Includes bibliographical references.

Powers of exclusion in Melanesia -- Urban Melanesia: the challenges of managing land, modernity and tradition -- Urban land in Solomon Islands: powers of exclusion and counter-exclusion -- "There's nothing better than land": a migrant group's strategies for accessing informal settlement land in Port Moresby -- Inform land markets in Papua New Guinea -- The formation of a land grab policy network in Papua New Guinea -- Oil palm development and large-scale land acquisitions in Papua New Guinea -- The political ramifications of Papua New Guinea's commission of inquiry -- Urban land grabbing by political elites: exploring the political economy of land and the challenges of regulation -- Making the invisible seen: putting women's rights on Vanuatu's land reform agenda -- From colonial intrusions to "intimate exclusions": contesting legal title and 'chiefly title' to land to Epi, Vanuatu -- Landownership as exclusion -- The politics of property: gender, land and political authority in Solomon Islands -- Afterword: land transformations and exclusion across regions.

The relationship between customary land tenure and 'modern' forms of landed property has been a major political issue in the 'Spearhead' states of Melanesia since the late colonial period, and is even more pressing today, as the region is subject to its own version of what is described in the international literature as a new 'land rush' or 'land grab' in developing countries. This volume aims to test the application of one particular theoretical framework to the Melanesian version of this phenomenon, which is the framework put forward by Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li in their 2011 book, Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia. Since that framework emerged from studies of the agrarian transition in Southeast Asia, the key question addressed in this volume is whether 'land transformations' in Melanesia are proceeding in a similar direction, or whether they take a somewhat different form because of the particular nature of Melanesian political economies or social institutions. The contributors to this volume all deal with this question from the point of view of their own direct engagement with different aspects of the land policy process in particular countries. Aside from discussion of the agrarian transition in Melanesia, particular attention is also paid to the growing problem of land access in urban areas and the gendered nature of landed property relations in this region.

English.

OCLC control number change - WorldCat record variable field(s) change: 050, 072, 082, 650, 651