ABSTRACT
The rapid growth of settlements in Pacific towns and cities has caused the supply of urban land to become increasingly limited.1 Much of the literature on urbanisation in the Pacific highlights informal settlement as a critical dimension of contemporary
urban land problems, including their potential to contribute to violent disputation.2
The key areas of disputation concern land access issues and the policies and legislation or custom that regulate land rights. Some scholars place the debate on rights of access to land in Melanesia within a broader analysis of an ideology of landownership and a politics of exclusion.3
