Development Policy Centre Podcast

In the second week of August this year, Papua New Guinea’s national newspapers reported that the customary landowners of the Hides gas field, the primary source of raw material for PNG’s Liquified Natural Gas project, were protesting and threatening to ‘turn off the taps’. This was because they had still not not received significant amounts of the money that was owing to them under a series of development agreements negotiated in 2009, despite the fact that the project has already been operational for two years. Government spokesmen sought to assure the landowner representatives that the money was safely accumulating in a government trust account pending the results of what was described as an ‘outstanding [meaning unfinished] landowner identification process’. While some observers would treat this as a simple case of policy failure on the part of the national government, Dr Filer argues that it is the outcome of a protracted contest between three distinct visions of what the Oil and Gas Act 1998 calls ‘socia