Moving beyond post-development: facilitating indigenous alternatives for “development”

Using the example of smallholder oil palm production in Papua New Guinea the paper illustrates how elements of a market economy and modernity become enmeshed and partly transformed by local place-based nonmarket practices. The persistence, even efflorescence, of indigenous gift exchange in tandem with greater participation in the market economy challenges conventional notions regarding the structures and meanings of development. The introduced market economy can be inflected to serve indigenous socio-cultural and economic goals by place-based processes that transform market relations and practices into nonmarket social relationships. These kinds of inflections of the market economy are common and widespread and therefore worthy of consideration for their theoretical insights into processes of social and economic change and meanings of development. The paper concludes by outlining some preliminary thoughts on how development practice could be modified to provide more scope for this process of inflection so that development strategies accord better with indigenous socio-cultural meanings of development.