As related yesterday, the talk by ANU food crops wizard Michael Bourke in Madang recently was garbled by a local rag’s attempt to tell us what he said. It had another crack at it this morning, and I must say I was pretty impressed.
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Mike Bourke of somewhere upstairs was yacking at the the Divine Word University in Madang last week. His message was, I can only assume, something to do with land, agriculture and indicators of poverty. Alas, this is not how it came out.
Last year during a visit to the Philippines I had the opportunity to participate in a roundtable discussion facilitated by the organisation Environmental Science for Social Change. The meeting brought together individuals from civil society and government agencies, as well as researchers and representatives of community level institutions to examine the state of play with implementation of Philippines’ Ancestral Domain legislation 10 years after its enactment. The overwhelming sense from this meeting was that, for a range of reasons, efforts to secure indigenous rights to land were not making a tangible difference to poverty in indigenous communities. This experience became the stimulus for an upcoming RMAP argument.
It goes without saying that securing recognition of territorial rights is central to discourses on indigenous peoples for reasons of identity, cultural connection to place and livelihoods. But do secure rights help such communities to gain a fair return from resource-based activities such as mining, forestry and tourism? How significant are secure resource rights for indigenous groups relative to other factors such as political voice, capacity, and governance arrangements in securing an equitable return? How do the benefits of securing resource rights weigh up against the costs, like the simplification of relationships to place that laws require, and associated social and economic issues such as conflict?
Next week’s not-to-be-missed RMAP argument grapples with these issues and more in addressing the question: Are secure resource rights the key ingredient for indigenous groups to benefit from resource-based development activities?
Panelists will focus on Australia and PNG, but there is scope for the audience to raise issues from further afield. More details are available here, and discussion will continue on this blog after the argument next Thursday. So: watch this space.
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