Big Money in the Rural: Wealth and Dispossession in Western Solomons Political Economy

This paper discusses the multiple ways in which rural economic wealth in the New Georgia islands of the western Solomons has been built up in both ephemeral and enduring ways through several decades of intensive industrial logging on customary lands. The scale of wealth accumulation in the rural western Solomons and the often associated process of dispossession of communal natural resource rights are rarely taken into account in discussions of political economy in early 21st-century Solomon Islands. Through this paper, changing configurations and trajectories of accumulation and dispossession are traced. The comparison of two distinctly different processes whereby collective social agency over customary land is weakened, ultimately for accumulation in the hands of a few, involves a discussion about the centralisation and disintegration, respectively, of customary chieftainship in New Georgia. This leads to a more general assessment of how authority over customary land in Melanesia can be the subject of large-scale dispossession.