Sister Communities: Rejecting Labels of Informality and Peripherality in Vanuatu

Abstract

This article is dedicated to Mr. Wycliff Tarilenga; may he rest in eternal peace. I would like to thank the Elang Etas Community Association and members of the Elang Etas community who have enabled me to write about their experiences. Special thanks go to Sam Tabawa, the late Wycliff Tarilenga, Jenny Sale, Brian Merah, Margaret Seule and Meriam Tabawa-but this is by no means an exhaustive list. Melisa Hango has been my constant friend and colleague and has always been there when I needed her. Thanks also to the following reviewers for their contributions to the article: the Pacific Interest Group (PIG) at the University of Melbourne, including excellent comments by Sergio Jarillo and Monica Minnegal; Sophie Sturup for her language and thoughtfulness; Ihnji Jon for some pointers into the literature; David Week for his excellent suggestions on decolonizing the article; and Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh for helping me see past urban studies. Thanks, finally, to the anonymous IJURR reviewers, whose comments markedly improved the article. I am especially grateful to the referee who helped me to summarize my purpose better than I could do it myself. This work was funded in part by the University of Melbourne and the Regional Studies Association. The University of Melbourne provided travel funding, and the RSA funded some of my engagements (workshops and training) with the Elang Etas community as part of a Research Network Grant for the RSA Research Network on Academic-Practitioner Collaboration for Urban Settlements, South Pacific (APCUS-SP). These events built trust between me and the community and helped me to improve my understanding of their work.

Decolonising Myself: Navigating the Researcher-Activist Identity in the Urban South Pacific

“…Even though international law protects people from forced evictions and Vanuatu's own national policy strongly recommends against them , evictions continue. I and my interlocutors argue (Day, 2020; that urban evictions violate these customary tenancies, but this idea is certainly not mine only. Member of Parliament Ralph Regenvanu, in a foreword he wrote for a book on urban governance in Melanesia, declares most of these arrangements to be not-informal (McDonnell et al, 2017).…”

“…Precolonial ideas about land custodianship were more collective, never unlinking people from place (Bonnemaison, 1985). The power of the customary landowner compared with the customary tenant is an issue I take up in a recent paper (Day, 2020). In quick summary, customary tenancies are a long-established practice in Vanuatu, whereby customary landowners grant permission for a migrant or neighbour to set up a homestead on his land (it's usually a "him").…”

“…Planning in the tradition of modernismunreflective of its role in reproducing coloniality and inequalitypersists in planning departments and the academy. I know because I have been part of that apparatus, and I have also critiqued it (Day, 2020;forthcoming). At the University of Melbourne, where I teach, our student society, the Melbourne Urban Planning Student Society (MUPSS) ran a survey in 2018 and concluded that 70 percent of students are uncomfortable writing in the first person (personal communication with MUPSS leadership).…”

“…Figure 7 shows that mission statement as pulled from the EECA Facebook page, in the lingua franca, Bislama. Because of some translation difficulties (Day, 2020), that mission statement is not available in English.…”

“…I will, for example, be able to study the future effects of the mission statement on community mobilisation. I have also written on the power dynamics exposed by words that appeared in the original drafts of that mission statement, which are rejected in the community but are common in the documents produced by the development industry (Day, 2020). Similarly, with the EECA Census, in any future work that describes this effort, I will need to acknowledge my role in this process (I did not design the instrument, but I did produce the analysis on behalf of the EECA; Figure 5).…”