Risk and Renewal in the Pacific: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The Pacific covers one third of the Earth’s surface, consisting of thousands of islands from New Guinea to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). These epicentres of cultural, biological and linguistic diversity have been central to understanding human socio-political life, the organisation of the natural world, and their dynamic interplay. Geopolitically, the Pacific also occupies a pivotal location: from being a central conduit of early human migration and trade, to a major theatre of war in the twentieth century, to the present, where it is strategically located in the global response to the rise of China and concomitant political and economic ‘pivot to Asia’. In the current age of global existential risk, the Pacific is once again at the frontline of worldwide challenges including those posed by climate change, economic inequality, inter-ethnic conflict, disease epidemics including HIV and tuberculosis, cultural heritage destruction, and language extinction.
This interdisciplinary network will bring together researchers from a range of disciplines within humanities, social and natural sciences to explore the topic of risk in the Pacific. This may include, but is not limited to, work on ecological change, gender relations, indigenous knowledges, global health and epidemiology, religious change and value transformation, shifts in human settlement patterns, society – state relations, cultural heritage management, cosmology and ritual life, food security, inter-ethnic relations, extractive industries, linguistic change, colonial histories, new forms of urbanism, development and infrastructure, education, tourism, and museum collection, exhibition and repatriation. Understanding risk and renewal in the Pacific, and the social and environmental transformations they engender, highlights broader global challenges and allows us to formulate new ideas and responses.
Speakers
Stephen Hooper (Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia)
Andrew Moutu (National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea)
Speakers Christoph Parsch (University of Göttingen)
Inna Yaneva-Toraman (University of Edinburgh)
Abstracts Christoph Parsch Papua at the Crossroads: A Plea for Systematic Conservation Planning
Land-use change and environmental degradation are widespread throughout most of the Indonesian archipelago, while Indonesian New Guinea (Tanah Papua) still has substantial forest cover remaining. As the region increasingly becomes a focus for national development agendas, it emerges as a new frontier for oil palm development, logging, mining, and other land-uses, leading to accelerating deforestation rates. Tanah Papua now stands at the crossroads between progressing land-use change and sustainable development policies. The Manokwari Declaration, a recent political pledge by the Indonesian provinces Papua and Papua Barat, aims at protecting 70% of Tanah Papua´s lands, while fostering sustainable development and strengthening the rights of indigenous peoples. This political momentum towards conservation- and culturally-centred land management provides a window of opportunity to develop a systematic conservation planning scheme to mitigate future biodiversity loss in the face of increasing land-use change and degradation. I want to discuss opportunities and challenges for conservation in the context of the opposing developments.
Dr Inna Yaneva-Toraman The Social Ecology of 'Dead Land'
Development in agriculture is still considered one of the best routes to improve rural livelihoods, drive regional and national economic growth, and fuel processes of industrialisation in the global south. This has led to the integration of many Melanesian communities into the international agro-foods market (mainly of coffee, copra, and cocoa). Recently, however, we have seen a new wave of development politics in the region, that shifts its emphasis from building strong small-holder farmer communities to the expansion of plantation-style oil palm agriculture. In Papua New Guinea, the national development plan targets a 10-fold increase to 1.5 million hectares of oil palm area coverage by 2030. Such goals put extreme pressure on land, ecosystems, and local communities who often end up living in poorer and more precarious circumstances.
This paper explores the ways in which the Baining people of Papua New Guinea envisioned and negotiated the establishment of an oil palm plantation on their customary land. It brings to focus peoples’ experiences and perceptions of ‘foreign-owned’ plantation agriculture, and the risks such land development deals hold for their social ecology. With promises of better jobs, infrastructure, and cash dividends, the oil palm venture had raised Baining people’s hopes for economic development, sovereignty and self-government. But how did their land, which they knew as 'life' (pointing to its power and capacity to grow food and people), become a 'dead land'? And what sort of new arrangements to their social and economic lives has this entailed? The paper offers insight into the risks and tensions created by land claims and transition to plantation agriculture and how culture politics and participation in the rentier economy can refashion local relationships and power structures, exacerbate or create new inequalities and processes of exclusion.