Paper short abstract:

State perspectives for villager wellbeing in WNB, Papua New Guinea are tied to oil palm expansion. But this runs counter to village ideas of wellbeing focused on spiritual and lineage wellbeing. As natural resources dwindle the tensions between these ontologies place new demands on the state.

Paper long abstract:

Concepts of state and nation are highly fragmented in rural Papua New Guinea. National and Provincial governments are largely unnoticed and the well-being of citizens rests in the hands of indigenous lineage networks, the local government authorities and dominant capital investment corporations. In West New Britain development is driven by the major oil palm companies with their nuclear estates, settler plantings and urban centres. Company visions of citizen well being are focused on their integration into the oil palm industry from which farmers reap some material benefits but, in their integration into this industry, experience ontological challenges to indigenous concerns for a sense of well-being that has both spiritual and relational content. This paper will look at how far state support for capitalist development has affected subject formation in both villager and settler populations dependent on the oil palm industry.

In these situations of increasing vulnerability to world commodity price fluctuations villager and settler communities look to the state to restore their autonomy and sense of well-being by securing the embeddedness of indigenous prosperity in their land, its forest resources and kinship connections, but this continues to run counter to the state's surrender of its responsibilities to capitalist expansion and the financial bonanza this brings the state elites. The paper will examine the extent to which these tensions continue to be played out in land disputes, lineage incorporation, Christian revivalism, and the 2017 elections.