The ‘zone’ system was conceived to address problems already experienced with ILGs elsewhere, and it anticipated what might happen with the formation of ILGs in the context of Huli culture and social organisation. From long-term research on dispute resolution and economic exchange in Huli society, a set of scenarios could be foreshadowed which would pose intractable obstacles to the progress and stability of a major resource development project. In one sense the ‘zone’ system was engineered to allow local-level politics to continue unimpeded: as local groups traditionally argued over the way in which pork should be distributed at ceremonial pig kills, so do these same groups now compete for increased portions of the ‘project pig’. The solution was to establish a system with a built-in firewall such that these utterly conventional but highly localised competitive encounters would not necessarily hamper development activities.

At the same time, the solution seemed attractive to this consultant because it offered an opportunity to build a new form of ‘community’ within a socio-cultural environment which lacked village-like settlements or any aggregated form of residential pattern. Thus supra-local community would be a grouping of clans and clan segments sharing different parts of the ‘benefit pig’, with a democratically elected leadership committee that could then seek to expand its activities by applying for development grants from suitable aid donors.

It is important to add that a three-month process of consultation with landowners in the Hides licence area (PDL 1) found unanimous support for the system, partly because the problem associated with the previous formation of ILGs in the neighbouring Moran licence area (PDL 5) and the more distant Gobe licence area (PDLs 3 and 4) were already well known in the Hides area. Indeed, the success of the implementation process which followed the consultation process reflected the real and historical relations of intermarriage and exchange between zone members.

Perhaps this shows how the anthropologist as consultant is able to ‘gate-keep’ a practical solution to a widely acknowledged problem by engineering a new social system that is not only consistent with the realities of economic development and the expectations of the developer, but also helps to manage ‘custom’ as a basis for sustainable innovation. According to Stirrat (2000), development consultancy work is commonly based on the mistaken belief that consultants can somehow penetrate to the ‘truth’ or ‘essence’ of what is going on in the world. But the consultant anthropologist who counts as an acculturated observer of one particular society is more like a translator who knows enough to anticipate social trajectories and provide constructive solutions to the problems they contain.