Land titling and socioeconomic development in the South Pacific

The controversy over the relative merits of customary and individual land tenure in Papua New Guinea and other island states of the South Pacific continues unabated. Steven Gosarevski, Helen Hughes and Susan Windybank (2004b) (hereafter cited Hughes as the senior author) stirred up a hornet’s nest by asserting ‘communal ownership has not permitted any country to develop. In Papua New Guinea, where 90 per cent of people live on the land, it is the principal cause of poverty’ (Hughes 2004b:137). Jim Fingleton answered with a collection of edited papers by Michael Bourke, Mark Mosko, Charles Lightfoot, and R.J. Fisher claiming to expose as ‘demonstrably false the argument that customary land tenures are an impassable barrier to development’ (2005:ix). In this review of Fingleton’s compilation we attempt to moderate the often extreme positions adopted by these rival scholars, and show a way forward that combines the best of both with positive policy proposals for accelerating equitable human and economic development in one of the world’s most backward regions. A first step is to refine the rival interpretations of customary and individual titling. We believe that once one achieves clarity on this matter, one will be better able to deal with empirical issues relating both to the role of land titling in the process of economic development and to any implications of titling for equity and rent sharing. The second section of this paper sketches some of the evidence for and against the rival Hughes and Fingleton contentions that individual land titling is either a precondition or irrelevant for successful socioeconomic development. This evidence includes the natural experiment in Zimbabwe where the Mugabe government has abolished individual title and reverted to undocumented customary modes of land ownership. The third section concludes with suggestions for what may be needed to give effect to the synthesis we propose.