ICS Seminar - Pryor Placino and Katherine Gibson
Scoping agricultural resilience in PNG’s Western Province from afar: negotiating challenges posed by COVID and colonial knowing
Presenter: Pryor Placino and Katherine Gibson
Discussant: Hannah Sarvasy
Chair: Naama Blatman
Abstract
PNG’s Western Province has recently become a focus of Australia’s development assistance. Western Province borders Queensland in the Torres Strait and Indonesia along the land border with Papua Barat (formerly Irian Jaya), making it a region of geopolitical importance to Australia. The province is the largest and poorest in PNG, despite hosting the Ok Tedi copper mine that has contributed 15-25% of PNG’s gross domestic product since the start of its operation in 1984. But BHP Billiton’s Ok Tedi copper mine also caused one of the world’s worst environmental disasters when toxic pollution flooded the Fly River and caused the displacement of 50% of the Provincial population. The environmental and social consequences of this disaster have ongoing effects that are still felt today. Development interventions to date have typically adopted a deficit model, offering technical assistance to address local needs. In 2022 we were commissioned by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research to conduct a scoping study aimed at uncovering provincial assets and strengths that might inform the agency’s long-term programming in research for development in Western Province. In this seminar we present some of the findings and recommendations from this study. We suggest that future development assistance to strengthen agricultural resilience in the province must 1) acknowledge and value Indigenous knowledge and local food production systems and 2) devise place-based and gender aware community-led planning for climate change across the region.
Biography
Pryor Placino is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. He is a human geographer interested in the socioecological entanglements between agricultural/rural resilience and urban sustainability. Pryor has 18 years of combined experience performing qualitative research, university-level teaching and extension work in the Philippines, Australia and Thailand. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Community Economies Institute (CEI) and is the coordinator of the Asia node of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN).
Katherine Gibson is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. She is an economic geographer with an international reputation for innovative research on economic transformation and over 30 years’ experience of working with communities to build resilient economies. She is a founding member of the Community Economies Collective.
Event Details
Date & Time: 16 November 2023 | 11:30am - 1:00pm
Venue: Room: EA.G.15, Parramatta South Campus
