Economic, political and cultural brokers in remote Papua New Guinea
This research project examines the role of brokers in shaping flows of knowledge, wealth and status at a resource frontier in Papua New Guinea.
![Entrance to Owabi Corner, Suabi village, Western Province PNG [photo: Peter Dwyer]](https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/image/0004/3580897/PNG_web.jpg)
Overview
This research project examines the role of brokers in shaping flows of knowledge, wealth and status at a resource frontier in Papua New Guinea, and how that role is changing as technologies such as mobile phones and associated social media platforms introduce new modes of engagement between local, national and global worlds.
As an extractive industry consolidates in a green field, particular individuals may emerge as brokers, acting to negotiate relations between members of their own community and representatives of the state, the companies and neighbouring communities. To the extent that such people are recognised and feted by outsiders so they are vulnerable to becoming complicit in, or submerged by, an ethos of inequality that, initially, they sought to manage on behalf of their constituents.
In contexts of these kinds, brokers may contribute both to differentiating the domains that they purport to bridge and to enhancing inequalities in their home communities.
By following the trajectories that key individuals from one community follow, and how these are fostered and interpreted by the audiences to whom they play, we are investigating the demands that brokers service, their positioning, and the tensions they seek to mediate.
Outcomes
Events, publications, reports, collaborations, impact etc
- Minnegal, M., & Dwyer, P. D. (2020). God, health and COVID-19 in remote Papua New Guinea. DevPolicy Blog, (16 April 2020).
- Minnegal, M., & Dwyer, P. D. (2020). Communication, privilege and the ironies of isolation: from Melbourne to Papua New Guinea. Consciously Quarantined: A COVID-19 response from the Social Sciences, (17 April 2020).
- Dwyer, P. D., & Minnegal, M. (2020). COVID‐19 and Facebook in Papua New Guinea: Fly River Forum. Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies. DOI: 10.1002/app5.312
- Minnegal, M & P.D. Dwyer (forthcoming) The Broker: Inequality, Loss and the PNG LNG Project. In Large-Scale Capital in Small-Scale Life-Worlds: The Establishment of Novel Inequalities in Papua New Guinea, edited by B. Beer & T. Schwörer. Canberra: ANU Press.