Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how neo-liberal ideas of the corporation have infused legal, bureaucratic and governmental forms to transform property, particularly seafront real estate. It focuses on Vanuatu, where tax and land law have been appropriated for expatriate realesate on its main islands, reclassifying property as commodity over “kastom.”

Paper long abstract:

Globalisation is transforming the way property is imagined, classified and commodified. Transnational networks, flows and linkages now enable wealthy and sometimes not-so-wealthy citizens of post-industrial societies to own and possess property including the most tangible form of all - land - across borders outside of their own countries. This has contributed to the rise of a global real-estate industry which is redesigning not only landscapes, but also notions of domicile, citizenship and the corporate form. In the South Pacific nation-state of Vanuatu investors, advisers and financial planners in the country's offshore industry have appropriated specific legal instruments (Torrens titling) and established particular corporate entities (tax free companies and trusts) to embark on the most ambitious program of land tenure conversion since European colonisation. In this process a named Indigenous landscape is being layered with multiplex meanings and ideas of land ownership, appropriation and use. These processes of tenure conversion have been facilitated by redesigning the corporation to maximize the arbitrage between Vanuatu's tax haven status and its 'high' taxing regional neighbors. In doing so bureaucratic, legal, governmental and bureaucratic processes intersect and become entangled in stories of land alienation, tax evasion and money laundering. As a consequence Vanuatu is experiencing one of the most profound changes in land ownership it has ever seen, with 55 percent of all land on the country's main island of Efate now in foreign hands, and 80-90 percent of all coastal land leased out to sea-changing expatriates. This paper charts these propertied transitions and transformations.