Divided communities and contested landscapes: Mobility, development and shifting identities in migrant destination sites in Papua New Guinea

Internal conflicts at the local and national levels in several South Pacific countries have revealed the fragility of national unity and the difficulties nations face in governing and managing their own economic development. In Papua New Guinea, the focus of this paper, an uncertain economic future for many rural and urban communities, and rising inequalities in income opportunities and access to resources, have coincided with greater intolerance of migrants at sites of high in-migration by customary landowners and provincial and local authorities. This paper draws on fieldwork undertaken in the major oil palm growing regions of Papua New Guinea where migrants from densely populated regions of the country have settled on state land alienated from customary landowners. We examine how struggles over land, resource control and development are polarising migrant and landowner identities resulting in increasing tensions and episodic communal violence. A settler identity is emerging based on a narrative of nation building and national development, while an ethno-regional identity amongst customary landowners is undermining the citizen rights of migrants and challenging the role and authority of the state in land matters

Valuation of ecosystem services: paradox or Pandora’s box for decision-makers?

The valuation of ecosystem services (ES) employs a range of methods. Based on a literature review and selected empirical examples, we consider major opportunities and challenges in ecosystem services valuation. We analyse when different valuation methods are appropriate and most useful. We demonstrate that mechanisms to capture benefits and costs are needed; and that the use of valuation should be incorporated more widely in decision-making. However, we argue that ecosystems are complex systems: neither the ecosystems or the services that they provide are a sum, but are an interrelated system of components. If a component vanishes the whole system may collapse. Therefore, critical natural capital management, in particular, cannot rely on monetary values; whilst the maintanance of the whole system should be considered. Monetary valuation of biodiversity and landscapes is also problematic because of their uniqueness and distinctiveness, a shortage of robust primary valuations, and numerous complexities and uncertainties. We conclude that mixed method and deliberative discourse techniques, as well as proper integration of research tools, should be more widely applied to help decision-makers and the public to understand and assess changes in ES. The approaches developed and tested by us, as presented in this paper, can provide more complete, comprehensive and impartial insights into a range of benefits that humans derive from ecosystems