The Hides Gas Project has been supplying gas to the Porgera gold mine since 1991 and has paid royalties to local landowners since 1994. The initial mechanism for benefit distribution was the so-called ‘agency’ system allowed under the Land Act. In effect, this meant that landowners appointed agents to represent their customary groups (mostly clans or sub-clans), to receive monies allocated to these groups, and then distribute these monies to their own group members. The system served the first and second operators of the project (British Petroleum and Oil Search) until 1999, when the proposed development of a new ‘Gas-to-Queensland’ Project raised the question of whether the ‘agency’ system should henceforth be brought into line with the ILG system used in the oil licence areas where CNGL had been the operator.

The task of finding a viable route to ILG registration for Huli landowners in the Hides area was encumbered by the complexity of the Huli land tenure system, in which there are three categories of people resident on any notional ‘clan’ territory, each with a different portfolio of land rights. Whilst land is notionally owned by clan and sub-clan ‘corporations’, individual members have rights in perpetuity to do with the land what they want — they are effectively the landholders. Individuals can sub-let land to anyone for a fee or for a fixed term, and can grant others use right or title to garden and hunting tracts by gift, deed or inheritance. In other words, who uses any particular piece of clan territory held by a clan member is at the discretion of that clan member and not subject to any group consensus or decision-making process. The only limitation on such discretion is that clan land can never be permanently and irrevocably alienated — the corporation holds the ultimate title and collective interest.

Two processes operate to cause the Huli clan groups on the ground to have a more complex and cosmopolitan make-up than the one envisaged in a simple ‘one clan one piece of land’ schema. These processes are at the heart of all problems encountered by lands officers attempting to grapple with the Huli land tenure system.

For all sorts of reasons — warfare, severe flooding or drought, the search for better access to hunting areas, or simply personal preferences — individuals often moved out of their natal clan territories to take up residence on a permanent or temporary basis with relatives or friends elsewhere, and they could do this without necessarily losing any of their rights to land in their ‘home’ territories. Huli distinguish two categories of migrant: those who are related to their hosts through descent from a female clan member (sisters’ sons, for example) are known collectively as yamuwini (literally ‘born of woman’), while those who have no direct blood tie, but are linked by marriage or friendship, are variously known as wali haga (‘where women stayed’), igiri yango (male friends), or tara (others). To distinguish themselves from these other categories of resident, the patrilineal clan members living on their own clan territory refer to themselves as tene, which means ‘source’, ‘origin’, or ‘main stem’. On any tract of clan land (or parish) there will therefore be three distinct classes of residents.

In practice all of these residents are indistinguishable in their everyday behaviour, but the tene are regarded as primary members in the sense of holding a sort of freehold title, while the others are secondary members holding a sort of leasehold title. Another way of conceptualising this relationship is to think of the agnates or primary residents as hotel owners and the secondary residents as guests who occupy hotel rooms, often with open-ended bookings, who could in theory be evicted by their hosts (Goldman 1993).

The second process which produces changes in the ‘one clan one piece of land’ model is in effect the repercussion of the first process over a period of generations. As secondary members migrate from various Huli clans and stay as guests on their hosts’ land for several generations, the result is a complex mosaic of Huli clan segments scattered across wide distances. Migrant groups may eventually account for anything up to 99 per cent of the total population of a clan parish, but each of these groups will still retain some knowledge of, and share a sense of identity with, their natal clan. The members will still be tene of Clan A while they count as yamuwini or wali haga for Clan B whose territory they now occupy. Thus any one Huli clan may have several segments scattered outside its own ancestral land (see Figure 6-3).

The experience of CNGL in the Moran area (PDL 5) had shown that resident groups in each category would try to assert their right to a discrete ILG status, and this meant disputing their relative status as owners, guests, or guests of guests. To make matters even more complicated, Huli people generally have gardens in many different named parish areas, so a person would claim membership of more than one potential ILG and thus claim entitlement to multiple benefits on the basis of this customary practice.

The process of clan boundary demarcation in the Moran area took more than two years and identified approximately 15 per cent of the land as being under dispute. There is still no agreement on the part of the landowners about the number and names of the ILGs that need to be recognised. After initially identifying more than 200 possible social units for registration, CNGL introduced the concept of a ‘stock-clan’ in order to prioritise some groups for registration as ILGs. Each ILG was to be named after one of these ‘stock-clans’, which angered those resident groups with different descent affiliations. Initially, 12 groups were registered, and then a further 14 groups were added to the list but without the due process of gazettal having been followed. This created another wave of discontent and a further demand for recognition of 17 more groups that was eventually met by the DPE and the ROT. Project benefits have been distributed in proportion to the area of land within PDL 5 that is held by each of the claimant groups. Although PDL 5 is only one-sixth the size of PDL 1, closure has still not been achieved on a lengthy and costly process of land boundary demarcation and ILG registration.

The proposed development of the PNG Gas Project posed new questions about the need for stable and democratic landowner representation in the negotiation of new benefit-sharing agreements, as well as the actual distribution of cash benefits to project beneficiaries. Government agencies and the project proponents both began asking themselves whether a special model was needed to deal with the organisation of Huli landowners, and if so, whether it should be retrospectively applied to existing ‘brownfield’ licence areas as well as to new ‘greenfield’ areas on which development licences had yet to be granted.

More than 400 Huli clans had so far been identified, and satellite segments from each of these clans might be represented in any one licence area. Moreover, these satellite groups might not be confined to discrete segments of land, but might be scattered across several locations within a licence area. The predictable outcome for a developer attempting to locate and register ‘primary segments’ would be a system under constant challenge from groups dividing into subgroups of ever-diminishing size. At the same time, land boundary work would presage a series of land court claims which would be protracted, costly and counter-productive for all parties.^[2] Providing solutions was very much a matter of finding the satisfactory interface between culture and commerce. In consultation with Oil Search community affairs managers, the search began with an effort to isolate and remove each of the variables in the equation that would constitute a subject for disputation. For example:

What was eventually proposed as a result of these discussions was a system of ‘zones’ conceived as loosely drawn territorial areas occupied by an aggregated set of clans and clan sections which sustained long-term relationships based on intermarriage and exchange (see Figure 6-4). These relationships are more densely clustered within each zone than they are between neighbouring zones. In essence, the zone ILG was devised on the basis of customary behaviour patterns rather than principles of land tenure, albeit with a recognition that there has to be a certain degree of arbitrariness in the construction of zone boundaries. The best analogy is to be found in the customary exchange of pigs: If I give you a pig, with which of your neighbours are you compelled by custom to share it? The answers to this question provide the basis for defining a zone.

Each zone would in effect be an umbrella entity capable of subsuming or incorporating ILGs which have already been registered without the need for deregistration or disenfranchisement (see Figure 6-5). Its members would be empowered through their own Dispute Settlement Authority to decide who is or is not a legitimate landowner or landholder within the zone. Neither the resource developer nor the relevant government agencies would be required to adjudicate on competing genealogical footprint claims or make the final decision on who is and who is not an accredited project beneficiary. The actual make-up of any zone which might be established in other licence areas would necessarily reflect local circumstances in light of variations in social organisation across the wider region.

The zone ILG system has several advantages over the present ILG system:

Zone ILGs would be formed in practice by a consensus of the component member units informed by social mapping and landowner identification studies undertaken in accordance with Section 47 of the Oil and Gas Act, and their social constitution would in that sense be guided by anthropological research. Zone ILGs would allow local-level politics to continue through the proliferation of smaller social units, but would contain the ramifications of this process within a set of higher-level boundaries. The message conveyed by this higher level of organisation is that closely related people need to ‘cooperate’ to mutually benefit from resource development rather than continue to argue and fight amongst themselves. Zone ILGs would to some extent be artificial entities, but would still be less artificial than the rectangular petroleum licence areas to which they are related. In each area, the licence holders (and government agencies) would only need to deal with a committee made up of the elected chairpersons of each zone, in much the same way as the mining company at Porgera deals with ‘super agents’ under the agency system (see Golub, this volume).

It is readily acknowledged that any system of this kind is subject to the risk of political manipulation and social strain. While the representative structures in a zonal system should provide constraints on benefit abuse by individual leaders, they would probably alienate the representatives of existing Landowner Associations who would be fearful of being marginalised in project negotiations. Equally, a reformed and rationalised ILG system would still need to provide the community with the level of benefit disaggregation they clearly desire — which means that benefits should end up with individual recipients and not the ‘representatives’ of larger social units.

Whether or not the zone ILG system needs to be justified in terms of local ‘custom’, there remains the question of whether it is consistent with the letter and spirit of the Land Groups Incorporation Act. Section 5(3) of the Act states that:

The zone ILG is precisely an entity of the type described in clause (c) if we understand ‘common customs’ to mean agreed principles of behaviour. It should therefore be evident that the LGIA does not oblige the developer or consultant anthropologist to chain the constitution of ILGs to some ‘primary segment’ model. Moreover, Section 5(5) even allows for an ILG to be constituted ‘as a group consisting only of incorporated land groups’. The notion of aggregated units is thus specifically and explicitly allowed for in the Act, and if the zone ILG system places the onus for decisions about membership squarely back in court of the ILGs themselves, this is also consistent with the spirit of the Act.

If one does imbue such units with what Ernst (1999) called ‘entivity’, this may in fact be a positive factor for change in the community. The principles of Melanesian kastom are not inconsistent with the creation of a social artifact tailored to the interests of a state and a developer which also benefits the population of local landowners. Under the terms of the Organic Law on Provincial Governments and Local-Level Governments 1995, zones actually resemble the local government wards which are also aggregates of local clans and clan segments.

In 2000, Oil Search instituted a ‘zone’ ILG system for PDL 1 and two adjacent Petroleum Retention Licence areas in anticipation of the PNG Gas Project. This exercise had written endorsement from the DPE and the ROT. Seventeen zones were proposed, and eight were actually registered with the ROT.^[3] However, following representations by some individuals from one of the adjacent licence areas (known as Hides 4x), further registrations were halted under instructions from the DPE. Zone ILGs have not yet had an opportunity to function as representative or beneficiary bodies because there is as yet no PNG Gas Project. However, zone ILG agreements about the distribution of future benefits between member sections within each zone are enshrined within the ILG constitutions.

PNG government agencies such as the DPE and the newly established Gas Office are still considering what is the best mechanism for the distribution of potential cash benefits to local landowners. Cash benefits from the existing oil project have either been divided equally between the number of ILGs in a licence area (as in PDL 2) or in accordance with the acreage held by each ILG (as in PDL 5). Whilst the retention of a ‘clan’-based system has some attractions because of its apparent consistency with their understanding of kastom, government officials are also sensitive to the results of various surveys which indicate that people in some of the licence areas want benefits to be distributed on a per capita basis. This preference is evident in a household survey conducted as part of the Gas Project Social Impact Assessment in 2005 (see Figure 6-6). However, this survey also shows a much greater preference for per capita distribution in Huli areas (Moran and Hides) than along the route of the current oil pipeline which follows the course of the Kikori River. This may reflect the already splintered nature of the ILG system in Gulf Province, where many individuals or families already have their own private ILGs. In all other areas, there is clear evidence of continuing dissatisfaction with the present benefit distribution regimes and support for the move to a more equitable system in which individual group members have their own passbooks and accounts, rather than having to rely on the decision made by ILG chairmen who look after the accounts of their respective groups.

Source: Goldman 2005.

Despite these findings, PNG government agencies are still saddled with the task of deciding how best to derive a system of landowner representation, given the factionalised nature of local politics in Huli society, and how best to derive a list of ‘landowners’ that will be acceptable to local people, given the complex nature of Huli land tenure. Government officials seem to think that the social mapping and landowner identification studies required under Section 47 of the Oil and Gas Act should extricate them from this minefield by painting a frozen landscape whose ‘landowners’ could then be vetted or endorsed by the Minister of Petroleum and Energy as ‘entitled project beneficiaries’. This position is at variance with the best advice of all consultant anthropologists who have worked in the licence areas over the last decade, who say that the task of providing a definitive beneficiary list based on people’s status as individual ‘landowners’ is nigh impossible, and in any event is a task best left to local people to undertake in accordance with the wide range of factors that make up kastom. In the many meetings on this subject in which I have been a participant, the ‘zone’ system has been firmly rejected by government officials because of its ‘non-customary’ nature. Debate therefore continues on how to reconcile the equitable principle of per capita distribution with the perceived inequity of a ‘clan’ system that relies on clan leaders to ‘cut up the pig’. This ongoing debate is enmeshed with considerations exogenous to the merits of a zone ILG system, such as the requirements of international financial institutions, the personal agendas of current landowner ‘leaders’, and misapprehensions or indecision on the part of the policy makers. The final scenarios have yet to be played out.