Searching for the Melanesian Way: culture, ethics and public service performance in Papua New Guinea

My thesis seeks to examine the ways in which notionally “Western” governance concepts and norms translate to a developing country context. Specifically, the thesis undertakes an ethnographic study of the ways in which public servants in Papua New Guinea interpret and enact a range of ethical-normative governance concepts and practices associated with the effective functioning of public bureaucracy - such as ‘duty’, ‘impartiality’, ’accountability’, and ‘transparency’. It seeks to show how their manner of interpreting and enacting these concepts and their related practices influences the way that cooperative action is constituted and legitimated in the Papua New Guinean bureaucratic organisational context, in a way that influences the operational performance of the organisation as a whole. The thesis approaches this task by comparing the way Papua New Guinean public servants characteristically interpret these ethical-normative governance concepts and practices with a notionally “Western” ethical discursive orthodoxy associated with Weber’s ‘ideal type’ of bureaucracy. In making this comparison, the thesis seeks to illuminate how the representations, signifying practices and related modes of ethical thought in use in Papua New Guinean state bureaucracies are characteristically shaped and influenced by socio-culturally situated moralities, identities and systems of meaning that derive from a general ‘ethos of mutuality’ - one that I argue is characteristic of contemporary forms of Melanesian reciprocal sociality, and which in turn derive from ‘traditional’ cultural forms of that sociality. Finally, by analysing the operational performance of a particular bureaucratic program – and the way in which cooperative action is constituted and legitimated under this program – the thesis aims to illustrate how the operative bureaucratic representations, signifying practices and modes of thought influenced by this distinctively Melanesian ‘ethos of mutuality’ contribute to the persistent inability of the program to fully meet its mandated purposes and objectives.