Policy Advice and Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This essay examines a moment in Papua New Guinea's history when international advice about the country's future had particular weight. In placing rural areas and populations at the centre of policy prescriptions, the advice fitted neatly with the ambitions of the Indigenous politicians and business people who were taking hold of and shaping state power. Whether the outcome, an independent nation-state following a policy direction which intended to keep the bulk of the population in the countryside, could reverse the unemployment and disorder which had appeared during late colonialism remained to be seen.