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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]

In the continuing debates about the relative importance of conservatism and liberalism in the history of the Australian Liberal Party, one important dimension remains absent. Liberal developmentalism as an important anti‐conservative strand of thought was critical to the party's formative years after the Second World War as a party of government. The importance of this facet of liberalism is illustrated here by reference to the role of long‐serving Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck in overseeing development in Papua and New Guinea (PNG). Hasluck and the Australian Administration formulated policy intended to secure the indigenous population on rural smallholdings at higher standards of living before industrialisation's anticipated effects of proletarianisation could take effect. [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]

The article presents an overview of political conditions and events in Papua New Guinea in 2017. Topics covered include the general election, the discontinuation of Australia's offshore refugee detention and processing center, and the arrest warrant of Prime Minister Peter O'Neill.

The article provides an overview of the political, economic, and social conditions in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 2017. Topics covered include peacekeeping efforts to end the conflict that begin in the 1980s over the Panguna gold and copper mine, independence referendums, and the activism of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG).

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]

Sorcery in Buka, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, is understood as reprehensible in most present contexts, but it is also believed to have once played a constructive role in maintaining social order. This mytheme is important both to the analysis of how traditional systems of sorcery come to be rearticulated in postcolonial contexts, and as a means of understanding how villagers conceptualise social order itself. Here, an analysis of the selective means by which vernacular forms of sorcery are assimilated to the Tok Pisin term poisen is presented together with an examination of the history of institutions of social control in which sorcery is remembered - and forgotten - to have played key roles. In the past, sorcery would have been gavman blong peles, a 'village government', a power over and from people, accumulated by the hierarchical integration of lineages within houses known as tsuhana. Sorcery has been privatized and commodified, slipping out of control of traditional authorities, who now pursue a strategy of achieving power over land. Power from people entails, in the Buka context, sorcery or other forms of internalised violence; power over land entails the assertion exclusivist genealogical claims. The pursuit of such claims is mediated by courts, and frequently creates rifts in communities. Sorcery, once freed from its role as government, returns to haunt traditional authorities as the spectre of their former power, and as the spectre of resistance to their current power: to the extent that they emphasize the historical role of poisen, the more they are suspected of it; imagined as the anarchy of jealousies, poisen multiplies in proportion to their success in parlaying forms of traditional authority into economic and political advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the study and practice of political reconciliation has experienced a turn to hybridity. This turn has been defined by the increased rate at which liberal international and local peacebuilding practices, and their underlying ideas, have become merged, integrated or co-located in time and space. While hybrid approaches to reconciliation have been praised as an effective means of engaging local populations in peacebuilding operations, little attention has been paid to examining whether or not they also bring unintended negative consequences. Drawing on the cases of Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville, this article examines the potentially dark side of hybridity. It demonstrates that, in each of these cases, hybrid approaches to political reconciliation have brought both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side of the equation, hybridity has seen imported international approaches to reconciliation adapted to meet local demands and ensure resonance with local populations. On the negative side, however, the misappropriation and instrumentalisation of local practices within hybrid approaches has served to damage their legitimacy and to jeopardise their contributions to reconciliation. The article thus concludes that the existence and extent of this dark side necessitates a re-evaluation of how hybrid approaches to political reconciliation are planned and implemented. [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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Despite international and national exposure, torture in Papua remains widespread and systematic; it is also surrounded by virtually complete impunity and denial. This article analyses torture through a Foucauldian perspective and conceptualizes torture as “theatre” in order to fill the gap of understanding state violence in Papua. Theatricality proffers a new analytical lens to examine the phenomenon by exploring the interplay and dynamics of four interrelated elements: the rationalities that underpin the web of power relations, the techniques of domination, the actors with their multiple and fluid identities, and finally their motivational postures. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, the article analyses the way the Indonesian state exhibits sovereign power to govern Papua as a docile body, and conceptualizes torture as an element of “the art of government”. The analysis is based on 431 cases of torture in Papua during 1963–2010 as well as 214 testimonies of torture survivors, perpetrators and spectators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the relationship between new oil-palm plantations and state-formation in Pomio, a remote rural district of East New Britain Province (Papua New Guinea). I am particularly interested in the kinds of spaces of governance produced by the new oil-palm plantations and how this contributes to state formation and territorialisation in Pomio. Plantations in Pomio do not became state-like spaces as a result of top-down processes alone, but also because of active worker initiatives. By contributing to state formation in this way, the inhabitants of Pomio also make claims on what the state should be like. While plantations become governable and state-like spaces, they do not produce simply governable subjects, nor do they produce a uniformly governable territory, but an uneven space in which some places are more governable than others. The inhabitants of Pomio move between these places in their pursuit of different goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers brief information on several global election results from June to September 2017 with details on its registered voters, percentage of voters and winning political candidates from countries including Albania, Kenya and Papua New Guinea.

The article focuses on the political and governmental history in Papua New Guinea. Topics discussed include the challenges face by the government of Prime Minister Peter O'Neill, arrest of O'Neill after the Investigation Task Force Sweep (ITFS), and National Executive Council (NEC) decisions regarding the ITFS disbanding.

The following analysis of Legal Orders, and of Legalism in particular, derive from my study of jurisprudence and history, and from the three fields in which I worked as a lawyer – barrister; government lawyer and adviser, and as Head of the Papua New Guinea Office in the movement of Papua New Guinea to self-government and Independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Melanesian communities face difficulties both because of the withdrawal of government services and the continued influence of clientelism within the politics of the distributive state. A notable reaction to both these problems is the organisation of a broad class of groups that may be termed 'parastatal': informal organisations, often evanescent, which form around the state and its absence. These may often appear as 'mimetic' of recognisable state forms. Characteristically, the analysis of such 'mimesis' in Melanesia is framed by doubt that the emulation of state forms extends to the alleged rationality or 'interiority' of the state. Here, a case in which villagers in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville undertook to prosecute themselves for non-payment of school fees is discussed in order to expose the substantial difficulties with understanding parastatal organisation in terms of 'copying'. The case suggests integration of the villagers into the actually existing state system is much deeper than is often assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]