[Anthropgrad] RMAP Research Seminar - PROCESSES AND PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN PNG’S OIL-RICH INTERIOR - 12.30-1.30pm Tuesday 5 August

[Andrew Walker]

PROCESSES AND PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN PNG’S OIL-RICH INTERIOR

Dr Emma Gilberthorpe (RMAP Visiting Fellow)

Tuesday 5 August 2008, 12.30-1.30pm 
Seminar Room B (Arndt Room) Coombs Building, ANU

Abstract: 

Poor education has long been recognised as a poverty indicator but universal access to education continues to be a global development challenge. In the Waro region of Kutubu, PNG, intense missionary presence in the 70s and 80s brought education opportunities to a generation of males; since then, however, the environment has become dominated by an oil extraction project that has brought millions of Kina to the Fasu language group by way of royalties, equity and compensation. Education, in terms of access, attendance, infrastructure and provision has significantly declined. This seminar will analyse a project that aims to identify the social, economic and political reasons for low level education in the Waro region, highlighting the conflict between processes and perceptions of socio-economic development at the corporate and village levels. Highlighted as part of this analysis will be the widespread use of corporate rhetoric, the extension of social networks, the atomisation of capital accumulation and the lack of investment in human capital as poverty indicators in areas affected by resource extraction in PNG.


Bio 
Emma is a lecturer in social anthropology at Durham University in the UK. She works in the Kutubu and Ok Tedi regions of Papua New Guinea where non-renewable resource extraction projects (oil and copper respectively) are currently operating. 


-- 
Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University






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