Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development : Other Paths for Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is going through a crisis: A concentration on conventional approaches to development, including an unsustainable reliance on mining, forestry, and foreign aid, has contributed to the country's slow decline since independence in 1975. Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development attempts to address problems and gaps in the literature on development and advance a new qualitative conception of community sustainability informed by substantial and innovative research in Papua New Guinea. In this context, sustainability is conceived in terms that include not just practices tied to economic development. It also informs questions of well-being and social integration, community-building, social support, and infrastructure renewal. In short, the concern with sustainability here entails undertaking an analysis of how communities are sustained through time, how they cohere and change, rather than being constrained within discourses and models of development. From another angle, this project presents an account of community sustainability detached from instrumental concerns with economic development

Paul James is professor of globalization and cultural diversity, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Yaso Nadarajah is a senior research fellow at the Globalism Research Centre, RMIT. Karen Haive is former first assistant secretary in the Department for Community Development, Papua New Guinea. Victoria Stead is a PhD student at RMIT.