ABSTRACT
In a country of such diversity, with substantial foreign investment, the role of politics is considerable in shaping national development, constructing a nation from a variety of islands, language groups and cultures, balancing provincial and regional interests, formulating policies and programmes and providing a social framework for development. Papua New Guinea is a ‘soft state’, with limited capacity to implement development policies and programmes, though with an ability to manipulate macro-economic policy and develop relations with transnational corporations. This weakness is to some extent a function of both the recent establishment of an imported, political system (alongside educational, health and industrial relations systems), and of the extent to which regional and local issues are of much greater importance, to the public and to politicians, than national issues. The structure of national development is, in many respects, the sum of development in the regions, and is weak because of the limited cooperation and integration between regions, and between the regions and the centre, and because of persistent factionalism and corruption at all levels of government. This political economy is far-reaching in its significance. It is a truism that change has been rapid, and that this has been particularly important for the functioning of the state political system and the bureaucracy, alien structures grafted on to a fragmented society, where literacy levels were low, experience of the outside world slight, inaccurate and inadequate, and suspicion and hostility vastly more common than regional or national unity. In the
circumstances there has been a remarkable degree of stability. Many Papua New Guineans nonetheless exist only on the fringes of the modern state, purchasing and selling commodities, but paying little or no taxation and largely continuing to live in their areas of birth, where ‘traditional’ social organisation is more influential in their lives than most institutions-even schools and roads-of the contemporary state. Languages, cultures, races and, more recently, religions have divided Papua New Guineans in a country where the tasks of achieving physical communication are often considerable, and only rarely improving.
