville, and in
the Trobriands, the main elements of economic wealth pass through the female line.
Land, the sine qua non of economic power, passes from mother to daughter, not from
father to son. The male child in a household has his primary allegiance, and owes much
of his socialization to his mother’s brother rather than his father, since it is through his
mother’s line that he will inherit any wealth or land for his use on his passage to
adulthood or marriage. Instrumentally and in terms of social status and economic power,
17
See, e.g., Anthony Regan, Traditional Leaders and Conflict Resolution in Bougainville: Reforming
the Present by Re-writing the Past? in S. Dinnen and A. Ley (eds), Reflections on Violence in Melanesia,
Hawkins Press and Asia Pacific Press, Leichhardt:290-304.
See, e.g., Margaret Mead, “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies” in which she discusses
masculine and feminine roles among the Mundugumor, Tchambuli and Arapesh societies of PNG.
18
13
his father is much less important, since the economic goods, and land, to which his father
has access will pass not to his father’s children, but to his father’s sister’s children.
This basic fact of matrilineal life – the control of land through the female line –
necessarily gives women a much larger role in the everyday decisions made in the
household and village. The institutions of a matrilineal society inevitably include rules of
the game that include women as key, sometimes the key actors. This means the
organizations, the teams constituted to pursue objectives in ways defined by the rules of
the game, include women in focal positions, often in leadership positions. It is frequently
the case in such societies that women allow the men to make day to day decisions, but
when more important, contentious or long term issues are to be addressed women tend to
step forward and take an more active role. The integral roles women play in such
societies has important consequences for their involvement and participation in the
institutions and organizations that arise with imported systems such as those introduced
during the colonial period and entrenched with independence.
f. Societies with Extensive Trading Relations
I have noted the tendency of most traditional New Guinea societies to be somewhat
compartmentalized with respect to economic activity. In most instances, and this
includes the chiefly societies of Bougainville, economic exchange occurs primarily with
those small scale societies immediately adjacent to the society in question. However,
there were exceptions to this among traditional New Guinea societies. Some parts of the
country were unusual in the extent of their external trading relations, both substantial and
ceremonial, and those societies were more externally oriented and predisposed to
engaging with outside groups than were the more compartmentalized groups in the rest of
the island.
The Motu-Koitabu people of the modern-day Central Province shared some aspects of a
chiefly society in that the paramount position in the iduhu, the main lineage or clan
group, was inherited through primogeniture, but they had little authority outside their
immediate group and there was little overarching political structure.19 However, these
people had traditions of long distance trade that gave their societies a distinctive outwardlooking aspect. Partly this is because they lived in one of the least favorable
environments for year-round horticulture, so they developed a long-distance sea trading
network, known as the Hiri expeditions, linking them to what is now the Gulf province in
order to supplement their food resources. Sailing in fleets of lakatoi, multi-hulled
outrigger canoes carrying as many as 500 people, they traveled annually to several Gulf
villages where they traded thousands of clay pots for sago, foodstuffs and other
necessities. On arrival they spent a month or more during which ceremonial feasts were
held, marriages consummated between the two peoples, and long term relationships
cemented.
The Hiri expeditions lasted months and resulted in the exchange of considerable amounts
of manufactured and agricultural trade goods. These expeditions were massive
undertakings, and they served to unite the Motu Koitabu, into a single people with an
19
See Goddard, Michael, Rethinking Western Motu Descent Groups, in Oceania, June, 2001.
14
identity extending well beyond individual villages or groups of villages. Partly as a
result, the Motu-Koitabu had little history of inter-tribal warfare, and some authors feel
they were poised, at the time of independence, to develop a more encompassing political
structure that would have included a number of local groups, at least partly as a result of
the interdependence engendered as a result of the annual Hiri expeditions.
Another group that engaged in long-distance exchange was the Trobriand Islanders in
modern Milne Bay Province, a group we have already discussed several times. In their
case the trade was less a necessity of livelihood and more a matter of the ceremonial
establishment of prestige and social status. A hereditary chieftainship society, they were
a part of the anthropologically famous Kula Ring in which two kinds of valuables were
exchanged over a networks stretching through as many as eighteen or twenty islands and
a thousand kilometers. In one direction, clockwise, a shell disk necklace called “soulava”
was sent from island to island, and was exchanged for an shell armband called “mwale”
that moved in a counter-clockwise direction. Many of the more important armbands and
necklaces were named, and they proceeded in an endless cycle around the Ring, returning
to their starting point once every generation or so.
The number of Kula partners an individual had was a measure of social status.
Interestingly, it was the relationships rather than the possession of the valuable per se that
was important. No one actually held onto a particular necklace or armband for a long
period of time, but instead used it to induce a sense of obligation on the part of selected
partners to whom the valuable was sent.
The Kula Ring was an integrative mechanism that established social relations among a
large number of societies ranging across an extensive area. This system served as a
peaceful means of integrating a large area to the east and southeast of modern PNG into a
regional trading network.
g. Similarities and Differences among Traditional PNG Societies
This brief overview of different regions of modern day PNG shows there are both
differences and similarities within and across regions. Among the similarities are, first,
that members of traditional society are not equal. Papua New Guinea has been for
thousands of years, and remains today dominated by social and political systems defined
in kinship-based exclusive terms in which every member of society is seen as different
and, in many cases, with different rights and privileges. These sets of rights and
privileges, whether in a big man complex or a chiefly system, are defined in a variety of
ways, by sex, age, social position, presumed links of lineage to ancestors both real and
totemic, by birth order, by marriage links, by control of land and a range of other factors.
The rights and responsibilities of women, in particular, vary across societies, and in
general their position in traditional society is lower than men, and often considerably so.
Rights within the group differed fundamentally from rights between groups.
Second, the basic unit in the traditional system has always been local and relatively
insular. Even in the chiefly areas there was little inclination or tendency to bring together
local groups into larger political structures, unlike the situation in Polynesia. In the
15
Highlands and other areas in which the big man complex was dominant political
groupings beyond the local lineage were frequent but fleeting, and rarely survived the
demise of the big man who had provoked them. Though the Trobrianders and the MotuKoitabu engaged in long distance trading and exchange networks, in neither case did this
lead to equivalently encompassing political structures, though in the case of the
Trobrianders some chiefs did hold political sway over a dozen or more villages. Still, in
the majority of instances in traditional PNG relations between local groups were tense,
often competitive and as often violent. Some inter-group conflicts were highly ritualized,
with strict and well institutionalized protocols for behavior between groups.20 However,
others were not and included personal fights, raids, fortuitous attacks on individuals and
ambushes. Some of these latter were themselves seen as justification for engaging in full
scale tribal war. Ultimately, however, there were usually well established mechanisms
for re-establishing some form of stability, generally involving ceremonial exchange,
payment of compensation and feasting, though in fact intermittent conflict and attacks
between groups tended to be an enduring feature of inter-group relations.
Though relations between groups were often competitive and even violent and highly
ritualized, relations within groups were based much more on consensus, cooperation, support
and public discussion and negotiation. Strathern21 notes the importance in intra-group
conflict resolution of public discussion in which the disputants are brought together in front
of the entire community to argue their cases. She also notes the importance in traditional
society of providing everyone in the group with an opportunity to express an opinion. This is
the essence of consensus building, and at the end of the process the elders or other leaders of
the group will make a judgment that has, in effect, already been negotiated by the collective.
Charles Yala notes that “The actual process of traditional conflict resolution resembled
modern court hearings, with the entire community acting as jurors and the presiding judge
being the village or community elder. Where necessary, witnesses were called upon to assist
community elders in making their final decision, which was backed by community
consensus.”22
Because of the tendency to insularity of local social groups widespread interaction among
these various societies was, with a few exceptions, infrequent. For the millennia preceding
colonialism the continental main island was effectively completely separate from the large
offshore islands. The commerce between New Britain and the Highlands was virtually nil,
and to the extent that it occurred it was through scores, probably hundreds of intermediaries.
20
This includes tribal war, which had well understood codes of behavior, including acceptable and
unacceptable justifications for initiating warfare, ritualized battles and highly organized ritual activities to
negotiate compensation and exchange following conclusion of the war (which, at least traditionally,
generally resulted in few actual casualties). See, e.g., Brown, Paula, Conflict in the New Guinea
Highlands in Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 26 No. 3, Sept. 1982 (pp. 525 – 546).
21
Strathern, M. (1974). “Managing Information: The Problems of a Dispute-Settler (Mt. Hagen)”. In
Contention and Dispute. A.L. Epstein, ed., Canberra, ANU Press.
22
See James Weiner, Abby McLeod and Charles Yala, Aspects of Conflict in the Contemporary New
Guinea Highlands in Discussion Paper 2002/4, the State Society and Governance in Melanesia Project,
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University.
16
A kina shell (the precursor, at least in name, of the modern currency) could make its way to
the Highlands, where it was considered, given its rarity, an item of wealth. But those who
possessed the kina shell in the Highlands had no real idea that it was from a marine animal,
that it was from an environment in which one could look at a body of water and not see the
opposite shore, in short, that it had anything to do with an ocean since they had absolutely no
concept of what an ocean might be.
While there were general similarities among most of these societies, the differences were
in many respects as significant. Social and cultural forms, though sharing general
respects such as an emphasis on clans and lineages, differed substantially in detail, with
some areas characterized by achieved position while others were based on
ascribed/inherited position with chiefly lineages passing power from generation to
generation, some matrilineal/matrilocal, others matrilineal/bilocal, others patrilineal and
so on. The basic elements of livelihood varied at least as much, with subsistence
activities ranging from sweet potato cultivation in the Highlands to a dependence on
marine resources on the shores, to sago and taro production in the vast lowlands in
modern-day Gulf, Western and Sepik provinces. There were cultures based on riverine
commerce, oceangoing peoples along the shore with extensive trading networks to others
along the shore and to other islands, and rainforest horticulturalists and hunters and
gatherers in the interior.
Among the most important differences for our purposes, of course, are in the sources and
nature of authority and in the control of economic resources, land and other goods. The
charismatic authority of the big man was flexible and ever-mutating, militating against
long-term establishment of stable higher level political structures, and this was the
dominant system in the island. The ascriptive chiefly system was more stable and held
more promise of enduring higher level structures, but was restricted to a smaller area.
Women’s roles were also important differences, and to some extent these overlapped
with the big man/chiefly distinction with women tending to have more power and greater
levels of participation in the chiefly societies while suffering extreme social inequities in
the big man societies.
These differences in traditional societies have led to significant distinctions in the ways in
which those societies have interacted with those political, economic and social systems
introduced during the colonial period that became the formal/legal basis of the “state”
following independence. In most cases traditional societies reacted strongly against the
imposition of a state that claimed legitimacy and domination based on legal-rational
authority. However, the nature of that reaction varied depending on whether the preexisting traditional society was one based on charismatic or traditional authority. Further,
an almost complete failure on the part of the colonial powers to understand the basis of
authority and legitimacy in traditional societies (or, at the least, to understand how those
bases would likely interact with the imported system) meant that moves to address the
problems that emerged in the formation of the state consistently entailed attempts to
strengthen the formal state institutions while failing to attend to the way in which those
institutions articulated with the traditional mechanisms of decisionmaking, authority and
legitimacy. I now turn to consider these more recent developments.
17
D. Modern Political Developments
a. Early Colonial History
There is not sufficient time in this note to provide even an overview of the history of
colonialism in Papua New Guinea. However, for our purposes a brief outline will suffice.
The point is to recognize the essential serendipity of the process that led to the emergence of
the “state” of Papua New Guinea.
The original European explorations were by the Portuguese and Spanish in the early 16th
century. The first colonial claims were of the western half of the island by the Dutch in 1828
and of the eastern half by the English and Germans in the later years of the century, with the
English taking the southeastern portion of the eastern half of the island and the Germans the
northeastern portion. Australia assumed full responsibility for the Territory of Papua in 1906
under the Papua Act, and from the outbreak of World War I the German New Guinea
Territory (Deutsch Neu Guinea) was effectively administered by Australia as well and
following World War I Australia was given a mandate by the League of Nations (in 1921) to
administer the territory. After World War II the two territories were placed under Australian
jurisdiction as United Nations Trust Territories and were amalgamated for administrative
purposes though the legal distinction between the two was maintained. The western half of
the island was annexed by Indonesia under a controversial process known as the Act of Free
Choice in 1969.
It was, therefore, through a process driven as much by historical accident as by any sense of
social or cultural integrity that the great variety of societies occupying the area from New
Ireland in the north to Bougainville and the Trobriands and through Papua, the Highlands and
the north coast came to constitute a single entity. It was an entity unknown to anyone but the
colonial powers. It soon became clear that the pre-existing social and political systems were
not automatically abrogated and transformed by the mere introduction of the forms of a
western political and economic system. Indeed, the tendency to assume that the forms of
western political, juridical and other systems automatically means acceptance of the rules of
the game of such systems has been a limiting factor in developing workable strategies for
development in the country.
b. The Regional Reaction to Independence and Inclusion
These realities were given stark confirmation during the late 1960s and 1970s when the
country was being “prepared” for Independence. From the moment, indeed, even before
the state of PNG was formed, there were strong forces resisting inclusion and fighting to
either prevent incorporation or, once it occurred, to at least modify, if not reverse it. At
the time of independence there was little sense on the part of the various regions that they
should constitute a single nation, and there was considerable confusion about what areas
of the former territories of Papua and New Guinea, including notably some islands such
as Bougainville as well as the Papuan coast, would be included in the new nation.
18
When it became clear the Australians intended to create a single country out of the entire
expanse of Papua, New Guinea, the Highlands and the Islands, pre-existing separatist
movements became more widespread and stronger and new ones developed. The more
organized of these movements, unsurprisingly, emerged in those areas that had some
combination of traditional, as opposed to charismatic, authority structures, a certain
degree of ethnic/tribal homogeneity, and/or traditions of long-range trade or exchange
that provided perspective on other societies and cultures. Essentially this meant the
strongest and most organized reactions to the imposition of a state defined by outsiders
were from the islands and Papuan coast.
i. The Mataungan Movement of New Britain
In New Britain the Mataungan Movement emerged in the late 1960s, at least partly in
reaction to the plans of the Colonial Administration to replace an all Tolai Local
Government Council with a council including other ethnic groups23. However, the
Mataungan Movement quickly mutated into a political movement that in some respects
operated as an alternative government to the colonial administration, and some in the
movement expressed a preference for at least autonomy if not independence for New
Britain and/or the islands region.
It is no accident that the Tolai were a large and homogeneous ethnic group who
recognized themselves as such, largely because of their matrilineal structure. Even
though, as many ethnographers have noted, the Tolai were organized in small, local units
that were frequently in conflict, the matrilineal nature of Tolai society had a strongly
integrative effect. All of Tolai society, across the Gazelle Peninsula and even into its
points of origin in New Ireland, was divided into two exogamous units represented by
two female lines, and these divisions regulated marriage for all Tolai24. An extensive
network of marriage relations therefore mitigated the competition between the smaller
residential units and gave an element of commonality to all Tolai. This unity found its
expression in the Mataungan Movement and the concerted reaction against the plans of
the colonial administration.
ii. The North Solomons Republic Movement
An even stronger reaction occurred in Bougainville. There the strength of the separatist
movement was such that a group led by Leo Hannet and Father John Momis actually
declared the independence of the “North Solomons Republic” three weeks before the
country of PNG became independent, and in doing so forced the emerging central
government to create the provincial government system to devolve sufficient power to
mollify the Bougainvilleans, with ultimately troubling consequences for the development
23
The Tolai are the dominant, both in numbers and politically, ethnic group in East New Britain Province.
They are descendants of a migratory group that arrived in the Gazelle Peninsula area from New Ireland
sometime in the mid-eighteenth century and extended their control over land previously controlled by the
Pomio, Baining and several smaller pre-existing ethnic groups.
24
See, e.g. A.L. Epstein, Tambu: The Shell Money of the Tolai at www.appropriateeconomics.org/asia/png/Tabu_-_Shell_Money_of_the_Tolai_-_Epstein
19
of the country. The continued separatist sentiments in the province have recently led
(through a tortuous 25 year process) to its designation as an autonomous province with an
Autonomous Bougainville Government.
In the case of Bougainville there was a pre-existing system of traditional authority that
lent stability to the local political systems, and though there were few overarching
political structures uniting the local systems there was a long history of peaceful
interaction among those systems. These groups felt little affinity with the populations of
the mainland and saw little utility to the integration of the island with the rest of what was
portended as Papua New Guinea, and they were sufficiently organized to make those
feelings widely known.
iii. The Papua Besena Movement
Less well known is the Papua Besena movement led by Josephine Abaijah and centered
in what is now Central Province among the Papuans of the south coast of the country.
This was a social group that had long experience of dealing with external groups as a
result of the Hiri exchanges. Papua Besena demanded a referendum be held to determine
whether Papua would join the proposed country, and when the referendum was denied,
actually declared unilateral independence six months before national independence in
1975, well ahead of the declaration of the North Solomons Republic on Bougainville.
Again, this is an area in which there is considerable cultural homogeneity, and which,
additionally, had a long history of extensive trade and interaction with outside cultures.
This is also the area in which the headquarters of the colonial administration had long
been established, and this leant the local groups a level of knowledge and sophistication
not generally shared in the rest of the country. As with Bougainville, the Papuans saw
little attraction in being joining an emerging political entity that would include the
Highlands, the North Coast and the Islands regions.
iv. Lack of Coordinated Reaction in Big Man Societies
The reactions to the impending amalgamation of these disparate regions into a single state are
as remarkable for where they did not occur as where they did. The single largest area in
which there was no organized movement against integration into the emerging state was the
Highlands and associated areas stretching from the Highlands to the coast along the Sepik in
the north and the Fly and Purari in the south. These are precisely the areas in which the big
man complex was strongest, long distance interaction among societies lowest and insularity
greatest. These are also areas that were, in some senses, well out of the mainstream (to the
extent such could be said to exist) of communications and transportation, and it is well
accepted that many in these more remote areas were simply not aware of the impending
formation of the state or, if they were, did not understand the political implications of such.
It was not until well after Independence, in the 1980s, that some nascent separatist tendencies
began to emerge in the Highlands largely at the instigation of Iambakey Okuk, a popular
Highlands leader who urged his fellow Highlanders to resist domination by the peoples of the
20
“nambis” (shore or coast). Even this, though, was not unambiguously separatist in intent and
faded rapidly with Okuk’s death.
v. the Institutional Reaction to Separatism: The Unitary State becomes Federalist
These movements were essentially regionally based, and they illustrated that if Papua New
Guinea was to come together as a country it would do so only as distinct regions in an overall
framework that would be federal in structure. This was counter to the original thinking which
was that PNG should be a unitary state, and this was assumed until almost literally the last
minute before Independence when it was clear that Bougainville would not join the emerging
country – willingly, at any rate – without a good deal of autonomy. The presence in
Bougainville of a major copper mine that represented a substantial proportion of the
proposed state’s potential revenues meant that concessions had to be made. Similar
movements in the other Islands and Papua only reinforced this imperative. Thus was the
provincial government system born.
However, this occurred so late in the process that there was no chance for in-depth planning,
and the easiest way to meet the needs of Bougainville and to create what amounted to a
federal system, rather than a unitary one, was to simply convert the pre-existing
administrative units that had constituted districts under Australian administration. So it was
that there was a nearly exact transformation of the 19 districts of the Territories of Papua and
New Guinea into the nineteen provinces of the newly independent state. These divisions
took little account of social and political realities in the several regions of the country, and
resulted in a dramatic swing from what had been intended as a unitary state to a federal
system in which a total population of less than 3 million was divided into 19 (20 counting the
National Capital District) provinces, or an average of less than 150,000 per jurisdiction.
Each province established a system of electorates, government and administration separate
from an already complex national system. This was a prescription for, at best, inefficiency
and, at worst, disaster.
E. The Emergence of the Current System
a. The Westminster System and Traditional Institutional Rules
Papua New Guinea became an independent state from Australia in 1975, at which time it
adopted a Constitution enshrining a formal governmental system modeled on a
Westminster Parliamentary system. This system was bequeathed by the colonial power
which had, itself, adopted it as a variant of the system of its former colonial power, Great
Britain. In fact, the system enshrined in the Constitution of Papua New Guinea was a
mix of the unitary state of Great Britain, the federal system of Australia and the preexisting colonial structure through which Australia had administered the Territories of
Papua and New Guinea for most of the twentieth century. The result was a governmental
system that combined forms of several different systems, with enduring consequences for
the development of the state and the sense of nation.
21
i. The Structure of Government: A Majoritarian and Consensus Cocktail
In his work on modern democratic systems Lijphart25 classes the Westminster
Parliamentary system (quintessentially represented in Great Britain) as a “majoritarian”
democratic system, characterised by a plurality electoral system, unitary government,
parliamentary sovereignty, one-party and bare majority cabinets, cabinet dominance and
asymmetrical bicameralism. Lijphart contrasts this to a consensus form of government
which includes, inter alia, grand coalitions, separation of powers, balanced bicameralism,
proportional representation and federalism.26 Interestingly, Lijphart concludes that the
majoritarian form of democracy is most appropriate to societies that are substantially
homogeneous while the consensus model is appropriate to more heterogeneous or plural
societies27.
What was bequeathed to Papua New Guinea at independence was clearly a curious
mixture of majoritarian and consensus democratic structures. While the PNG system
shared the majoritarian features of a plurality electoral system,28 cabinet dominance and
parliamentary sovereignty, it also had consensus features including, most significantly, a
federal structure. In addition, the PNG system is unicameral, and this mutes the potential
balancing of power at the national level. This is aggravated by the absence of a strong
executive, as the Prime Minister serves, essentially, only at the sufferance of Parliament.
There is therefore little separation of powers, which Lijphart identifies as an attribute of a
consensus system.
As we will see below, it is unfortunate that the specific majoritarian and consensus
features selected for inclusion in the PNG governmental system seem to have worked
against the inherent strengths of PNG traditional societies while at the same time
amplifying some of the most dysfunctional (from the perspective of effective higher level
government institutions) aspects of traditional societies. This has resulted in a system
that neither performs as intended (by those introducing the Westminster System) nor
overcomes some of the traditional obstacles to integrating a great variety of pre-existing
social and cultural systems into a single nation-state.
25
See Lijphart, Arend, Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty One
Countries, New Haven. Yale University Press, 1984 and Lijphart,
26
This division of contemporary democracies into “majoritarian” and “consensus” models mirrors earlier
similar distinctions, notably that of Robert Dahl’s distinction between “populist democracy” (majoritarian)
and Madisonian democracy (consensus).
27
In Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty One Countries Lijphart says that
for heterogeneous or plural societies “majoritarian rule is not only undemocratic but also dangerous,
because minorities that are continually denied access to power will feel excluded and discriminated against
and will lose their allegiance to the regime.” (pp. 22-23).
28
A plurality electoral system is one in which the candidate can win an election without receiving a
majority of the votes, and generally (as in PNG) consists of single member electoral districts. All that is
necessary for election is to receive more votes than any other candidate, even if that number of votes is a
substantial minority of total votes cast.
22
ii. Electorates, the Electoral System and Big Man Politics
The basic political structure of the country is based a division of the provinces into a total
of 109 electorates, from each of which a Member is elected to the unicameral National
Parliament. In a country of (today) about five and a half million people, this represents
roughly one parliamentarian for every 50,000 people. Of the 109 MPs, 90 are elected
from “open electorates” and 19 from “regional electorates”. Open electorates are
mutually exclusive districts within each province, while each province also has one
regional electorate coterminous with provincial boundaries. Both open and regional MPs
have identical powers at the national level. MPs are intended to represent the interests of
their electorates at the national level. Political allegiances are formally based on
membership in a party, each of which has a formal platform or policy stance. Parties
work to form coalitions in contests for control of government. The Constitution
establishes a Parliamentary, and by extension governmental, term as five years, after
which new elections are held.
Members of parliament have historically been elected through a plurality electoral system
based on a first-past-the-post method in which there is a single round of voting with the
individual receiving the most votes declared elected; there is no requirement that any
candidate receive a majority of the vote. This system was introduced for a number of
reasons, not the least of which is that the electorate in PNG is extremely inaccessible, and
several rounds of voting would therefore be logistically daunting29.
The use of the first past the post electoral system has only reinforced the traditional
fragmentary nature of PNG social and political life. In many cases 40 or more people
have run for a single office, so members of Parliament can be elected with less than 10
percent of the vote. In the 1997 elections more than 1,000 candidates contested the 109
seats, and more than half the parliamentarians were elected with less than 20 percent of
the vote; this trend was aggravated with over half the candidates winning with less than
16% of the vote in 2002. The system encourages candidates to focus on mobilizing
support among their traditional constituency of supporters, and particularly among the
candidate’s core social and cultural group. The candidate who can secure the full support
of a small portion of the electorate stands an excellent chance of being elected. This is a
direct extension of the institution and organizations of the big man complex to the
national level.
In most respects it is clear that what has happened is a transferal of the traditional big
man system of gaining followers into the modern political system. This is a strategy that
is well understood by both leaders and followers, and as long as the traditional
redistributive system works effectively the system will continue to be popular.
Campaigning is based on those traditional redistributive relationships, with the leader
providing resources to traditional supporters. The candidate spends most of his time and
effort in the discrete area in which he has kinship links and where his faction is strongest.
He provides goods during the course of the campaign, hosts feasts and distributions of
wealth, including pigs, food and other resources to cement the support of his core
29
Recently a new, more proportional electoral system based on a limited preferential system was enacted,
and this system will be used widely for the first time in the 2007 elections. The possible implications of
this introduction are several, which will be further discussed below
23
constituency. In the modern system he will also provide cash, beer, vehicles, computers
and other benefits to his followers.
In return the supporters provide votes at the election. Therefore, once the candidate is
elected, allegiance is not to the entire electorate, but to the leader’s immediate supporters.
It is understood that the primary responsibility of the leader is to redistribute resources to
those who supported him/her, not to the electorate as a whole. This system is recognized
and accepted by all—including those who are left out because their candidate was
unsuccessful—and reinforces the fragmentary tendencies of Papua New Guinea society.
Though the elections are ostensibly held under rules of the game defined by the
Westminster System, in fact the organizations created to contest them are substantially
analogous to those used by the big man to achieve his political power in the traditional
system. In fact, the adoption of a plurality electoral system was ideally suited to
preserving the traditional political and social divisions between local level groups in
Papua New Guinea, and did nothing to encourage the extension of consensus-building
traditions beyond the local group. Once organizations defined by the rules of the big man
complex became the dominant political teams, the rest of the political process was
inevitably conditioned to operate by the rules of the traditional system. This became
clear in the structure and operation of political parties, the formation of government and,
ultimately, the fragility of governments once formed.
iii. Parties, Government and the Fragility of Power
The structure and working of political parties illustrates a rhetorical reality that pays lip
service to the Westminster system and a behavioral reality that illustrates the actual
institutional rules of the game. If we look closely at how parties are formed and how they
behave once formed the actual institutional basis of PNG politics will become clear. In
this section I will look at the tendency of parties in the PNG context to proliferate rather
than consolidate the insecurity of MPs once elected, the process of formation of
government and the essential fragility of government once formed. These factors
together conduce towards a political system based on short term, personalistic goals and
working strongly against consensus and the establishment, and implementation, of long
term governance and development strategies.
Each party in PNG has a single leader and develops a party platform and party policies
that provide blueprints for social and economic programs. But these statements do not
provide the real rationale for action and despite the existence of party platforms and
formal party policies, membership in a political party is actually based on patronage and
personal allegiance rather than ideology. The parties themselves are not institutionalized
– parties are only vehicles for the expression of the power of individuals who have
established themselves as charismatic leaders in the new national arena through the first
past the post system. The dominance of the traditional system is evident in the pattern of
party proliferation that has characterized PNG since independence.
Most theorists have posited that the use of a plurality voting system should, over time,
lead to a narrowing in the number of political parties. Duverger30, Lipset31 and others,
30
See M. Duverger, Political Parties: The Organization and Activity in the Modern States
24
predict that over time a plurality voting system, such as the first past the post system in
PNG, will lead to a few dominant parties as it becomes clear to the electorate (though this
may take several electoral cycles) that their vote is wasted on smaller parties and only has
impact if they support one of the larger parties which shares in general substance the
voter’s ideological stance. Lijphart, as well, expects a majoritarian system to be
associated with a plurality system of elections and a small number of political parties. So
if the system was actually working according to the institutional rules of the game of the
Westminster system one would have expected that, over time, the number of political
parties would have been reduced to only a few, perhaps even to two, a pattern
characteristic of majoritarian systems
However, in PNG the opposite has occurred, and it appears the consolidating tendencies
of a plurality system of voting have been trumped by the extreme diversity of social
groups and the strength of the pre-existing institutional rules for political behavior. For
example, in the 1977 election only six political parties were represented in Parliament.
By 1987 this had risen to ten, by 1997 to 13 and the 2002 election, the most recent,
returned MPs representing 22 different political parties (and a total of 43 actually
contested the elections)32. This is exactly opposite to what would be expected if party
ideology actually structured the rules of the game. At the same time the number of
independents has consistently been high, with 20% of the 1987 Parliament, 36% of the
1992 Parliament, 33% of the 1997 Parliament and 17% of the 2002 Parliament consisting
of independents.
What has occurred is, rather than the entrenchment of the rules of the game of the
Westminster Party System, the persistence of the traditional system in which allegiance
to a leader is fluid and instrumental, and the inherent competition of the system leads to
fragmentation and fracturing of factions which form, dissolve, and re-form as the
interests of the big men who constitute the faction dictate. This is encouraged by the
large number of electorates which effectively reduces the number of votes required for
election, particularly in a plurality electoral system. The result is that the institutions that
are relevant are not the Westminster parties, but the traditional big man factions based on
personal charisma and power
This instability and proliferation of political parties is both encouraged by and encourages
the remarkable insecurity of MPs once elected. While western political systems tend to
return a very high percentage of elected representatives each electoral cycle (well over
90% in American congressional elections, for example), in PNG tenure of office is very
low. In the 1977 election 62% of all MPs were not returned. This has remained fairly
consistent over the years at well over 50%, and actually reached a high water mark of
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966-first published 1954).
See S.M. Lipset and S. Rokkan, ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An
Introduction’, in S.M. Lipset and S. Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments:
Cross National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967),
31
See Okole, Henry, The ‘Fluid’ Party System of Papua New Guinea in Commonwealth & Comparative
Politics, Vol.43, No.3, November 2005, pp.362–81 for a discussion of the growth of political parties and
the essential instability of political office at the national level in PNG.
32
25
75% not returned in the 2002 election.33 This is partly because both the margins of
victory and the total number of votes cast in each electorate are so small that a shift of
only a few hundred votes in the next election can make the difference between victory
and defeat. Since the MP knows he (or, very infrequently, she) is extremely vulnerable in
the next election, he is encouraged to operate according to the rules of the game of the
traditional system since they recognize that they have only one five year period during
which to cement their status as big men. They are therefore much less concerned about
party ideology or platforms, and more concerned about how they can gain access to
resources and funds for redistribution in order to establish their status.
Even within this fluidity, parties tend to be regionally based, and the leader of the party is
the biggest of the big men from the region. In this case the members of the faction are
other MPs and the leader of the faction is that MP perceived as most powerful among his
followers, primus inter pares34. The party itself is considerably less important than the
individuals who constitute it. This was dramatically illustrated in a 1987 survey of
electoral behavior in which only 4.8% of the respondents cited party affiliation as a factor
in their decision to vote for a specific candidate35. It is individual status that is
determinative. The importance of personalistic factors is given further confirmation in
the process of formation of government after the parliamentary elections.
No party has ever gained an absolute majority of the seats in Parliament in a national
election36. Over the years the multiplication of parties has meant the prospect of
achieving a majority in Parliament has diminished. This means that all governments have
been, of necessity, coalitions. The jockeying to establish a coalition with sufficient
numbers to form government in the weeks following a general election is intense and
patently instrumental. Large sums of cash are passed to potential allies by those trying to
form government, providing those politicians with additional resources for redistribution
to their followers. Those who are the leaders of parties – effectively the biggest of
several big men who constitute their faction - command the greatest price since they can,
at least potentially, deliver several votes. They then, in turn, redistribute some of the
largesse they have received to the other members of the party. Members who have
accepted such prestations and who have agreed to participate in the coalition are
sequestered in removed locales where they are literally guarded by followers of the lead
members of the coalition in order to prevent the competition from approaching and luring
them away with more substantial offers, a recognition of the essential instrumentality of
the process.
33
Ibid.
34
For a discussion of the factional nature of PNG political parties see Kurer, Oskar, Voting Behavior and
Governance: the Case of Papua New Guinea, Institut für Wirtschaftswissenschaft, Universität ErlangenNürnberg, IWE Working Paper Nr. 04 2006
35
See Y. Saffu, ‘Survey Evidence on Electoral Behaviour in Papua New Guinea’, in M. Oliver (ed.),
Eleksin: The 1987 National Election in Papua New Guinea (Port Moresby: University of
Papua New Guinea Press, 1989)
36 In the 1982 Pangu Pati actually gained 50 of 109 seats, and this is the most any single party has ever
gained. However, since that time factionalism has deepened, and in the 2002 election no party got more
than 20 MPs.
26
The key inducement to participation in a coalition is a position in government that
ensures the candidate two things critical to a big man: public recognition of status and
access to substantial resources in goods, services and cash. The plums in this game are
offers of important ministries, particularly natural resource ministries with the potential to
provide significant rents to the minister concerned. Nonetheless, possession of any
ministry will provide the incumbent with access to some resources, and with a title that
confers public status. The utility of ministerial position as a mechanism of redistribution
to induce support for a coalition is the reason behind the growth in the number of
ministries as their potential for garnering political support has become clearer.
At Independence in 1975 there were twelve government departments, each headed by a
member of parliament as minister. By the mid-1980s that number had expanded to over
twenty, and as of the beginning of 2006 the total number of ministries had grown to 29.
The growing number of available ministries has greatly increased the inducements
available to attract potential coalition members. Additionally, in the late 1980s the office
of vice-minister was created and has been added to several ministries; today a number of
ministries also have an office of vice-minister. This means that nearly every member of
government can be guaranteed a position which provides social standing and access to
significant resources and funds. The offices of minister and vice minister are examples
of structures in the imported system that have been adapted to meet the needs of the
traditional system.
Despite the fact that PNG has several traditional institutional models, including the big
man, chiefly systems and chiefly systems in the context of matrilineality, the dominant
model at the national level has been that of the big man. Even once a government is
formed, the basic flux of the big man system continues to affect the political process.
The essential quality of relationships among big men is that they are unstable and when
the opportunity presents itself for one big man to gain an advantage over another it is
inevitably taken. The faction is stable only to the extent that all the members feel their
allegiance to the leader provides them with optimal access to resources for redistribution
to their own followers. When they make the judgment there is an option that provides
them with access to more resources their allegiance shifts.
This is a partial explanation of why, in the first twenty five years of Independence, not a
single government was actually able to serve out a full five year term37. The PNG
Constitution originally provided for a “constructive” vote of no-confidence – i.e., where a
new prime minister is proposed – anytime after six months of a government’s term and
before the last year of the term. A Constitutional amendment in 1991 extended the
“grace period” at the start of a government to eighteen months, but still left two and a half
years in the middle of a government’s term when a vote could be held. The effect is that
the Prime Minister, government in general, has been held hostage to the ebb and flow of
factionalism in Parliament, with the result that every government from Independence
until the present government was turned out on a vote of no confidence. Votes of no
37
The current Somare Government will, in fact, be the first since Independence to actually serve out a five
year term., though even this has only been possible after a tortuous process in which the Prime Minister
attempted to adjourn Parliament for six months to avoid any no confidence vote. When this move was
rejected by the Supreme Court Parliament was reconvened and the Prime Minister managed to avoid
termination of his government by deft negotiation to include additional parties in Government.
27
confidence are successful because allegiance is purely instrumental; teams are based not
on ideology, but on instrumental return, not on the rules of the Westminster system, but
on those of the big man complex.
The argument is even more convincing when we consider the Constitution also provides
for Parliament to dissolve itself and to call new elections, and this could be done, as is
often the case in western parliamentary systems, when a vote of no confidence against
government is successful. But this option has never been exercised, primarily because
the pattern in elections in PNG has been that over 50%, and sometimes nearly three
quarters, of sitting MPs have been turned out at each election. Effectively, most
parliamentarians feel they have only one term in which to take full advantage of the
resources to which they have access as parliamentarians, and they are loathe to take the
risk of shortening their time in office by calling for new elections.
The translation of traditional institutional understandings, and traditional organizations,
to the imported governmental structure leads to little concern for the development of the
nation as a whole and much concern for the advancement of narrow constituencies,
largely defined as kinship based groups who form the core support of the MP. In this
context the fiscal assets of the state are used to build the strength of parliamentarians—
and to weaken rivals and competing social groups, a pattern with which we are familiar
from the traditional big man complex. National planning is weak and poorly
implemented, with implementation decisions driven by patronage and personal contacts
rather than by concerns for sustainable development. Political influence extends to the
bureaucracy, with ministers still, despite recent improvements, able to exercise
considerable sway over career civil servants. Politicians can exercise discretionary
control over large amounts of the state’s resources through the annual budget, and in
recent years this discretion has increased, with little transparency or accountability in the
use of budget funds. If members of Parliament were accountable to all of their
constituents, their funding of projects that make them more electable would simply mean
that the political process was working. In the absence of political accountability, this use
of public funds is self-serving and inappropriate.
In hindsight it appears considerable more thought might have been given to the nature of
the political/governmental system bequeathed to PNG, particularly given the traditional
social and cultural structure of the constituent societies of the emergent nation. Though it
is difficult to be prescriptive, it seems clear that such a system would include more of
what Lijphart has called a “consensus” system and Dahl has called “Madisonian
democracy”. There are a variety of components to such a system, and within each
component there are a variety of possible approaches, but in essence it would consist of
several key aspects. First, the system would be one based on proportional representation
rather than a plurality electoral system. As we will see, to some extent this issue has been
addressed recently with changes in the electoral system. Second, the system would be
one that encouraged federalism rather than the substantial centralization of power in one
(usually national) level. However, that federalism could usefully have been at a more
encompassing level, and the existence of 20 provinces and 109 electorates has had a
negative effect as we will see. Third, it would be a bicameral rather than a unicameral
system, which would result in a more effective division of powers and encourage the
tendency to work by consensus. Fourth, there would be a greater separation of powers
28
among the key branches of government, with the executive, in particular, held less to
hostage by the legislature.
What seems clear is that the nature of the majoritarian/consensus mix unfortunately
selected the very aspects of each of those approaches that had the unfortunate effect of
encouraging the most divisive and competitive aspects of the traditional system, notably
the faction-based organizations inherent in big man politics, and discouraging the most
integrative aspects, notably the consensus and negotiation-based nature of local political
and social structures. Any governmental system bequeathed to a developing nation is
necessarily a work in progress that must be gradually adapted to meet local needs and
realities. But it is clearly useful to begin from a position that, at least in general outline,
is consistent with the inclusive and incorporative tendencies of traditional societies rather
than the opposite. That this was not the case in PNG is clear in the failure of the system
to move towards one based, at the national level, on consensus and national strategic
directions.
The weaknesses of the system bequeathed to the country at Independence were
recognized almost from the moment of – indeed, in some instances even before – formal
Independence. Much of the political history of the country since then has consisted of
attempts to overcome these weaknesses by introducing changes to the system (though in
some cases the desire to overcome those weaknesses was more rhetorical than real).
These results of these attempts have been mixed, generally improving the situation to the
extent they resulted in a move towards a more consensus-based system and aggravating
the situation when they resulted in more majoritarian approach. I now turn to consider
those changes, and to assess the effects those changes have had on the ability of the
system to delivery effective governance and development outcomes.
F. Changes in the System
a. Introduction
There has been a tension between the assumed rules of behavior informing the
Westminster Parliamentary system and the reality of the traditional institutional rules that
have ordered political activity in PNG since independence. Outside actors, notably the
Australians but also international organizations such as the ADB and World Bank, have
strongly urged reform of the political and economic system to make it more accountable
and transparent, though generally these have been reforms at the edges. Partly as a result
of these pressures, and partly as a result of recognition by Papua New Guineans
themselves that the system has been dysfunctional, a number of changes have been made
in the political system since independence, ostensibly to improve governance and
development outcomes. In fact, however, most of these changes have failed to achieve
their alleged objectives, partly because many of those making the changes actually had
other intentions and have managed to subvert the alleged intent, and partly because of a
general misunderstanding of the importance of adjusting the national and subnational
systems to take greater advantage of the inherent strengths of the traditional systems of
the country.
There are four changes in particular that are of importance here: the Public Service
(Management) Act of 1986, the Organic Law of 1995, the Integrity of Political Parties
29
Act of 1999 and the move from first-past-the-post to a limited preferential voting system.
One of these, the Public Service Act, was a clear retrograde step (and has, at least
partially, been corrected), but the other three have promise. In each case, however, there
is evidence that the apparent adaptation of the system has actually been subverted by
reversion to the more traditional rules of the game under the influence of organizations
devoted to the achievement of goals defined by traditional understandings.
b. The Public Service (Management) Act
The Public Service (Management) Act, 1986, was a step backward in establishing an
effective civil service and improving governance. This Act severely curtailed the
constitutional powers of the Public Service Commission (PSC), which had been a
relatively independent body responsible for overseeing public service salaries,
employment, promotion and acting as the arbiter of disputes. In essence this was an
admission that it was uncomfortable for big men to operate with others over whom they
had no control, so they had to “personalize” the system. In the place of the PSC the Act
established the Department of Personnel Management to carry out these functions, with
the result that elected officials, parliamentarians, gained considerable control over the
public service which became increasingly politicized as ministers were able to hire and
fire department heads and other officials with relative impunity. In recent years there
have been moves to restore the Public Service Commission as a body with authority over
these issues, and legislation passed in 2003 reinstated much of its original power. It is
still unclear the extent to which this will restore public service independence and
integrity.
c. The Organic Law on Provincial Government and Local Level Government
The most ambitious of the reform efforts is the Organic Law on Provincial Governments
and Local Level Governments, enacted in 1995. This legislation was a clear admission of
the failure of the provincial government system to function effectively with respect to
issues of service delivery and governance. The rhetoric that accompanied the legislation
made it clear the intent was to shift power to the local level to reverse what was seen as a
stagnation, or even gradual decline, in the quality of governance, as reflected in the
failure to record improvements in basic social and economic indicators over the previous
ten to fifteen years.
The talk was of the need to reduce the level of political interference in the delivery of
basic services, particularly education and health, and to improve the provision and
maintenance of critical infrastructure. There was much discussion about improving
capacity at the subnational levels to improve development outcomes for the people of the
country. While there is little doubt some politicians were genuinely motivated by these
concerns, it is equally certain more were motivated by concerns revolving around dealing
with political rivals, guaranteeing access to resources for redistributive purposes and
30
expanding their own base of power as a big man38. A closer examination of what
actually occurred under the Organic Law and of the outcomes of its implementation will
be instructive.
In addition to decentralizing functions to the district and local levels, the Organic Law
altered the structure of provincial government. In a word, the OLPGLLG eliminated
provincial politicians. Prior to passage of the Organic Law there was both a provincial
political cadre and a national cadre, and provincial government consisted of politicians
elected directly to a Provincial Assembly in addition to the national politicians elected to
the National Parliament. This system was changed so there are no directly elected
provincial members. Instead, provincial assemblies now consist of all local government
council presidents in the province plus the national MPs from each province. The
regional MP from each province is automatically Governor of the province, unless he
holds a national ministry in which case another MP is elected Governor. National MPs
now control the provincial legislatures and are also in positions of power at the local level
through their chairmanship of the Joint District Planning and Budget Priorities
Committee which exercise control over the District Support Grant (DSG, discussed
further below).
There are several ways to interpret these changes. From the perspective of outsiders this
looks to be a somewhat rational reduction in what was an overly politicized system,
eliminating arguably the least efficient political level. There can be little doubt the
elimination of the politicians at the provincial level is, given the history of performance
of most provincial governments, not a bad idea. However, in the context of the
traditional institutions, or rules of the game, what occurred was not so much the
elimination of politics at the local level as the usurpation by the national level big men of
the turf and resources of their provincial level rivals. At the same time this represented a
roll back of provincial autonomy, which would have important consequences down the
road, particularly in Bougainville where provincial government had represented the key
concession necessary to convince the province to join the country in the first place.
If the change is given the first interpretation the legal-rational “rules of the game” would
lead us to expect improved transparency and accountability in the delivery of resources,
services and goods from the national to the local level, and this was what many expected
at the time. If, on the other hand, we accept the second interpretation we would expect
the now triumphant big men to utilize their newfound control over additional resources to
enable them to redistribute even more resources to their core followers, just as the nowdeposed provincial politicians had distributed resources to their followers. One piece of
May noted in 1999 that “The avowed purpose of the ‘reform’ of decentralization was to shift power
towards local-level government. It must be seriously questioned whether local-level government will have
the capacity to carry this load….In the absence of a strong local-level government structure, the new
system is likely to increase substantially the political role of national MPs. Arguably, this was the real
objective of the reforms.” See May, R.J., 1999. Decentralization in Papua New Guinea: F
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back’, in Mark Turner (ed.), Central-Local Relations in Asia-Pacific.
Convergence or Divergence? Houndmills: Macmillan Press, pp.123-148.
38
31
evidence that will help us to decide among these interpretations is how the provisions of
the Organic Law with respect to fiscal transfers have been implemented, and what has
actually happened to those transfers in practice.
At the heart of the Organic Law is a system of fiscal transfers designed to provide
resources to subnational levels to enable them to carry out the decentralized functions.
This was to have resulted in an increase of about 50% in the fiscal resources delivered to
subnational levels. These transfers39 provide the key support for the decentralization of
many basic functions of the state, including important aspects of health, education and
basic infrastructure, and they provide a potential area of significant flexibility and choice
at lower levels. Unfortunately, the transfers have never been consistently provided,
despite the legal mandate to do so. Even worse, the way in which the transfers have been
provided and manipulated has reinforced the fragmentary and exclusive aspects of the
traditional system rather than encouraging inclusion and strengthening the sense of
nation.
First, most of the grants have been only intermittently and/or incompletely provided,
thereby preventing any effective, long term planning at subnational levels predicated on
availability of the funds. Second, the transfers most consistently provided are the
Provincial and District Support Grants, intended for rural action and urban rehabilitation
programs. The District Support Grant (DSG) is divided, with one-half provided directly
to the MP for the electorate, and the other half provided to the Joint District Planning and
Budget Priorities Committee (JDPBPC) which the MP chairs and over which he has
substantial control. The other grants, those intended to go directly to subnational levels
for the functions of education, health and infrastructure have not been regularly delivered.
The only grants regularly delivered are under the control of the MP, and this pattern is
more consistent with the rules of the game of the traditional system than of the introduced
system. The important resources to deliver are those under the control of the big man;
any other resources are either, at worst, a direct challenge to the position of the big man
or, at best, of little interest since he cannot take credit for their delivery. The result is that
a potential avenue for encouraging inclusion at the local level and, by extension, building
legitimacy of the state has in fact been co-opted by the MP and is used in service of
building his status among his followers, with the predictable effect that his followers
benefit inordinately and to the exclusion of others in the electorate.
This dysfunctional approach was exacerbated with the 1999 Budget Amendment 7 to the
Organic Law which increased the DSG considerably and introduced a Provincial Support
39
The OLPGLLG mandated six kinds of grant from national to subnational levels: a provincial and locallevel administration grant, a local-level government and village services grant, a provincial infrastructure
development grant, a provincial and local-level staffing grant, a town and urban services grant and a
derivation grant (indexed to the value of commodities produced and exported from the province). These
were supplemented in 1999 with a provincial and district support grant to be provided to newly created
Joint Provincial and District Planning and Budgetary Priorities Committees, referred to in the text below.
In the 2004 budget government amended the arrangements for funding provincial and local level
governments by replacing existing grants with an unconditional block grant and three function grants, one
each for basic education, rural health and transport infrastructure maintenance.
32
Grant40 that goes to the provincial equivalent of the JDPBPC and is under the control of
the MP elected on a province-wide basis. At the same time the other sub-national grants
– those not under the influence of the national MPs - were reduced. These changes
strengthened the influence of MPs, and further stunted development of state legitimacy
overall.
However, having said this it is important to acknowledge there are instances in several
provinces (notably East New Britain and in sections of some others) in which the MP has
taken a “hands-off” approach to the Provincial and District Support Grants. In these
instances the MP has turned those grants over directly to the Joint Provincial or District
Planning and Budget Priorities Committee to utilize in ways they determine without the
overt direction of the MP himself (though the details of decisionmaking vary somewhat).
It is important to determine how such control (or, where delegated, lack of control)
affects outcomes at the local level, a point addressed below.
d. The Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties
A third change is the passage of the Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties Act
of 1999. The Act was passed in partly in response to the political instability caused by
the tendency of MPs to change parties after the elections in order to solidify their
personal standing as members of government and, ideally, as ministers of major
portfolios which would allow them to fulfill their traditional role as redistributors of
patronage. The Act established rules to regulate the formation, composition and funding
of parties and also imposed restrictions on defections from political parties which, inter
alia, were intended to have the effect of limiting the likelihood of votes of no confidence
since members of specific parties could not shift allegiance simply to support a vote of no
confidence.
The law was amended in 2003 but retains its essential features, although it is unclear
whether it will achieve its intended purpose. For example, the elections of 2002, the first
under the new Act, saw a dramatic increase in the number of political parties to over 40.
A second issue was the continued strength of independent candidates, and 17
independents were elected in 2002. Independents are essentially free to shift allegiance
as they choose and therefore introduce an element of uncertainty, and that uncertainty
increases as the number of independents increases. Nonetheless there are some hopeful
signs as, for example, the fact that the number of parliamentary parties decreased from 21
to 15 in the aftermath of the 2004 elections at least partly as a result of the more strict
application of rules for party registration.
40
In 1996, associated with the creation of Joint Provincial and District Planning and Budgetary Priorities
Committees, a provincial and district support grant was added to the funding package. In 1998 the
OLPGLLG was again amended; the minimum level of the provincial/district support grant was set at
K500,000 per electorate, half of which was to be paid to the JP/DPBPC to fund rural action and urban
rehabilitation programs, and half to the MP in the electorate, to be allocated at his/her discretion within
district support grant guidelines (in some cases, MPs leave the allocation of the entire district support grant
to the JDPBPC).
33
e. The Limited Preferential Electoral System
A fourth change is the move from the first-past-the-post electoral system to the limited
preferential system, essentially a move from a plurality-based to a majority-based
electoral system and at least a partial step towards extending the appeal of candidates to a
larger constituency41. The new system will ask all voters to vote for three candidates, a
first, second and third preference. If a candidate receives an absolute majority of first
preferences the candidate is elected (highly unlikely in PNG), but if there is no absolute
majority then the candidate with the lowest total votes is eliminated and his/her second
and third preferences are distributed as marked to the remaining candidates. Ideally this
process continues until one candidate is allotted more than 50% of the votes.
There are several overt objectives here. First, the new system is intended to encourage
candidates to think of their electorates in more encompassing terms, to encourage efforts
to gain support from a much wider constituency than under the first past the post system
since they are now competing not for a single vote, but for second and third preferences
as well. Second, the system may encourage the establishment of “preference alliances”
between politicians in the belief that it is to their advantage to be able to deliver second
preferences to another candidate with whom they are in fundamental policy agreement in
return for reciprocity on the part of that candidate in directing second preferences to
them. This, it is hoped, will lead to less “confrontational” campaigning and greater
tendencies towards alliance building. Third, the possibility of using second and third
preferences will eliminate the “all or nothing” nature of support for a candidate, and this
will reduce “paybacks” after elections, reduce the stress on voters in areas where one
candidate has strong support and reduce violence overall resulting from perceptions of
betrayal or the breaking of promises. Finally, the option of second and third choices is
thought to be an opportunity for women to express greater independence since under the
prior system they were under tremendous pressure to vote as their husbands voted in
order to support the local big man. Under this system they will have a greater say
because they will be able to express their preference for candidates other than those
supported by the men of the village.
To this point the limited preferential system has been used in ten by-elections, and the
results are uncertain42. In many instances candidates themselves had limited
understanding of the functioning of the new system, and campaigned in ways
indistinguishable from the old system. At the same time voters also had trouble
understanding the system, though they generally were able to make their three
preferences. Standish notes that overall the elections appeared to be less violently
contested, with candidates agreeing, even encouraging, rivals to campaign in their core
41
The preferential system implemented in PNG is applied in single-member constituencies only, so it is not
genuinely proportional in the sense that the first votes of those whose candidate is eliminated in the first
round of counting do not count towards any representation, and only one representative is elected overall.
Nonetheless, it aspires to be at least a majority voting system in that the intent is that one candidate will
gain a majority of votes and be seen to represent a majority of the constituency.
42
See Bill Standish, Limited Preferential Voting in Papua New Guinea: Some Early Lessons, in
Pacific Economic Bulletin, also available at peb.anu.edu.au/pdf/PEB21-1Standish-policy in which lessons
from the first six by-elections are drawn.
34
areas of support in return for being allowed to do the same. There was some indication
that voters who felt obliged to vote for the local “big man” then assigned their second and
third preferences to other candidates who were fairly well known and who were believed
to have the good of the larger electorate at heart.
The results with respect to women were unclear, with many indicating they liked the idea
of having “free” second and third votes, but many also indicating they voted all
preferences according to the way they were instructed by the men of the village. Overall
there were still many problems associated with accurate electoral rolls, the filling out of
ballot papers, particularly second and third preferences, by polliing officials and related
problems, but on balance the system seems to hold promise of reducing electoral violence
and extending the size of the electorate to which the successful candidate feels a
responsibility. Nonetheless, there is reason for cautious optimism that the introduction of
the system will encourage the development of larger communities of interest than have
hitherto existed under the traditional social and political systems; that the system will, in
some sense, encourage consensus politics at the local level.
G. Identity and Nationhood
This discussion of the traditional systems of New Guinea and their interaction with the
introduced Westminster Parliamentary System provides the context of the current situation
with respect to the state and nation in modern PNG. Though there have been some
integrative advances, the simple fact is that today PNG remains predominately an
aggregation of small, fragmented social groupings with little idea of common identity or
interest. There is no genuine sense in which the people see themselves as Papua New
Guineans. Rather, people see themselves as members of a localized, usually clan-based
group, sharing a common language, common ancestry, attachment to a specific area of land
and a mythic corpus explaining their origins and place in the world. In some areas, notably
the Islands and along the Papua Coast (and, at least nascently, in sections of the Highlands)
there is a perception of regional interest, though this is often conceptualized in contrast to
national interest or identity.
There has been no galvanizing experience (as a protracted, often violent, independence
movement characterizing many former colonies) to promote a shared sense of identity and
national purpose. Legitimacy is conferred to local leaders, be they big men in the Highlands
or chiefly lineages in Bougainville. Legitimacy is still based on either charismatic authority
or traditional authority, and the legal-rational authority of the states comes a bad third among
the bulk of the population. What it is to be Papua New Guinean is still being determined.
This is both a weakness and an opportunity. Three lessons emerge from this analysis that can
point the way to overcoming the weakness and seizing the opportunity.
First, in order to build an effective state and, by extension, a sense of nation the minimum
requirement is for central government to demonstrate unequivocally the state is able to
actually provide benefits to its citizens. If this minimum standard is not met, the frank
truth is that there is little motivation for the various components of the country to remain
together. The inherent centrifugal tendencies have already been manifested clearly in the
35
move to autonomy on the part of Bougainville province and the long-standing sense
among the other island provinces, as well as lingering feelings in Papua, that they might
actually be better off as autonomous, or even independent, entities than as members of
the PNG state. These tendencies are never far beneath the surface, and if the various
areas do not see clear benefits to remaining a part of the state they are likely to emerge
once again. Government must recognize this imperative and act on it, in ways I discuss
further below. The time has come for a decision on the part of the national political
powers whether they are committed to pursuing traditional, inclusive redistributive
practices or whether the survival of the state as a viable entity is more important.
Second, in demonstrating that membership in the state is of benefit to the constituent
elements the national government must recognize that the institutional structures and
rules of the game of the Westminster System (or, more accurately, of the mix of
majoritarian and consensus systems of which the PNG political economy consists) are not
those that will order the political economy of the country. Interaction with different
regions, even different provinces and districts, will require different approaches to
governance, decentralization and service delivery that encourage inclusion and
participation, but structure the participation in ways appropriate under a variety of
different traditional systems. This flexibility will be necessary if the various parts of the
country are to effectively promote development outcomes in their respective areas,
thereby demonstrating the benefits of remaining within the state as a whole. Some ways
in which this might be done are discussed in the following section.
Third, the goal of activity by government as well as by development partners such as
Australia, the World Bank, ADB and others should at all times be oriented towards
encouraging the inherent integrative and consensus building tendencies of PNG societies
and discouraging tendencies towards conflict and fragmentation. Realistically it is
unlikely major changes will be made to the system of government over the short to
medium term, so this means other gradualist approaches need to be taken. At the national
level strengthening accountability, transparency and reliability in the delivery of
resources and services is important. At the local level this means any development
activities should include explicit incentives for local groups to cooperate with one another
in defining development objectives, particularly where those local groups have not had
histories of cooperation. The intent should be to promote coalitions of local level groups
where such coalitions have not previously existed, in order to develop “communities of
interest” that will put pressure on the formal (and other) structures to meet wider local
level needs than have been operative in the past.
36
Part II: Ways Forward
A. Introduction
At the beginning of this paper I asked what adjustments could be made in both sets of
institutions – the traditional and the introduced – so the organizations, the teams, responding
to the rules of the game, the institutions, are oriented towards objectives that will work to the
benefit of the country as a whole, that will lead to good governance and positive development
outcomes. The analysis has pointed to two areas in which adjustments can be made, and
provides some hints concerning the kinds of strategies that might be effective in improving
governance and development outcomes. The strategies need to be applied from two
directions. One approach focuses on the lower levels – it is bottom up – and one focuses on
the higher levels – top down.
The first area in which evolution is possible is with respect to the challenge of local level
inclusion in which traditional mechanisms of consensus and social control are put to the
service of equitable local level participation in the process of nation building. The second is
the challenge of effective national level articulation with those emergent, inclusive local level
structures and processes that take advantage of the strengths of traditional PNG societies –
such as consensus building and negotiating skills – while overcoming some of the
disadvantages – such as exclusionary tendencies and a failure of cooperation across local
groups. It is important to recognize that there are strengths in the traditional systems of the
country that can be built on to improve overall governance and development outcomes.
However, the simple fact is that the current structure of government militates against these
strengths. The trick will be to pursue strategies that build on traditional strengths in the short
to medium term, both at the local level by encouraging inclusive processes and at the national
level by developing strategies that articulate with those inclusive processes.
B. From Conflict to Consensus at the Local Level: From the Bottom Up
At the local level the main challenge is to move beyond the exclusive and fragmented
local level structures symptomatic of the grass roots levels of PNG society and that
provide the impetus to view the state as a resource to be plundered and competed over for
distribution through patronage networks. This is the demand side of the equation. It is
the demand from this level that has conditioned the ways in which national level officials
have personalized the institutions of the Westminster System in order to use them for the
achievement of objectives defined by the traditional systems.
The persistent tendency of national level politicians to pervert the intent of the introduced
system is a result of the expectations to which they respond from the local level. If this
behavior is to change it will only be through a change in demands from the local level.
This entails the promotion of mechanisms and processes by which legitimacy is gradually
transferred from primarily local to broadly trans-local and, eventually, regional and even
national groups. Despite a general pessimism at the quality of development in PNG,
there are promising signs this has been occurring for some time. These examples need,
37
first, to be recognised and, second, used as templates for similar processes in other areas
of the country.
These processes have been occurring for decades, but have frequently been ignored,
marginalized, even seen as threats. In many areas of the country, both urban and rural,
groups have been established that are deepening links across local groups that, in turn,
lead to an extension of legitimacy beyond the clan or village to larger social aggregations.
These are disparate groupings and have emerged in a variety of contexts, including urban
squatter settlements, in institutions of higher learning, at the instigation of churches, in
some rural areas in which formerly competing groups are being brought together in
pursuit of common interests, in mining areas, and even among raskol gangs. These
groups are indicative of the slow emergence of a more inclusive sense of identity.
These processes respond to and are reflections of traditional Papua New Guinean
understandings, and have the potential to evolve into sustainable institutions and
organizations to promote equitable development across the country. Despite the fact that
PNG societies have traditionally been exclusive and competitive, those exclusive groups
embody, within the group itself, some decisionmaking processes that can serve as a basis
for more inclusive processes. Many local groups take generally similar approaches to
methods of conflict resolution, decisionmaking and consensus building, social support,
systems of land use and tenure, means of achieving and retaining status, approaches to
critical life events and so on. These essential similarities have been the platform on
which many local initiatives have built links across more inclusive and extensive groups,
pointing the way to a truly endemic sense of what it means to be a Papua New Guinean.
Though there is not space to examine all such examples here, a few will be illustrative.
a. Some Integrative Local Level Processes
These groups have emerged in a variety of contexts and in response to a variety of
stimuli. In the Highlands of Oro Province the Managalas Plateau is home to more than
10,000 people organized into more than 100 sub-clan groups living in small village and
hamlet communities and primarily dependent on subsistence agriculture. Over the course
of the past fifteen years the Plateau has been the site of a process that has taken an
approach including provision of information about the potential of the area for income
generating activities, awareness building of the implications of potential development
activities, consensus building among groups who had previously not cooperated with one
another and the implementation of various small scale enterprises, including coffee
cultivation, okari nut cultivation and other eco-enterprise activities.43 . The entire Plateau
has been divided into ten culture zones, each of which includes a number of villages and
hamlets and brings together six to fifteen different sub-clan groups. Each zone works to
develop a long term sustainable development strategy, working closely with local level
governments and political representatives.
This is a long term process involving repeated meetings among local groups, extensive
negotiation of ideas and goals and the full participation of all local stakeholders in a
43
See Managalas Plateau Conservation Area Project, at http://www.pwmpng.org.pg/program.html
38
process to understand potential development activities and agree on those that make most
sense in the local context. Once groups agree on development strategies the process
introduces business structures and practices to enable participants to extend economic
activities and take advantage of opportunities. Standard business organizational
structures and management practices are adapted to more accurately reflect core
Managalas cultural values and to provide greater autonomy for local clan/cultural groups
at the same time they encourage collaboration among local groups in meeting the needs
of potential outside buyers and marketers. The intent is to extend new income generating
opportunities and to provide the tools necessary to empower stakeholders to take a
controlling role in the direction of their development, so that program goals become
community and clan goals in the future.
Several of the zones have established incorporated business entities, and on an annual
basis the villages in each zone come together to discuss progress in the past year, plans
for the future and to adjust their development strategy. Following the separate zone
meetings a combined forum is held on an annual basis at which all the zones come
together to discuss how they can work more effectively together, what opportunities exist
and how to take advantage of them and other issues of mutual interest and importance.
At each stage of the zone and combined zone meetings the Local Level Governments,
District level bodies (such as the JDPBPC) and other formal institutions at the local and
district level are full participants in the process and this leads to integration of local
development strategies into formal government planning and implementation processes.
Another example of the development of more inclusive groups at the local level involves
the transparent and accountable use of the District Support Grant that goes to the Joint
District Planning and Budget Priorities Committee in East New Britain Province. As we
have seen, District Support Grants can be an important element of local level governance
as they are annual grants provided to the District (and, with respect to Provincial Support
Grants, the province) level as a part of the fiscal transfers mandated under the Organic
Law of 1995 intended to be used for local level development, particularly infrastructure.
As we have also seen, there have been consistent problems over the past ten years and
more because the MPs have had effective control of the funds and the great majority of
them have failed to adequately acquit their use (a number MPs have been called before
the Leadership Tribunal and/or Ombudsman, and several have been forced to resign as a
result of malfeasance). The majority of MPs have treated the DSGs as a “slush fund” to
be used to the benefit of their followers with little regard for the overall development of
their constituencies.
But there are exceptions. In Gazelle District the MP has made the decision to turn all
DSG, and some additional, funds over to the JDPBPC to be used in ways determined by
the district administration, and to be clearly and transparently acquitted. The District
Administrator recognized that the competing interests of over 130 wards in the district
meant that there would be too little for each ward and that having each ward prepare
submissions for use of the funds would be both inefficient and wastefully competitive.
He and his deputy, with the full support of the MP for the district, therefore developed a
system intended to promote the development of consensus across formerly exclusive
39
groups. They insisted that wards amalgamate before they prepared submissions for
funding. This has resulted in the 130 wards amalgamating into 14 “zones” with an
average of 9 to 10 wards in each zone. This encourages wards with common needs and
priorities to come together and jointly prepare proposals for funding. This is done with
the assistance of technical expertise from the District Administration.
Once proposals are prepared, the zone representatives sit with district officials and it is
made clear the exact envelope of funds available over the next three to five years, and
within this envelope a specific plan for implementation is devised. This results in more
realistic and integrated plans for local development, and provides a clear and predictable
timetable for implementation. Full involvement of local people is encouraged, in
preparation, implementation and operation and maintenance. This is a potential model
for rural development in other areas of PNG.
These are only some illustrative examples of the kinds of integrative activities already
occurring at the local level throughout the country. In different parts of the country other
mechanisms are used to achieve substantially the same objective. In some parts of the
country institutions and organizations are being developed around mining and other
resource extraction activities, in some areas MPs are developing innovative approaches to
providing sustainable development programs, in some areas there are interesting
private/public sector partnerships emerging, as in Western Province where the PNG
Sustainable Development Program, Ltd., is making use of mining revenues from the Ok
Tedi mine for a variety of development activities, some of them, as in the Microfinance
Project, in partnership with the private sector. The point is that in different parts of the
country there are different traditional structures oriented towards consensus building and
negotiation, there are different kinds and levels of resources available, and there are
different needs. No one size will fit all, but all are capable of extending the range of
cooperation beyond the purely local group and all can make more effective use of the
resources available, even where those resources are limited.
b. Some Lessons of Local Level Development Activities and Potential Areas of
Inquiry
These approaches are not isolated examples. The GoodNews Workshop, conducted in
November, 2005 in Madang and sponsored by the State, Society and Governance in
Melanesia Project44 of the ANU in collaboration with the Divine Word University,
examined a range of approaches that show promise for improving development outcomes
and governance at the local level. The Workshop came to many of the same conclusions
as this paper with respect to the kinds of approaches likely to be effective and sustainable
in the PNG context. Some important conclusions of the workshop were that:
 “Statist” approaches to development assistance are of course vital – we
cannot give up on strengthening the state – but there are considerable traps
44
The State, Society and Governance Project of the School of Asia and Pacific Studies of the Australian
National University has done more consistent and seminal work in the area of governance in the Pacific,
and in PNG in particular, than any other organization since its establishment in 1996. Their website can be
visited at http://rspas.anu.edu.au/melanesia/
40




for players unprepared or lacking an understanding of the interplay between
Melanesian societies and the introduced state apparatus (or indeed of the
nature/model of the weak state that was left at independence).
The existence of vibrant and robust societies getting on without the state,
finding local solutions, coping with considerable adversity with or without
some partially effective state assistance becomes increasingly obvious as the
social ‘lens’ is applied to PNG.
Social capital is developing rapidly and with it, civil society. Local level
organizations – spontaneous and assisted – are emerging at a rapid rate.
“Transactions” of a modern economic and political nature (i.e., beyond
‘tribal’ but also within it) are expanding exponentially. Entrepreneurship
and the thrust for economic gain is one of the major drivers of this
development, but it is by no means the sole force for change.
The further development of social capital would be enhanced greatly if
communications and information flows could be dramatically improved. A
constant theme was that of making more widely available knowledge of the
successful ventures and initiatives and their rationale and modus operandi.
How to help other communities emulate these initiatives – in social order,
provision of services, connectedness to the state, and in generating general
well being? How to expose a broader range of communities to these role
models and champions of development and reform?
Research into, for example, the conditions and triggers for such community
initiatives, into the spatial distribution of such initiatives (e.g., are they more
concentrated in remote areas, for example, Burum Valley, or around existing
economic hubs, for example the oil palm schemes?) would throw further
light on these dynamics of development.45
This kind of work shows that there are a variety of initiatives occurring at the local level
in PNG that show promise for improving governance and development outcomes.
However, more work needs to be done to understand the kinds of local level groups that
have emerged and proven successful in bringing together local constituencies to
cooperate in planning, implementing and operating local initiatives, and the extent to
which the existence of such groups is correlated with shifts in ascription of legitimacy.
Building on the analysis in this paper, the outcomes of meetings such as the GoodNews
Workshop and others, some obvious routes of inquiry at the local level should include:
45
See SSGM Report on the Conference GoodNews Workshop: Examining successful
models of community development, entrepreneurship and governance by David Hegarty,
Australian National University. The conference was organized by the State Society and
Governance in Melanesia Project, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian
National University in collaboration with Divine Word University and held in Madang,
Papua New Guinea on 24 – 26 November, 2004 with funding support from the Australian
Government through AusAID.
41
1. What is the range of trans-local groups operating at the local and district levels in
PNG? This will include church groups, mining groups, groups established for
specific purposes in rural areas, urban squatter groups of various sorts, migrant
worker groups and others.
2. How are such groups structured and how do they function? This will include the
areas from which the groups draw membership, the makeup of membership (male,
female, livelihood groups, special interest groups, external members, etc.), how
leadership is structured and determined, how decisions are made within the group,
areas of interest of groups, resources available to the groups, how they seek to
influence activities and processes affecting the local level, and so on.
3. What is the quality and nature of the relationship between trans-local groups and
other organizations and institutions in general, as well as specifically local level and
district level governments and government agencies? What are the levels of and
sources of support provided to trans-local groups, and the extent of input of such
groups into planning and decisionmaking at local and district levels?
4. What kinds of legitimacy do such groups have among the villages and/or
communities in which they operate? This would initially take the form of focus
groups in which an institutional mapping is done of the groups and organizations seen
as important to local people, the links among groups, along which dimensions they
see those groups as important, and their attitudes towards the effectiveness of those
groups.
5. Identify those areas in which trans-local groups have been particularly successful,
have a high degree of legitimacy and have operated for a reasonably long time.
6. How are the existence of such groups, perceptions of them among the local
population, and perceived success of activities in which they are involved correlated
with levels of resources delivered to the local level and with the ways in which
formal institutions, such as LLGs and JDPBPCs, operate at the local level?
The initial results of these analyses will be a picture of the extent to which different kinds
of integrative local groups are active in PNG, the nature of their activities, the ways in
which they are supported through the transfer of resources, and the extent to which they
are being mainstreamed as full partners in the development process. The work will
identify those situations in which local level groups are able to most effectively cooperate
to achieve common goals and how they can be most effectively supported in the
achievement of those goals. The level of success and effectiveness will be further
correlated with the structure and nature of fiscal transfers occurring to the provincial,
district and local levels, and in particular with the extent to which those transfers provide
flexible resources that can be adapted to the specific needs of each local situation.
This information will reveal a number of contexts in which the process of establishment
of trans-local groups and their effective articulation with state (and other) institutions has
proceeded successfully, thereby providing both an entry point for further support and
models for implementation of similar processes in other areas of the country. This would
be done in an integrated manner, in which, e.g., CDD operations engage trans-local
groups, but only if there are guarantees on the part of government that fiscal transfers are
42
consistently provided under the conditions the research establishes as optimal for success
in local level development.
However, these approaches cannot be viable on their own. They require support –
consistent and predictable support – from higher levels. If the state is to become a truly
viable entity it needs to become actively involved in supporting and promoting these
kinds of integrative activities at the local level.
C. The State as Nurturer of National Identity: from the Top Down
The second challenge, therefore, is to structure the state and state interventions so they
are supportive of the already occurring processes that could eventually lead to the
development of a national identity. This is critical if the state is to achieve widespread
legitimacy among the people who are intended to be its constituents. If we recognize the
local level needs to become more inclusive, then the role of the national level is to
support those traditional tendencies towards inclusion. This is not to deny the
importance or working to improve the performance and capacity of the state from the top
down – improved oversight institutions, better public expenditure management, improved
planning, budgeting and implementation capacity is critical – but care should be taken to
ensure that those attempts are not directed more towards propping up a decaying and
inappropriate state structure than to adapting the structures of the state to articulate
effectively with the emerging social and cultural understandings shared among Papua
New Guineans qua Papua New Guineans. In this section I will first address some of
these issues of strengthening national level accountability and transparency, after which I
will move into a discussion of ways in which the national level needs to acknowledge and
account for differences at the subnational level if it is to become more effective in
meeting the governance and development needs of the country.
a. Oversight Institutions
There has been a good deal of concern with strengthening the oversight institutions with
responsibility for ensuring the accountability and transparency in operation of the
country’s public institutions. The country has a range of oversight institutions, including
an Ombudsman Commission, the Auditor General’s Office, the Office of the Attorney
General, the Solicitor General, Pubic Prosecutor and Parliament itself (through such
bodies as the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee). As a recent mission to PNG
by Richard Messick has confirmed, there is clearly room to strengthen these institutions
and to provide them with additional human and financial resources so they can operate as
effective checks on malfeasance, mismanagement, corruption and waste in the public
sector institutions. For example, the mission found that the capacity of the Auditor
General’s Office “to audit provincial and local governments, through which close to 70%
of the national budget flows, is virtually non-existent”46. The mission also reported that a
2005 management review of the Ombudsman Commission “praised the commission for
46
See Messick, Rick, Back to Office Report PNG Oversight Institutions, Pre-Identification Mission,
March 8 – 16, 2007.
43
its vigorous enforcement of the Leadership Code, [but] nonetheless found that the
commission fulfilled only two of the 112 primary duties assigned to it by law”47.
Activities to increase awareness of the importance of oversight institutions, combined
with the strengthening of those institutions themselves, will be important in the short to
medium term. However, having said this the core problems in the country have more to
do with incentives for behavior and with the expectations of national politicians by
citizens than with enforcement activities per se. Enforcement is useful, but has its
primary utility in a situation in which the general institutional rules of behavior are
accepted by most actors. At this point in PNG it is not the case that the Westminster
rules are accepted. If we can progress to a point where a workable adaptation of
Westminster and traditional rules are the accepted rules of the game, then enforcement
activities will be both more accepted and more applicable. Right now this is not the case;
there is a need to transform the notion of the state from a distant and largely irrelevant
arena in which big men pursue their individual aims and objectives to one that is in close
and consistent contact with lower levels in a predictable and supportive manner. Once
those more inclusive rules are generally accepted as the template for action, enforcement
will be both more manageable and more effective. There are several steps the state and
central government can take to promote the acceptance of those rules.
b. The Importance of Consistency and Reliability of State Support
One key to this supportive role of the state is to promote the perception (based on reality)
that the state is a dependable source of supply of needed resources. This perception will
not develop if the support of the state is not consistent and predictable. Support for basic
services, such as health, education and basic infrastructure, has never been consistent, and
has therefore never been something on which people could depend. Where infrastructure
has been provided, e.g., there is almost always insufficient attention paid to operation and
maintenance, with the result that the benefits are short term and intermittent. Clearly
there is a place here for capacity building, both with respect to provision of
improvements and maintenance of those improvements once provided. This is a long
term process that is necessary, but not sufficient to promote sustainable development.
In addition, or in concert, the state needs to adopt a more nurturing and supportive role, to
fully engage all subnational levels (down to and including trans-local groups) on an equal
footing to promote the development of a distinctly Papua New Guinean idea of nation.
The state should recognize it needs to learn from those lower levels what kinds of
organization work to promote the expansion of identity beyond the purely local group,
and it needs to support those groups and pull them into active participation in
development, both of the country and of the nature of the state. The kind of group and
the ways in which such groups interact with the state will differ depending on the region
and the pre-existing sociocultural structures, but in all cases there are local level allies
who need to be enlisted in the effort. If this becomes the goal of state activity, then the
state itself will gradually evolve to reflect the endemic Papua New Guinean approach to
47
Ibid.
44
building consensus and acting for the common good which has allowed these groups to
emerge in the first place.
The emergent sense of nation will then be one that reflects, but transcends, traditional
Papua New Guinean social and cultural understandings, and not one predicated on
imported structures and understandings. Rigid prescriptions about how higher level
institutions interact with lower level institutions and groups risk stunting the development
of creative mechanisms of inclusion at lower levels. Though this is clearly a long term
process, there are some avenues already available that can go a long way towards
institutionalizing this kind of approach.
One readily accessible avenue for this kind of open-ended engagement is through the
fiscal transfers mandated under the 1995 Organic Law. As we have seen, these transfers
provide the key support for the decentralization of many basic functions of the state,
including important aspects of health, education and basic infrastructure. They provide a
potential area of significant flexibility and choice at lower levels.
If the fiscal transfers, which include considerable sums for the local levels, can be
effectively implemented, they would provide an avenue at the local level for engaging
those groups, structures and institutions that are trans-local, that have extended inclusion
beyond the clan and village to include other groups in the local arena. The nexus of
local, inclusive groups and the lowest levels of formal government, particularly local
level governments and the district level, is critical in promoting a healthy relationship
between emergent trans-local groups and the state. If the fiscal transfers can be effected
in a consistent, dependable manner, and if the application of those resources can be
removed from the control of those who would utilize them for traditional, exclusive
purposes, local level planning and budgeting holds the promise of supporting and
nurturing the emergence of a truly productive and legitimate process of development.
This requires recognition that a variety of local level institutions and groupings have roles
to play in expressing the demands and of, and providing basic needs and services to
people at the local level. These groups need to be fully engaged in planning, budgeting
and implementation activities. This will both support local level development in an
inclusive and sustainable manner and gradually influence higher levels of the state to
adapt its institutions and processes to the needs and demands of Papua New Guineans
rather than operate in the straightjacket of imported understandings and structures.
c. Different Strokes for Different Folks: Equity in Resource Transfers
The fiscal transfers are only one part of the puzzle. Overall the national government
needs to become a more dependable source of support for the lower levels of government
and, eventually, for the citizens of the country. In addition to the transfers, this requires
more effective planning, budgeting and implementation of such basics as service delivery
and infrastructure provision. In order to do this there is a need to recognize the differing
situations and needs of different areas of the country. Different provinces have different
social and cultural structures, different challenges with respect to access, and different
45
capacities and potentials with respect to both human and physical resources.
Interventions need to recognize these differences and be tailored to the distinct needs and
situations in different parts of the country.
Some important work in distinguishing among the capacities and needs of different parts
of the country has been done by the National Economic and Fiscal Commission. The
NEFC was established by statute consequent on the Organic Law of 1995 to advise on
national macro and micro economic issues and monitor overall development, including
provincial and local levels. The NEFC was to monitor the implementation of, inter alia,
the fiscal transfers mandated under the Organic Law and to ensure that such transfers
were made in an equitable manner.
In recent years the NEFC has done groundbreaking work in analyzing the effectiveness
and equity of not only the fiscal transfers but resources in general available to different
provinces across the country48. It has determined that when the overall resource envelope
available to provinces is considered certain provinces are far better off than others.
Specifically, some provinces benefit inordinately as a result of resource extraction
activities resulting in large sums being returned to them as royalties or derivation grants
(based on a percentage of total exports from a province), while those provinces with no
resource extraction activities tend to receive far less and much less than is necessary for
basic maintenance and operation of infrastructure, service delivery and other functions
assigned them under the Organic Law.
NEFC has determined that the total transfers for 2005 to the provinces and lower levels
amounted to a total of K385 million. Of this, only K100m, or 26%, consists of Organic
Law grants. K160m, or 40%, consists of GST transfers, 19% (or K75m) of royalties, and
15% (or K50m) of locally raised revenues. This work by NEFC has demonstrated that
the combination of grants, royalties (for mining provinces), GST, and local revenues
available to provinces is extremely inequitable. Those that receive large royalties (e.g.,
New Ireland, Western, Enga, Southern Highlands) all are able to meet 100% or more of
their costs49 while this is true of no other province. At least eight provinces are unable to
meet even 50% of their costs under the current system. The current system of Organic
Law transfers (based largely on population) does not take account of the difference
among provinces with respect, e.g., to the accessibility of population, which can add a
great deal of expense to the provision of services and infrastructure.
In addition, fully 60% of the funding for goods, services and development in the
provinces is in the form of GST and royalties, and these are distributed to the provinces
from which they originate. This means GST funds go primarily to only six provinces50
48
See Review of Provincial Function Grants in 2005, by the National Economic and Fiscal Commission,
September, 2006.
49
The NEFC bases its estimates of provincial expenses on what it would cost to provide basic services as
well as maintenance for basic infrastructure. This does not include possible development expenditure, so is
very much a baseline fiscal requirement.
50
Total GST redistribution amounts to K160 million per year, of which K71m goes to NCD, K27m to
Morobe, K9m to Western Highlands, K9m to East New Britain, K8m to Madang, K6m to Eastern
46
while royalties go overwhelmingly to four provinces51The NEFC has made a number of
recommendations for improving the equity of total resources available to provinces,
revolving around reallocation of, GST based on the actual costs per capita of delivering
services to various provinces (which vary hugely – service delivery costs per capita
range from K47 in Southern Highlands to K124 in Sandaun, largely because of
remoteness of population, large land area, etc.), shifting more spending to the district
level, particularly in health and agriculture, and shifting more spending into goods and
services and out of development per se.52 Understanding the structure and impacts of
resource and fiscal transfers is an important part of improving governance in the country,
and the work of the NEFC provides several points of entry for such work.
d. Assessing Provincial Differences
This further illustrates that the situation in PNG varies dramatically from province to
province, and even within provinces from district to district. These differences need to be
better understood. One useful exercise will be to do an assessment of the situation on a
province by province basis along a number of dimensions in order to understand the
particular challenges being faced by each province so strategies for development can be
formulated that take account of the distinctions among provinces.
Though it is early to specify what the important variables are across provinces, the work
to this point indicates there are several that could be useful. These include: (1)
resources, particularly financial, available, (2) institutional capacity for development
planning and implementation, (3) sociocultural heterogeneity/homogeneity, (4)
accessibility of population, (5) levels of corruption, (6) degree of participation of various
groups and institutions in planning and implementation of development strategies and (7)
a variable that is , in a sense, not a variable at all from the provincial level but that affects
all provinces, the effectiveness/efficiency of the national government in planning,
budgeting and delivering resources.
The first variable is resource availability. As we have seen, several provinces have
sufficient or even more than sufficient, resources available to them, particularly those
with major resource extraction activities such as Western, Enga, New Ireland and
Southern Highlands. There are also many provinces, the majority, with too few resources
to meet their basic needs of maintenance, service delivery and other recurrent activities.
NEFC has done some solid work to identify the relative positions of provinces along this
dimension.
A second variable revolves around provincial, district and LLG capacity for planning and
implementation of development activities. At the provincial level this includes the ability
Highlands and only K27m to all other provinces. See Proposals for Reform of Intergovernmental
Funding in PNG, Presentation by NEFC to Special Governors Conference Mt Hagen October 18-20, 2005
51
Total royalty redistributions in 2005 amounted to nearly K75, of which K27m went to Western Province,
K17m each to Enga and Southern Highlands, and K 10m to New Ireland.
52
See Review of Intergovernmental Financing, Presentation to Special Governors Conference, Mt Hagen
October 18-20, 2005, Proposals for reform of intergovernmental funding in PNG. National Economic
and Fiscal Commission.
47
to do medium to long term planning for development of the province, a capacity present
in only a small minority of provinces. The majority have little such capacity. However,
it is not the case that provincial capacity is in any way related to the level of resources
available to the province. Western, Enga and several other provinces with considerable
resources available (through the additional funds accruing from mining activities)
nonetheless have weak and ineffective provincial administrations, while some provinces
(for example, East New Britain) with few resources available nonetheless have solid
provincial capacity. The situation at district and local levels is even more variable, not
only among provinces but within individual provinces.
The third variable is sociocultural homogeneity/heterogeneity within the province.
Sociocultural fragmentation is a hallmark of Papua New Guinea, and many provinces
have extreme levels of such fragmentation. The provinces of Morobe, Madang, the
Sepiks and several of the, particularly, eastern Highlands provinces have extreme
sociocultural diversity, each with up to 50 or more different language groups. At the
same time, some provinces, such as East New Britain, have as few as half a dozen or less
language groups. Sociocultural homogeneity/heterogeneity is an important variable with
respect to strategies for development in a province.
Another distinction among provinces is the degree to which the population has access to
services and to the outside markets and communities. Basic improvements, such as roads
and other infrastructure, have proceeded unevenly across the country, partly because of
difficulty of terrain, partly for political and related reasons. The effect that the cost of
delivering services for some provinces, per capita, is much higher than that for other
provinces. The NEFC has done some excellent work in this area, and has shown that the
per capita cost of delivering services to some provinces is one third the cost in other
provinces. The fiscal transfers do not take account of these distinctions.
A fifth variable is corruption, particularly at the provincial level. There is a wide
variance in the extent to which resources transferred to the provincial, and lower, level
are properly acquitted and are utilized in an accountable and transparent fashion. Clearly,
even if adequate resources are delivered to the provincial level, corruption can mean
those resources do not have the impact we would expect and as clearly, in those
provinces with already inadequate resources, corruption only aggravates the situation.
A sixth variable is the extent of citizen participation in decisionmaking processes with
respect to planning, implementation and maintenance. As we have seen, in some
provinces and districts local groups participate fully in the planning development
strategies, as in East New Britain where the DSG is utilized transparently and
accountably. The extent to which citizens, and various institutions, participate
inclusively (including with respect to gender) can make a major difference in the sense of
local ownership and, by extension, the sustainability of local development activities.
The final variable is one that is actually more or less generic to all provinces - the degree
to which national government has both the capacity and will to deliverer resources to the
provincial, district and local levels. This includes the ability of national government to
48
do an effective job of formulating the national budget, ability to actually deliver the
resources called fro under that budget, and capacity to monitor and be accountable for
delivery of those resources.
These variables can be useful to do an initial assessment of provinces that would provide
us with significant entry points for doing work in different areas. More work would be
necessary to determine the specifics of the challenges facing different provinces, but
these diagnostics can be an interesting point of departure.
D. Where the Top Meets the Bottom: The District as Entry Point for
Improving Governance and Development Outcomes
The point at which the imported institutions of the Westminster Parliamentary System
and the traditional systems of Papua New Guinea come together for the majority of the
people of the country is at the district and local levels. Though the country can be
approached at the regional or provincial levels, most of the actual work of development
will occur at an even lower level, the district. In addition to the work suggested above, it
would be useful to do a more fine-grained assessment of the actual situation at the district
level across a number of districts in different provinces of the country. The intent of this
work would be twofold. First, there is the question of what resources are actually
available to the district level to meet service delivery, infrastructure and other
development needs. Second, there is the question of how those resources are actually
used, who makes decisions concerning their use and how effectively they are applied.
This suggests a set of questions, including:
 What resources are actually delivered and available to the district and lower levels
(including fiscal transfers/grants, GST, royalties, internal revenue, etc.);
 How are those resources applied – what use is made of them? To what extent are
they used for the purposes intended?
 Who determines how those resources are applied? This will include different
actors, institutions and groups depending on the nature of the resources (e.g., DSG
is controlled by the JDPBPC, the unconditional block grant and three function
grants are controlled by various local level government and district bodies,
royalties flow to certain groups, etc.).
 What is the level of participation of various groups in the decisions concerning
the use of different kinds of resources delivered to the district and local levels? Is
the use of the DSG or the block grant determined in a participatory manner, and if
so who participates?
 To what extent is there overall coordination in the use of resources delivered to
the local level? Do agencies, institutions and groups who have decisionmaking
power over the use of certain kinds of resources coordinate their activities and
priorities with other groups who have decisionmaking power over the use of
different resource streams?
 What is the effectiveness of outcomes at the local level? Can an assessment be
made of the efficiency with which available resources are used? Are resources
49
applied in a strategic manner – i.e., is there a medium and/or long term plan for
the use of resources to gradually improve conditions at the local level?
Part of the work would be to attempt to assess the incentive structure for decisions made
at the local level with respect to the use of resources. Once the decisionmakers for the
use of resources are identified they should be interviewed to determine their rationales for
the ways in which they apply the resources or “encourage” them to be applied. If we can
understand the incentives for both efficient and inefficient behavior, we can begin to
identify the levers through which such behavior can be changed or improved with respect
to development outcomes.
a. National Parliamentarians as Stakeholders
One of the key groups of stakeholders/decisionmakers who should be engaged is the
national parliamentarians, who play a major role in deciding and influencing how
resources are used at the local level. If we can understand the incentives for those MPs
who approach, e.g., the use of the DSG in a transparent, accountable and participatory
manner we may be able to leverage this knowledge to encourage others to do likewise.
It is clear that the main motivation for any politician in the distribution of benefits is to
gain political support. It is interesting that PNG will, in the next election, shift from a
first past the post to a limited preferential voting system for Parliament. It is hoped that
this system will result in politicians responding to demands from a greater proportion of
the total electorate, as electability will now depend not only on the ability to garner
complete support of a small, usually kinship defined group, but on the ability to gain a
second and third preference vote from a much wider range of voters. This provides an
opportunity to apply the findings from this study in a way that could possibly provide a
major “pay-off” to national politicians. If, for example, a correlation is established
between those MPs who approach the use of the DSG and other resources at the local
level in a transparent and participatory manner and the level of political support under a
limited preferential system, this would have a powerful demonstration effect for other
politicians to alter their behavior. If approached wisely, this could serve as an incentive
for politicians to engage with more people in the electorate and to encourage greater
participation of more groups in return for which he/she would receive political support
sufficient to ensure election.
b. CDD in the Context of Trans-Local Groups
The potentially productive relationship between national level and more inclusive local
level groups has implications for the way in which CDD operations are implemented in
the country. One of the mistakes of CDD approaches in PNG has been the tendency to
support purely local level groups (often on a village by village basis), rather than
concentrating on supporting groups that represent wider coalitions of villages and
communities. CDD that supports village based groups alone may provide needed basic
services on a short term basis, but such approaches only reinforce the perception that
50
local groups are competitive, that the process of development is a zero sum game, and in
the long run this can be more destructive than productive.
Therefore, any CDD operation in PNG should promote the active building of consensus
across groups concerning development priorities, and the aim of such operations should
explicitly be the extension of legitimacy to larger groups than have traditionally existed.
Institutionalizing links between these trans-local groups and local, district and provincial
level government should also be a requisite component of any CDD operation. This
means a strong emphasis on an often lengthy process of conflict resolution, consensus
building and the development of common goals and recognition of a community of
interest.
51
PART III: CONCLUSION
This analysis of the political economy of Papua New Guinea, and of the processes and
structures that have emerged in the context of that political economy, illustrates the
complexity of issues of governance, development and sustainability of development
activities in a situation in which pre-existing traditional structures are overlain with an
introduced political system. The analysis has shown that there are several cross-cutting
areas that need to be understood and addressed to achieve the goal of improving
governance and improving the effectiveness and efficiency with which development is
delivered to the people of the country. Ultimately, the way in which these issues are
addressed will determine the success of Papua New Guinea in becoming a nation, a
constituency in which all, or at the least most, members feel an allegiance to the state
because the state has proven to be a dependable deliverer or the resources and expertise
required to improve the lives of its citizens.
The country of Papua New Guinea was, in many respects, accidental. The geographic
expanse, the variety of social and cultural systems included in the new nation, and the
nature of the governmental system introduced were all serendipitous. Little real thought
was given to the ways in which the introduced system would articulate with the plethora
of pre-existent systems already present. This has led to a variety of problems and
obstacles with which the country has had to grapple for over thirty years. It is
unfortunate that the way in which the introduced institutions were structured had the
effect of simultaneously encouraging the divisive and competitive aspects of traditional
societies while muting the traditional tendencies towards consensus building and
negotiation. Nonetheless, this is the reality of the situation and the only path is to move
on from here and attempt to make the best of a difficult situation.
There is no guarantee that the country, much less the nation, of Papua New Guinea will,
in the long term, be viable. If that is to be the case there will have to be some
fundamental rethinking of how the national level works, how the national level interacts
with the local level, and how the more integrative and inclusive aspects of the local level
can be encouraged and fostered and how they, in turn, can force an adaptation of national
level strategies and processes. The process of nation building is one that must build on
endemic aspects of Papua New Guinean social and cultural processes while at the same
time moving beyond those processes in terms of inclusiveness and the recognition of
communities of interest.
In general we have seen that this process of nation building will revolve around two
approaches, one from the top down and one from the bottom up. The most critical of
these is certainly the bottom up, the restructuring of the nature of the groups at the local
level that make demands of higher levels, and the establishment of more encompassing
communities of interest that promote wider local level concerns than is now common in
the country. Development of such communities of interest is a precondition for the
restructuring of higher levels to respond to these new local level demands. If the local
level continues to operate in the way it has traditionally, representing narrow clan-based
52
interests, no amount of reform, capacity building or improved oversight at the national
level will result in improved development outcomes.
Therefore, the first step is to understand those processes already occurring at the local
level in various parts of the country that are leading to more inclusive groups who are
cooperating across traditional boundaries. There are many example of such groups, and
analytic work to assess the range of such groups, how they are structured and function,
how they draw membership, how decisions are made, the quality and nature of their
relationship with each other and with formal institutions, their levels of legitimacy among
their constituencies and the extent to which, and how, they have been successful is a
necessary first step. This analysis will provide us with success stories, examples of how
such groups can be effectively structured in different traditional sociocultural systems,
and entry points for supporting and expanding such activities.
This analytic work from the bottom up needs to be complemented by work from the top
down. Here there are a number of different areas that require further work. First, we
need to understand the kind of resources actually available from, as well as actually being
delivered by the national level to lower levels. This work includes all forms of resource
transfer, including national budget transfers for critical service delivery functions (health,
education, infrastructure, etc.) as well as transfers such as the fiscal grants under the
Organic Law, royalties to mining provinces, GST transfers and local level own resources.
This needs to be done in the context of work such as that done by the NEFC that assesses
the actual needs of provinces and lower levels given the reality that provinces and lower
levels differ substantially across a number of variables. Serious consideration needs to be
given to what can be done to improve equity in the delivery of resources to provinces and
lower levels.
This work will also require an assessment of the actual situation in different provinces
and areas of the country across a number of variables. These will include resources
available to each province, institutional capacity of provinces and lower levels,
sociocultural diversity, issues of accessibility of populations in different provinces, levels
of corruption and the degree of participation of various groups in decisionmaking and
implementation. Understanding how these variables differ across provinces, as well as
within them, is the first step in devising strategic approaches to improving governance
and the delivery of services and development across the country. It needs to be
recognized that the variety of situations across the country will call for distinct
approaches by region, province and even, in some cases, district.
Another important aspect of improving performance from the top down has to do with
oversight institutions. The most important point here is to recognize that improvements
in effectiveness of oversight institutions depend more on a change in the rules of the
game that must emerge from the local level than in capacity building or the provision of
additional resources. The latter is certainly necessary, but it is insufficient if improved
governance is the objective.
53
Finally, the key point of intersection of formal, national level institutions and more
traditional, local level institutions is at the district level, and it is here that considerable
work needs to be done to understand how those two levels intersect currently, and how
that intersection can be improved. This calls for some serious work at the district level
that will answer such questions as what resources are actually delivered to the district
levels, how the resources are applied (and whether they are applied in ways intended),
who makes decisions concerning the use of resources, the extent to which there is full
participation of stakeholders in such decisions and whether such groups have been able
to establish larger, more inclusive communities of interest in pursuing development
objectives.
The process of nation building in Papua New Guinea will not be an easy one. It will
require commitment of a variety of actors and stakeholders at all levels, from the national
to the grass roots. However, there are fundamental strengths of traditional Papua New
Guinea societies that can be enlisted in the effort. If all the key stakeholders –
government, civil society, development partners – focus on activities that encourage
those strengths while working to minimize the influence of inherently divisive strategies
and activities there is hope that the country of Papua New Guinea, currently minimally
defined as a physical but not a social reality, may one day be a nation as well.
54