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Among the topics that Bernard Narokobi addresses in his numerous writings is the place of traditional Melanesian leadership styles in a modern Papua New Guinea. This article explores Narokobi's leadership status to show how far-reaching and multifaceted his leadership career was: he was at once a traditional Melanesian bigman, a chief, and a modern public figure. The actions he took in these roles were for him a matter of the highest principle, something that at times had severe political consequences. Because in Melanesia the scope of the ritual that takes place upon an individual's death is an index of their status, an analysis of the mortuary rituals undertaken upon Narokobi's death provides insight into the significance of his leadership at every level from his clan up to the national level of Papua New Guinean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernard Narokobi dedicated his career as a law reformer, jurist and parliamentarian to making Papua New Guinea's legal system a catalyst for a distinctively Melanesian philosophy. This philosophy, 'the Melanesian Way', emphasized Papua New Guineans' embeddedness within their local social worlds, including spirits and the natural environment. The legal foundation for the Melanesian Way was set down in the National Goals and Directive Principles and Basic Social Obligations, which are stated in the Preamble to the Constitution of Papua New Guinea. These make the ideals of social justice, participatory democracy, national sovereignty and sustainable development a legal aspiration and an impetus for formally recognizing the social forms that Papua New Guinean people themselves experience as providing order in their lives. Legislation that Narokobi promoted over the course of his career offered practical mechanisms for operationalizing these ideals in accordance with their original constitutional foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernard Narokobi's concept of the Melanesian Way was influenced by a variety of factors, including his own childhood in the village, his religion, and the understandings of the people around him. He also drew inspiration from his exposure to the views and opinions of the many Papua New Guineans who contributed to the work of the Constitutional Planning Committee (CPC) between 1972 and 1975 when he served as a consultant to the committee. He shared the belief in a specifically 'Melanesian' way of social organization and cosmological understanding with the others who took part in the CPC's work, most prominently its de facto chairman, Father John Momis. With Momis he drew on the people's contributions to formulate PNG's National Goals and Directive Principles, which, at least in part, embody Narokobi's understanding of what it is to be Melanesian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue on the life and legacy of Bernard Narokobi documents and contextualizes Narokobi's life and thought. A central figure in Papua New Guinea's transition from Australian territory to independent nation, Narokobi was a jurist, philosopher, and poet who is best remembered for making 'the Melanesian Way' an important theme – if not the guiding ideological principle – in the discourse of independence in Papua New Guinea. In looking closely at Narokobi's biography, the collection also contributes to a growing body of work on political life writing in the Pacific. The collection speaks to Narokobi's role as a theorist of Oceanic modernity more broadly, one who deserves a place alongside two other important philosophers of Pacific independence, Epeli Hau'ofa and Jean-Marie Tjibaou, as one of the main visionaries of Pacific decolonization and Oceanic modernity of the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published writings by the Papua New Guinean politician and intellectual Bernard Narokobi present modern Papua New Guinea as a projection of village-based social relations; as he writes in Foundations for Nationhood, 'We are a nation of villages'. This article explores Narokobi's idea of Papua New Guinea as a village writ large, showing how this conceptualization drew upon his experience of a particular historical and cultural place, the Arapesh village of Wautogik in the mountains of East Sepik Province, where he spent his childhood and returned regularly throughout his life, and which he described as a nation unto itself in an unpublished manuscript that he composed in his later years. Beyond finding reflection in his writings, which often build upon Arapesh concepts and motifs, Narokobi's valorization of Wautogik as a worthy model led him to reciprocally invest, in a deeply principled way, in the village's continued vitality and integrity as a social entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand why quality of government (QoG) varies, scholars have drawn on two theoretical approaches: principal-agent and collective action theories. The literature tends to bifurcate these two theories, and focuses on the national scale and the structural conditions under which collective action and principal-agent problems arise. This article highlights how principal-agent relationships and collective action problems shape the implementation of decentralisation policy in two subnational governments in Papua New Guinea. It is argued that pathways to QoG are contextual, and determined by both principal-agent and collective action relationships. In the case of PNG, these relations are shaped by history, culture and the agency of elites and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will address the growth of bureaucracy as a phenomenon that in the West has been driven by the financialization of the economy. Undoubtedly these developments have an influence on the developing world. The article will consider the bureaucratic realities in the private and public sectors of Papua New Guinea and ultimately assess the growth and functionality of organizational bureaucratic practice. It suggests that, as in the West, bureaucratic excess has resulted in an inefficient use of human capital. It will offer suggestions to mitigate this effect but will also recognize the difficulties of overcoming these organizational tendencies fueled by hierarchical impulses in the West and tribal affiliations in Papua New Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of articles seeks to demonstrate that the concept of order - the intensive and extensive coordination of human action across space and time - is useful for answering some of the most pressing theoretical and practical questions in contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG) today. Building on existing work in this field [Benda-Beckmann, K., and F. Pirie. 2007. "Introduction." In Order and Disorder: Anthropological Perspectives, 1-15. New York: Berghahn Books] in this special issue we ask: How do people create enduring, stable, and routinised life in contemporary Melanesia today? We position our work as the next step in a growing movement to study contemporary institutions in PNG as order-making projects, rather than attempting to divide them into legitimate projects like 'government' and false or ineffective ones like 'cargo cults'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In remote villages of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where official village courts and other state institutions are absent, local leaders routinely hold unofficial village courts to maintain law and order. They base their decisions on local perceptions of order and justice, all the while emulating elements of state justice and constantly referring to the state as the source of their legitimacy. As these unofficial judicial institutions historically emerged as a convergence of local patterns of leadership with colonial concepts of order, they neither form a completely new nor completely autochthonous method of conflict settlement, but are an example of para-statehood, in which local leaders take on state functions in the absence of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article commences with a review of the administrative law regime in Papua New Guinea, including the avenues for review of administrative decisions. Against this background, the constitutional mandate to take a Papua New Guinean approach to the development of administrative law is considered. More specifically, the article explores the approach of the courts to review of decisions involving customary law. The article also discusses whether decisions of traditional leaders are or should be subject to judicial review, given that the notion of governmental action has been expanded to cover not only action taken by government officials and officers acting for statutory bodies, but also actions by private persons who are part of a framework of governmental control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Scalar discourses can become dominant in environmental governance initiatives. • Scalar discourses define arenas of governance which may exclude certain groups. • Assemblage-thinking can be used to interrogate scalar discourses. • Assemblage-thinking reimagines relations between power and spatiality. Abstract This paper traces the relations and frictions that make up the institutional assemblage for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program in Papua New Guinea (PNG). By engaging with REDD+ using assemblage-thinking – a theoretical orientation and method that focuses on relationality, heterogeneity and emergence – this paper interrogates the dominance of scalar discourses around climate change and environmental governance. While scalar discourses predefine categories and hierarchies (such as the 'global,' 'national' and 'local'), assemblage-thinking offers a method to resist such framings and reimagine relations between power and spatiality. Through institutional ethnography and discourse analysis, this paper critically examines how scalar discourses become dominant and how they translate into environmental governance projects, specifically the Central Suau REDD+ Pilot Project. By using assemblage-thinking to problematise scalar discourses, we can see how such discourses may reinscribe inequalities by defining arenas of governance that work to exclude certain groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prime Minister Peter O'Neill came under continuing pressure to step down pending resolution of corruption charges but resisted demands from university students and civil society groups and convincingly defeated a parliamentary vote of no confidence. Papua New Guinea experienced a further decline in GDP growth and faced landowner threats to shut down liquefied natural gas production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to new technology and the development of the necessary skills to master them are crucial aspects when developing countries aim to play a more important role in the current information age and knowledge-based society. New technology and the internet have the potential to enhance access to information for people and to help countries such as Papua New Guinea become active producers of knowledge, shifting away from the traditional role of passive consumption. However, new technology also has the potential to increase already existing inequalities. In this regard, exploring the concrete shortcuts brought by the digital divide in PNG and trying to address them for journalism education is an imperative, so that journalists in the country can bridge this gap, raise their own voices and best contribute to the development of Papua New Guinean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widespread student national boycott of classes and protests against the government of Peter O'Neill in Papua New Guinea during May and June 2016, supported by many civil society groups and activists. The epicentre of these protests was the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) in the nation's capital, Port Moresby. Demonstrations stirred by allegations of corruption against Prime Minister O'Neill grew in intensity until police opened fire on peaceful protesters on June 8. The protests were largely organised by the elected UPNG Student Representative Council, which entered into alliances with other tertiary student bodies, especially at the University of Technology in Lae, and civil society groups such as UPNG Focus and the Community Coalition Against Corruption. The essential argument of the students was that instead of thwarting investigations into allegations that $30 million of fraudulent legal bills were paid to the legal firm Paraka Lawyers, O'Neill should resign from office and present himself to the police investigators for questioning as they had demanded. This article focuses on the student leadership's role and critiques the coverage of two major national press outlets, the PNG Post-Courier and The National, leading to the temporary shutdown of the university. It argues that there were issues of ethics and integrity at stake with both students and the news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papua New Guinea's (PNG's) road system is in a parlous state after decades of neglect. More than half of the roads in the country require urgent rehabilitation. The PNG Government sought from 2003 to address the problem through the establishment of a Road Fund designed to earmark revenue for road management. Development partners supported these efforts, which were similar to reforms implemented in other parts of the world. This article examines the establishment of an independent road fund and road management agency in PNG. It finds that these reforms have not markedly improved road conditions, and that they have been undermined by a lack of support from political leaders and parts of the civil service. The article's conclusion, that the establishment of a road fund is no panacea against political obstacles to road maintenance funding, is relevant to a broader literature concerning the establishment of independent institutions to address governance challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea typically offers one of two explanations for the choices voters make, and the way these choices contribute to those countries' poor political governance. The first explanation focuses on culture's influence on the expectations that voters hold of politicians, contending that the Big Man style of local leadership traditionally found in both countries has shaped voter expectations in ways that cause voters to demand local or personal benefits from MPs rather than good national governance. The second explanation hinges on rational choice models of voter behaviour and does not include culture in its list of explanatory variables. In this paper I argue that neither explanation fits well with key features of these countries' politics. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data I show that, while voters are broadly rational and can readily distinguish modern politics from traditional leadership, culture still matters. In particular, informal institutions, associated with the countries' cultural contexts, influence voter behaviour and electoral collective action, and through this political governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Government of Papua New Guinea undertook a significant step in developing curriculum reform policy that promoted the use of Indigenous knowledge systems in teaching formal school subjects in any of the country's 800-plus Indigenous languages. The implementation of the Elementary Cultural Mathematics Syllabus is in line with the above curriculum emphasis. Given the aims of the reform, the research reported here investigated the influence of children's own mother tongue (Tok Ples) and traditional counting systems on their development of early number knowledge formally taught in schools. The study involved 272 school children from 22 elementary schools in four provinces. Each child participated in a task-based assessment interview focusing on eight task groups relating to early number knowledge. The results obtained indicate that, on average, children learning their traditional counting systems in their own language spent shorter time and made fewer mistakes in solving each task compared to those taught without Tok Ples (using English and/or the lingua franca, Tok Pisin). Possible reasons accounting for these differences are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anthropologica is the property of CASCA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the factors that contribute to the success or failure of gender quota campaigns through an analysis of two case studies from the Pacific Islands region: Samoa and Papua New Guinea. While Samoa became the first Pacific independent state to implement a parliamentary gender quota in 2013, a campaign for 22 reserved seats in the Papua New Guinea Parliament before the 2012 general election was unsuccessful. Drawing on media analysis and interviews with key players in the gender quota debates in both countries, this article examines why the push for a quota succeeded in Samoa and not in Papua New Guinea. The local, external and structural factors commonly found in gender quota literature can help to explain the divergent outcomes of the gender quota campaigns in these two countries. In particular, I highlight one structural factor – political stability – as fundamental to our understanding of the different outcomes in the two cases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of many countries around the world where the relationship between customary land tenure and economic development has been hotly debated for a long time. A commonplace of the debate in PNG is that 97% of the nation's land is held under customary tenure, while only 3% has been alienated, and these proportions have not changed since the country became independent in 1975. This paper shows that the boundary between customary and alienated forms of land or immovable property was already showing signs of instability in the late colonial period, and this instability has been greatly magnified in the post-colonial period. The areas of land subject to some form of partial alienation have increased along with the ways and means by which immovable property has been ‘mobilised’, while a variety of customary claims to previously alienated areas have grown stronger over the same period. Although Karl Polanyi's idea of a ‘double movement’ can throw some light on this phenomenon, the PNG case also reveals a new side to the application of this concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SUMMARY Many anti-corruption organisations work from the notion that both petty and grand corruption axiomatically results in negative consequences. However, few studies have asked citizens to evaluate the effects of different scales and types of corruption. This article investigates how rural people in Papua New Guinea associate dysfunctional or functional consequences to different types and scales of corruption. It draws on findings from focus groups conducted in four provinces of the country. The article finds that most examples of corruption considered by respondents were perceived as dysfunctional; however, marginalised respondents considered small-scale corruption as functional-if the acts described benefitted marginalised people. These findings suggest that it is critical that anti-corruption organisations understand and respond to the constraints faced by poor and marginalised people when operating in weak states. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of civil–military relations have long been puzzled by the fact that despite a series of mutinies, Papua New Guinea (PNG) has never seen a full-blown military takeover. Indeed, when PNG became independent in the early 1970s, some veteran PNG watchers had predicted that the country was likely to follow in the footsteps of many coup-prone African countries. In this article, the authors highlight the reasons for the surprising absence of coups in PNG by comparing the country to three South-East Asian nations that have experienced coups. By contrasting PNG with Indonesia, Burma and Thailand, the authors identify five key factors that have prevented coups in the former and facilitated them in the latter: first, the role that the military played in the struggle for independence or modern statehood; second, the size of the armed forces; third, the military's organisational capacity; fourth, geographical conditions and the military's command structure; and finally, the general relationship between civilian and military elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nation-building and the tasks of encouraging a sense of national identity and political community pose an immense challenge in Papua New Guinea (PNG). With over 830 languages, it is one of the most linguistically and ethnically diverse countries in the world. Since independence in 1975, PNG has experienced high levels of political instability with frequent changes of government and allegations of corruption. Local and traditional obligations to extended family and language groups frequently supersede allegiances to the nation-state. This paper examines the attitudes of tertiary students from the University of PNG to national identity and key issues of nation-building. These students are highly likely to feature strongly among the next generation of leaders. Findings highlight the importance of family, religion and maintaining traditional customs. They also illustrate the importance of geographical region and gender in explaining differences in key attitudes towards national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the turbulent political landscape and intraparty power struggles in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 2011. Topics include the split in the National Alliance (NA) party caused by the appointment of parliamentarian Sam Abal as acting prime minister instead of Highlands bloc leader Don Poyle during Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare's absence, the declaration by Speaker of the Parliament Jeffrey Nape that the Office of the Prime Minister was vacant resulting in the election of Peter O'Neill, and the December decision by the PNG Supreme Court to reinstate Sir Michael Somare as prime minister.