Property Rights and Natural Resource Exploitation in Papua New Guinea

In one media release a few years back, the Member for Vanimo-Green River, Mr. Belden Namah, stated that our mining laws are unfair and out-of-date, and deprive both the state and customary landowners of equitable benefit sharing from mineral exploitation. He further stated that these laws favor multinational corporations, giving them access and exploitation rights to natural resources that are our God-given inheritances while we, the land and resource owners, have become mere spectators.

This was the first time a politician or bureaucrat had the guts to stand up and speak out openly on this particular issue. Many politicians and bureaucrats, past and present, are reluctant to speak out on this particular issue and consider it taboo, fearing that touching on this very subject would cause economic instability and affect business interests in the country. 

Nonetheless, this is an important issue that has largely evaded policy and political debates in this country since Independence, either out of ignorance or deliberately, and it is timely the Honorable Belden Namah has brought it to the forefront. The very issue raised by the Honorable Belden Namah centers on the subject of Property Rights (PRs).

The online dictionary, Investopedia, defines PRs as laws made by governments regarding how individuals control, benefit from, and transfer property. The same dictionary also states that individuals will create new forms of property to create wealth, only when they are assured that their rights to their property will protect them against unjust and/or unlawful actions by other parties.

PRs are important for natural resource management. People create rules on how natural resources can be used by individuals within a community; there are PRs in both the formal economy and traditional societies (non-formal economy). These rules then define the rights of individuals within their communities to access, use, and have some other rights to natural resources on their lands, in their seas, in their lakes, and their rivers and creeks. The rights to natural resources include ownership, user, claimant, exclusion, alienation, access, withdrawal, and many other rights that can be defined, for both tangible and non-tangible resources. There are common pool resources, property owned by no one, public property, and private property regarding PRs.

In PNG, however, we collectively refer to PRs regarding any natural resource exploitation as a Bundle of Rights (BRs), regardless of the type of right or the type of resource being under consideration, be it common pool resource, property owned by no one, public property, and private property.

The problem with the BRs concept is that not all the sticks fit into the bundle, yet we extinguish rights in the bundle regardless of the type of right and the type of natural resource being considered.

In most cases, it has been the definition of the “Political Economists” that has been used to define PRs in this country and elsewhere in the world, while scientific and natural resource management definitions are rarely used. This is even though some definitions used by political economists contain ambiguities that sometimes lead to misrepresentation of issues that are used in the formulation of policies and legislation for natural resource exploitations.

The abuse of PRs is the root cause of all the social, economic, and environmental problems with natural resource exploitation in PNG. This is the very issue that prompts customary landowners to occasionally or continuously shut down mining, logging, commercial agriculture, quarries, hydropower dams, and many other economic activities in this country; the protests or shutdowns show that the landowners believe that their rights have been abused or not recognized. This is the very issue landowners are not willing to put up any more of their customary lands for economic development in this country, fearing they may lose more of their rights and livelihoods if they do so. This is the very issue customary landowners and NGOs continuously petition the state to review business agreements/contracts and laws of the land regarding natural resource exploitation. This is the very issue that led to the shutdown of Bougainville Copper Limited and eventually, the Bougainville Crisis, which resulted in the loss of 20, 000 lives. This is the very issue of why the gold on Misima Island is gone in just a few years, and the landowners are sitting there wondering where all the money had gone and are asking themselves what to do with the degraded landscape left behind by the mining activity. This is the very issue that is now causing all the tensions between Nautilus Minerals Limited, local land and sea owners, and NGOs regarding the first experimental deep-sea mining in the world to take place on the sea beds of this country.

Many researchers and commentators are now going beyond the threshold of land to define PRs in terms of natural resource exploitation. It is now necessary to go beyond the threshold of land to define PRs because “resources of the future” like carbon, ecosystem goods and services, and minerals under the sea (deep-sea mining) warrant it. Some of these resources lie beyond the threshold of land (e.g., deep-sea mining) or are non-tangible natural resources (e.g., carbon dioxide or carbon), and their PRs need to be defined based on their nature and characteristics.

Moreover, under the threshold of land, PRs to some natural resources like water are given away as if they are usufruct rights given away by the landowners to corporations without the need for any proper compensation for the use of the resource.

Many academics now agree that the definition of PRs has always been taken from a Western perspective, and although it does not suit circumstances and situations within indigenous societies it is nonetheless forced down their throats. The justification for this course of action has always been that indigenous societies do not have any use for natural resources like gold and therefore do not have any PRs for these resources. More than that, it is also argued that because customary laws and PRs are not written laws, it is not possible to transfer customary laws and PRs from traditional societies into the formal economy, thus the easiest thing to do is to extinguish these laws and rights under the threshold of land. 

Governments around the world have also used the same arguments to suppress the rights of indigenous societies so that they take control of a particular resource to attain economic prosperity for all, but this has rarely worked and has led to increased poverty and more social, economic and environmental problems in many cases - this is exactly the case in this country right now.