Rumble in the jungle: land, culture and (un)sustainable logging in Solomon Islands

The Politics of Marketising Asia

“…While in the past, the role depended on individuals' capacity to mobilise the community around subsistence farming activities and warmaking, and more recently on their ability to attract state funding, since the arrival of large-scale logging big-men have often relied upon formal and informal logging rents. As the Asian corporate newcomers were not averse to using bribery and other inducements when dealing with landowners, while big-man aspirants needed a source of income to redistribute, a mutually beneficial relationship was created (Kabutaulaka 2000(Kabutaulaka , 2006.…”

“…As eminent commentator Kabutaulaka (2000Kabutaulaka ( , 2006 argues, the expansion of logging in Solomon Islands since independence is not simply related to the ability of Asian loggers to dupe Solomon Islanders. It is a factor of both the big-man culture, whereby authority is reliant upon the ability to redistribute wealth, and the lack of other meaningful sources of income for the majority of rural Solomon Islanders.…”

Conservation in tropical Pacific Island countries: why most current approaches are failing

“…The wide variety of stakeholders, the central importance of landowners, and poor resources make implementing conservation programs and activities fundamentally different from more developed neighboring nations, such as Australia and New Zealand. These factors make relevant Pacific Island government departments unable (underfunded, understaffed, limited legal authority) and sometimes unwilling (alternative priorities, corruption) to achieve their CBD obligations (Kabutaulaka 2000; Keppel 2006; Lees 2007; Laurance et al . 2011).…”

“…The latter group is generally low on resources (Kingsford et al . 2009) and can mismanage available resources (Kabutaulaka 2000; Foale 2001; Laurance et al . 2011), while the former often fail to produce conservation success despite adequate funding (Hunnam 2002; Lees & Siwatibau 2009).…”

Peter Boomgaard, David Henley, and Manon Osseweijer (eds.), Muddied Waters: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Management of Forests and Fisheries in Island Southeast Asia

“…In the Solomon Islands (Melanesia) where most of the land is still under customary tenure, logging companies have been quite successful in convincing a number of villages to allow them to operate, and this has contributed to the emergence of a new rural elite financed by logging money and backed by logging companies. It is instructive to note that several of the logging companies in the Solomons come from Indonesia and Malaysia where there is a long tradition of state land ownership (Kabutaulaka, 2000). While the timber industry in Melanesia faces the same problems with corruption as in Southeast Asia (Henderson, 1997), various sustainable development initiatives, such as ecotourism, handicraft production, and the harvesting of non-timber forest products, have been tried as alternatives to assist people to earn cash without destroying their natural environment (Scheyvens and Cassells, 1999).…”