We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea
On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.
 
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We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea
On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.
 
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We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea

We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea

by Jason Roberts
We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea
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We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea

We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea

by Jason Roberts

Overview

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780816548149
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication date: 04/23/2024
Series: Critical Green Engagements: Investigating the Green Economy and its Alternatives
Pages: 264
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jason Steadman Roberts is a practicing anthropologist who currently works on subsistence policy and natural resource management issues in Alaska.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
A Note on Language
Introduction: History, Hope, and Development
1. Staying the Same While Others Prosper
2. The History of the Land is the History of People and the Foundation for Development
3. The Historical and Political Economic Background to SABL Development
4. Sickness of the Skin and Sickness of the Land
5. Maintaining Hope for a New Mode of Subsistence at Narim Village
6. The Land is Sick in the Shadow of Development at Sulava Village
7. SABL Development Has Already Come like a Thief
Conclusion: The Hopeful Pursuit of a Good Change Endures
References
 
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