ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand the historical processes and political negotiations that produced New Caledonia’s current land situation, characterized by the co-existence of a public domain, private landownership and customary land. The shift operated by the ADRAF in problematizing the controversy and the strategy designed for solving it to a certain extent allowed the question of historical proof to be embedded into a broader test. The notion of the test as a sanction will allow us to understand the bifurcations and irreversible paths taken that characterize the progressive construction of the customary land artifact. However, these two logics are not equivalent in the sense that the first, the logic of proof, is embedded in the second, the logic of the test, as one of its components. The process of building customary land and the tests that mark its stages and bifurcations do not therefore end with its legal formalization as part of a restitutive land reform.
