PACIFIC ISLANDS REPORT

Pacific Islands Development Program/East-West Center
With Support From Center for Pacific Islands Studies/University of Hawai‘i

A Pacific Cooperation Foundation-sponsored training workshop In Bougainville turned out to be the first time a group of landowners, mostly women and a handful of men, had ever learned about the laws and rights governing the use of perhaps their most precious asset and birthright - their land, writes Tina McNicholas.

By Tina McNicholas
BUKA, Bougainville (Pacific Connection Magazine, June-August 2009) - The workshop, at Buka Hospital on 9 and 10 June, was held in response to the ongoing exploitation of natural resources in Melanesia, and the recognition that working with women landowners in Bougainville might help to provide sustainable benefits over the long term. For these resourceful custodians of the land, the immediate impact on them was clearly visible and empowering, yet sobering to witness.

Participants travelled several hours from across Bougainville's 13 districts to attend the workshop. As trainers Nehemaiah Naris and Ursula Rakova, from the Environmental Law Centre (ELC) in Port Moresby, took the group through the twoday programme, feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing their gratitude to the organisers for sharing such vital information. Some could not resist the opportunity to enter into emotionally-charged discussions about why their government had not brought them the information first, while others asked if similar workshops could be held in their districts in future.

Helen Hakena, Bougainville's Leitana Nehan Women's DevelopmentAgency (LNWDA) executive director, who had helped initiate the event, said the training was greatly welcomed because many people in Bougainville had never had the various laws governing resources explained to them in an easy-to-understand way before, and that Bougainville women were seldom consulted on the sale or use of their resources.

"Today we heard about all these laws and our various rights as women landowners for the first time. So this training will not only empower our women by helping them to make informed decisions and exert their ownership rights, but it will also raise their awareness about the importance of being involved in local decision-making processes and the need to support each other when difficult decisions are being made about the use of their resources," Hakena said.

Like other resource-rich areas in the Pacific, the lack of effective and sustainable resource management practices and processes that engage and benefit all customary landowners continues to be a controversial feature of Bougainville's development history. As a recent post-conflict society, its people are naturally more sensitive to the threat of further exploitation by foreign investors. And they have good reason to be concerned, but perhaps their attention should also be directed at factors closer to home.

The dilapidated ruins of the Panguna copper mine, high up in the mountains of central Bougainville, are a painful reminder of Bougainville's devastating civil war that claimed the lives of thousands of men and women in the 1980s and 90s. Despite long standing objections to the mine, the landowners were helpless in bringing about effective litigation under existing laws, which then resulted in the forced closure of the mine by the Bougainville Resistance Army. The ensuing civil war re-ignited a fight for selfdetermination amongst many Bougainvilleans, who although governed by Papua New Guinea (PNG), are ethnically more closely affiliated to Solomon Islands.

The leadership role of Bougainville women in helping to prevent the crisis from escalating, and in rebuilding society, is still largely unrecognised today despite being well documented. Throughout the crisis women were pivotal in preventing a further loss of lives. By the time peace was officially agreed in 2001, most of the hard behind-the-scenes work of brokering peace between the warring parties had already been secured by a group of resourceful Bougainville women, many of whom had resorted to life in the jungle during the crisis to raise their families away from the violence.

Today, despite Bougainville's mostly matrilineal society, where land inheritance and land rights are passed through women, there is no guarantee that women will be consulted or have an active role in decisions about land use. Roslyn Gatana, a workshop participant from Buka, believes that chiefs and male clan leaders are the culprits. "Most decisions about leasing land come from men without letting the women know or acknowledging where women stand. Even women chiefs are often excluded," Gatana said.

Louis Nicky, a landowner from Nissan Island one of only two districts in Bougainville with a patrilineal land tenure system (the other district being Buin), said that although he was a landowner, the workshop raised his awareness about the importance of men supporting women landowners, since the majority of Bougainville land was owned by women. Nicky said Bougainville's matrilineal land tenure system was its biggest point of difference with the rest of PNG, but the problem was that there was little or no official recognition of those differences in law.

"Maybe the ABG (Autonomous Bougainville Government) should be doing things differently from the national government [of PNG] by looking at how our land in Bougainville could be better protected in future. It's important to consult people, and here the majority of landowners are the women so they should be supported by all these laws," Nicky said.

At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, Louis Nicky does raise an important point. Custom in PNG is recognised by the Constitution through the Underlying Law Act 2000 and the Customs Recognition Act. Customary groups are bound by their respective custom in relation to land ownership. Expensive and lengthy court processes make it difficult for ordinary people to take land disputes to court, and recent reports indicate that the Underlying Law Act 2000 is given little prominence and recognition by judges, lawyers and quasi-judicial institutions. These challenges are often compounded for women landowners in a society where extreme inequalities are part of everyday life.

More than 97 percent of the land in PNG (including Bougainville) is under customary title, most of which is unregistered. Customary tenure is therefore the dominant form of tenure.

With increasing levels of development, there is a demand for more customary land to be 'freed up' to generate economic return.

Recent legislative changes have followed, which seek to introduce controversial land administration reform in a bid by the PNG Govemment to encourage voluntary customary land registration across the country. This is a move widely criticised by the nongovernmental organisation (NGO) community in PNG for various reasons, one of which is the lack of widespread infrastructural development across all provinces to meet the massive demand for services that will result from the reforms. Given the massive scale and complexities of these reforms, what hope is there of gender-equity considerations being integrated into this process?

For Bougainville women, the answer may lie in the planned implementation of a parallel process by the autonomous government's own land administration unit.

Andrew Dovaro, chief executive of the ABG's Department of Lands and Physical Planning, says his division will be working with Bougainville's landowners over the next two years to discuss the current legal arrangements, including developing legislation for customary land, which he says is currently not governed by any written law.

Dovaro also says that more women should be assuming leadership roles in Bougainville. "Women tend to respect men too much, and are not really taking up their rightful place in decision making. This type of workshop is good because it really does empower our women," he says.

On the face of it, Dovaro's sentiments are encouraging. Could this indicate a real willingness by the ABG (or at least its Lands Department) to genuinely consult with people and perhaps even integrate a gender-based approach into the development of a new legislative framework? For the unsung heroes of Bougainville, Dovaro's proposed process may represent a glimmer of hope.

Another mechanism may help to consolidate the impact of the training. Nehemaiah Naris, from the ELC, carefully introduced and explained the role of Incorporated Land Groups (lLGs) during the workshop as a way for women to assert their leadership roles as landowners under the law. ILGs give landowners legal recognition and allows them to manage their land and natural resources. Naris says a key step forward is for women to not only organise themselves into ILGs but to position themselves into the most senior and influential roles within these organisations. This will not only increase their influence and power but enable them to more readily secure and manage their interests.

When the people of Bougainville return to the polls one year from now, in June 2010, to elect a new autonomous government, one hopes to see more women standing in their district or local constituencies to augment the existing regional quota for women in the ABG.

Helen Hakena says this is an achievable goal, and the Leitana Nehan Women's Development Agency will be encouraging women who participated in the workshop to stand in their district constituencies and be the voice of other less informed women and practise what they learned from the workshop.

Andrew Dovaro agrees, but he says women need to work hard to convince the population that they are better than the male candidates. "They should have a good chance in terms of numbers because the ratio of women to men is two to one now since so many men died in the crisis. They've got the numbers, they just need to mobilise themselves better. "

Pacific Connection Magazine
Copyright © 2009 Pacific Connection. All Rights Reserved