Paper short abstract:

Our research starts with the observation that people living under threat of eviction retain an apparently-universal faith in the customary landowner. We ask why people seeking to establish places of belonging in the city rarely if ever call for mediation of customary landowners’ land management.

Paper long abstract:

Our research starts with the observation from a recent series of interviews conducted in February 2021, that people living under threat of eviction retain an apparently-universal faith in the customary landowner and customary processes. Again and again, people are evicted from these kinds of lands, as customary landowners themselves appear to be much more ambivalent and to take varied positions on managing squatters and customary tenants. Landowners sometimes seek to honour ancestral agreements and customary arrangements— but also often seek to remove customary tenants when better opportunities for their land come along. The state – the Government of Vanuatu – is a central player in these evictions: customary landowners usually initiate evictions, and then state courts issue eviction orders, which are then carried out by police and paramilitary force.

People in urban Vanuatu negotiate tenure in myriad ways, from longstanding agreements via ancestors to contemporary rental practices. The state’s role in codifying land rights and customary land management is largely invisible, and people attribute their tenure security to the relationships between tenant and landowner. The relationship between the state, tenants, and landowners becomes legible at the point of eviction. When it comes time to decide whether a landowner’s interests should prevail over a tenant’s, people appeal to nationalist struggles that sparked the independence movement. The nation in urban Vanuatu, then, is seen as a source of potential settledness and calm amidst a backdrop of land-grabbing by international elites. This signals that the nationalism that gave rise to the state in 1980 is still strongly-felt by people resisting the state’s processes of dispossession.