HOTSPOTS VERSUS HANDOUTS

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• HOTSPOTS VERSUS HANDOUTS
• ILLUSIONS OF CONSERVATION ANDDEVELOPMENT IN
  PAPUA NEW GUINEA
• Colin Filer

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BASIC FACTS ABOUT PNG

• About 5 million people, half upstairs, a third on
  the coast, and the rest in between
• A formal economy which is heavily dependent on
  extractive industry
• A low average score on the Human Development
  Index
• About 800 vernacular languages, and more than 10
  times that number of traditional political
  communities
• 98 percent of land and inshore marine resources
  under forms of customary ownership which are
  barely documented
• And heaps of biological diversity

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THE ARGUMENT

• Hotspots and Handouts
• The Two Mentalities
• The Language of Dependency
• The Bridge and the Bower
• Regimes and Networks
• Retreat to the Beach

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THE TWO MENTALITIES
The hotspot mentality is used here to refer to
the general idea that money spent on the
conservation of biodiversity should not only be
spent in places which contain a great deal of it
in the first place, but also in places where
people are likely to make a horrible mess of it
if they are left to their own devices The
handout mentality is a phrase used to deplore
the tendency of other Papua New Guineans, most
Papua New Guineans, or even we Papua New
Guineans, to demand development in the form of
free goods, services and money
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THE TWO MENTALITIES
Put a stop to hand out mentality Lately, a lot
of MPs have been getting onto the bandwagon of
school fee subsidies. This is well and good if we
all can do the ostrich trick and bury our heads
in the sand in order not to notice that it is bad
public policy to encourage the hand out
mentality that in turn leads to sloth. As one
writer to your paper once said, people grumble
about school fees but do not think twice about
buying beer, betting on horse races and pokies or
in other selfish indulgences. I myself have a
total school fee burden of K9780 for three
children. I will pay for this out of my salary.
The amount is over 50 per cent of my take home
pay which has meant that I have had to forgo a
few things and lead a rather spartan life. I do
not have a single regret about this state of
affairs because it is for the best of courses and
I expect my children when they grow up, to do the
same to their offspring. The last thing I expect
them to do is to go cap in hand to their local MP
and demand that he/she take over their primary
obligation in life. Letter to the PNG
Post-Courier, 12 March 2004on in life.
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THE TWO MENTALITIES
Conservation projects only seem to succeed in
places where local landowners have not yet had
the opportunity to extract rent from a developer,
or (more rarely) where they have already decided
to turn down an offer of development because it
does not meet their expectations. In both cases,
local landowners appear to support conservation
projects because they offer another kind of
development, but the conservationists are then
left with the task of explaining why biodiversity
values would suffer if this kind of development
were not on offer at all, and the local
custodians of biodiversity were indeed left to
their own devices.
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THE TWO MENTALITIES
One explanation claims that local landowners lack
the knowledge or the motivation to resist an
external menace which has yet to materialise, and
money therefore needs to be spent on the
fortification of their hearts and minds as a
precautionary measure. Another says that local
landowners will make a mess of their own
property, even if or especially if there is
no developer to do it for them, and money
therefore needs to be spent to train them in the
practice of sustainable resource management. If
taken to their logical extreme, these lines of
argument end in the proposition that local
landowners are either idiots or pests.
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THE LANGUAGE OF DEPENDENCY
It is very difficult to have a sensible
conversation about biodiversity in the version of
Melanesian Pidgin English that is normally used
when rural villagers are talking to other people
who do not speak the local vernacular. That is
not just because the villagers are thinking with
their stomachs, but also because, like most US
citizens, they are creationists, not
evolutionists. So what is likely to happen if the
outsiders divert the conversation to the topic of
ecosystem services instead? There are three
commonplace terms in Tok Pisin which are
available for the purpose of translating this
concept sistem (system), sevis (service),
and risos (resource).
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THE LANGUAGE OF DEPENDENCY
When people talk about the system, they are not
talking about the ecosystems which provide free
services , but about the one-talk system
(wantok sistem) whose operation explains the
governments failure to provide the services
whose absence is driving the sale of resources
to the private sector. Papua New Guineans talk
about this system in much the same way that
Sicilians talk about cosa nostra, our thing, in
other words the mafia. This system is the
informal, subterranean and mysterious network of
primordial personal relationships which
undermines all principles of good governance. The
one-talk system and the handout mentality are
thus two sides of the same coin in the currency
of public self-reproach.
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THE BRIDGE AND THE BOWER
Is there an indigenous theory of knowledge (or
epistemology) which is unique to Melanesian
cultures as a whole, or does each of the worlds
languages contains its own epistemology, and does
the Melanesian culture area therefore contain
hundreds of these things? Should we not try to
avoid making assumptions about the relationship
between race, language and culture which
professional anthropologists have been
questioning for several decades? In the context
of an ecosystem assessment, we should also avoid
the assumption that the world consists of a set
of bounded spaces in which systems of different
types are piled on top of each like the layers in
a club sandwich.
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THE BRIDGE AND THE BOWER
When anthropologists go hunting for indigenous
knowledge in PNG, they tend to end up in a
subterranean warren of contested claims and
questionable secrets, where it is not even
possible to figure out which bits of knowledge
belong to the custom of one social group or
another, which bits have been borrowed or
imported from some other place, or which bits
have been made up by their current owners to
replace the bits which dead experts failed to
pass on to their successors. Instead of treating
this form of indigenous knowledge as the cultural
reflection of a diverse natural environment, we
should think about it as the means by which
indigenous people exaggerate and refine the
natural qualities of the landscape by branding
them with their own personal identities.
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THE BRIDGE AND THE BOWER
Consider this account of the behaviour of the
Fawn-breasted Bowerbird (Chlamydera
cerviniventris) Males spend many hours every day
at the bower, tending it or proclaiming
territorial rights. The male is seldom quiet
when at or near the bower he mumbles, imitates
other species and local bush noises, clucks,
scolds and whistles almost continuously in a low,
but penetrating voice (Peckover and Filewood
1976 122). Substitute their culture for the
bower, and you have the secret society syndrome
in a metaphorical nutshell. Indigenous (male)
experts of my acquaintance would not only grasp
the significance of this metaphor, but also take
great pride in it.
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REGIMES AND NETWORKS
In our sub-global assessment of PNGs coastal
ecosystems, we do not assume the existence of a
single body of traditional ecological knowledge
which is opposed to scientific forms of
ecology. That is because the characteristic
national form of indigenous knowledge is not
dedicated to the maintenance of tradition, nor
does it have branches which mimic the conceptual
architecture of modern science. Instead, we treat
all kinds of ecological or environmental
knowledge as organic components of specific
indigenous or sectoral resource management
regimes.
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REGIMES AND NETWORKS
Each indigenous regime consists of a
food-cropping system and a number of other
practices, as well as the values, institutions
and policies which are associated with
them. Local ecological knowledge is defined as a
type of practical indigenous knowledge which
belongs sectoral resource management regimes,
where it is mixed up with scientific,
bureaucratic, and other sector-specific forms of
knowledge. Traditional knowledge is that form of
indigenous knowledge which fails to connect with
any sectoral resource management regime, and is
known to disappear when indigenous resource
management regimes absorb a modern
classification of natural resources.
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REGIMES AND NETWORKS
The language of dependency implies that the
mismanagement of natural resources is a
consequence of the unequal distribution of real
power between decision-makers at different levels
of the countrys social and political
organization. But the whole point about the
one-talk system is that decisions made at
different levels in the superficial hierarchy
of political space are all equally personal
decisions, as if they were in fact decisions made
at different points in a one-dimensional network
of personal relationships. When Papua New
Guineans negotiate the interface between sectoral
and indigenous resource management regimes, they
will mostly do so as customary landowners dealing
with other customary landowners.
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RETREAT TO THE BEACH
If Papua New Guineans all tend to approach the
business of resource management with a single
form of indigenous knowledge at the back of their
minds, we still need to ask why the relationship
between indigenous and sectoral management
regimes is negotiated in different ways, and with
different outcomes, in different parts of the
country. If biological diversity is the resource
at issue, the argument should focus on those
areas or ecosystems which contain a lot of it.
But scientists cannot agree a common standard of
measurement, local landowners can rarely
understand what they are talking about, there is
barely any market to clarify the costs and
benefits of doing one thing or another, and the
state has no capacity to impose a solution of its
own making.
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RETREAT TO THE BEACH
If one assumes that biodiversity values in
tropical forest ecosystems are inversely
correlated with the extent of human disturbance,
or if one measures biodiversity values in a way
that reinforces this assumption, then one is
naturally led to seek the protection of those
great swathes of undisturbed forest which might
as well be described as human population sinks,
because they threaten to consume the small and
scattered groups of forest people who have
taken refuge in them.
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RETREAT TO THE BEACH
The relationship between ecosystem services and
human wellbeing seems altogether different in
those coastal areas where people have far more
experience with the institutions of modernity, a
reasonable rating on the standard indicators of
social development, and an awareness of the fact
that continued population growth will threaten
the sustainability of indigenous resource
management regimes if there is no increase in
existing opportunities to participate in the
formal economy.
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RETREAT TO THE BEACH
Despite the apparent contrast between the folk
who own the megadiverse reefs around the coastal
fringe and those who own the megadiverse forests
in the heart of darkness, it is still worth
asking whether conservationists will get more
value for their money if they spend it on the
reef-owners rather than the forest-dwellers.
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RETREAT TO THE BEACH
A strong case can be made for the argument that
PNGs terrestrial biodiversity, whether inside or
outside of the space which is covered in forest
at any one moment of time, has been sustainably
developed as an unintentional by-product of
indigenous resource management regimes which have
been evolving over a period of 40,000 years or
more. It is much harder to make the case that
indigenous fishing or harvesting practices were
responsible for the sustainable development of
the countrys marine biodiversity.
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RETREAT TO THE BEACH
In that sense, the conservationists may be closer
to realising their own dreams of wilderness when
they go diving around the countrys coral reefs
than when they go walking around in the bush. But
since the reefs still belong to the territorial
domains of traditional political communities,
this does not make it any easier, and might even
make it somewhat harder, for them to keep their
dreams intact.
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• HOTSPOTS VERSUS HANDOUTS
• ILLUSIONS OF CONSERVATION ANDDEVELOPMENT IN
  PAPUA NEW GUINEA
• Colin Filer