Women and girls are increasingly called on as the champions of progress, the vehicles for development. If we can empower a woman or girl child, we can empower her community (see, for example, The Girl Effect 2014; World Bank 2008, 2011). This mythical, unidimensional and singular she agent of development carries great hope for change as well as great responsibility; her change capacity must therefore be effectively harnessed and channelled. Dreams of ways of life, of occupations outside the formal market are rendered obsolete, instead the woman and girl subject of development, as an agent of development, is made responsible for a particular type of change. This change is tied intrinsically to the formal market and to market-based exchange, imagined as the appropriate and effective vehicles to bring women and girls to their full potential (see, for example, Chant 2016; Cornwall and Rivas 2015; Hickel 2014).
These tropes of development are near universal, so effective has been the tying of normative calls for a focus on women and gender in development (see, for example, Rai 2002; Rathberger 1990; Sen and Grown 1987) and gender justice (see, for example, Mohanty 2003) with global advanced liberal developmentalities (see, for example, Ilcan and Lacey 2011; Ilcan and Phillips 2010; Li 2007; Rankin 2001). This chapter is an investigation into one example of these global advanced liberal developmentalities of womenâs lives and the central liaison to the urban setting. By drawing on complex relationships and performances of labour and livelihoods it investigates the World Bankâs employment schemes in Honiara and Port Moresby and the ways women are imagined as productive/unproductive, at risk and vulnerable, and how they are called on to participate in the formal employment sector in the name of development.
The World Bank operates two Rapid Employment Programmes (REPs) in the western Pacific, one in Honiara, the capital city of the Solomon Islands, and another in Port Moresby, the capital city of Papua New Guinea. The projects are differentâthe one in Port Moresby is, in fact, entitled an Urban Youth Employment Project (see, for example, World Bank 2013a)âbut I continue to term both programmes REPs in recognition of their time-focused goal of employment creation. I conducted interviews with World Bank staff associated with the programmes and with staff from a range of local and international non-governmental organizations who were tied, to varying degrees, to the programmes in 2013. These interviews took place in the context of wider research on womenâs livelihoods in urban centres. The World Bankâs REPs in Honiara and Port Moresby are examined to reveal the ways in which international and local development actors call on womenâs engagement in the formal employment sector. Labour, livelihoods and responsibilities are imagined to be practised in narrowly productive and transformative ways by the proponents of these work schemes. The urban site of the programmes, urbanization itself and the challenges and opportunities afforded by urbanization patterns in these two locations are central to the REPs as development solutions. Vitally, they are urban programmes in their imagining and deployment. I argue that the development programmes and their actors, importantly including the women themselves, are engaged in a myriad interwoven, advanced liberal and postcolonial, biopolitical governance practices. The chapter concludes with a consideration of possible alternatives to the REPs.
Urbanization in the Western Pacific: Honiara and Port Moresby
The research for this chapter grew out of a larger research project that considered womenâs livelihoods and urbanization in smaller cities, cities in which the effects of urbanization are perhaps as palpable as in a metacity or hypercity, albeit on a relative scale, and where livelihoods are taken simply as the diverse âcapabilities, assets (stores, resources, claims and access) and activities required for a means of livingâ (Chambers and Conway 1991: 7). These cities include Honiara and Port Moresby, two western Pacific cities that are small in global terms but which continue to challenge contemporary developmentâs focus on ideas of transformation, progress and modernization in rural lives (see Lacey 2011). They are also cities that are typical of so many relatively small cities in the global South, where the effects of an urban shift are being felt. To some extent, this research is a call to attention on the effects of urbanization, and these effects on development thinking and practice, in cities that are captured neither by focuses on the rural or on megacities (cities with populations of over 10 million inhabitants; see, for example, McGranahan and Satterthwaite 2014). The 2016 UN-Habitat World Cities Report stresses that while megacities are indeed growing fastest in the global South, overall the âfastest growing urban centres are ⊠medium and small cities with less than one million inhabitants, which account for 59 per cent of the worldâs urban populationâ (UN-Habitat 2016: 9). Honiara and Port Moresby are two such cities. The UN-Habitat World Cities Report goes on to call for planning, policy and governance attention on such cities, in spite of the overwhelming focus on megacities (UN-Habitat 2016: 9).
Urbanization in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea is depicted, generally, in a negative light. It is seen as rapid, and thus somewhat uncontrolled and uncontrollable. It is also seen as challenging a dominant rural past and present way of life. It is associated with poverty, and sometimes with criminality, danger and insecurity. Urbanization, particularly in the two capital cities of Honiara and Port Moresby, is also the subject of development intervention, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate. I first explore urbanization patterns and dominant representations of urbanization in the two western Pacific cities.
Honiara and Port Moresby are relatively small cities, but share with other Pacific cities and cities of the global South patterns of widespread semi-urban, semi-peripheral and peripheral informal settlement. Indeed, this pattern is regarded as characteristic of the western Pacific, or Melanesian, island state urbanization (Jones 2012a, b: 327), and the development of sprawling informal settlements is key to the rate of growth of the citiesâ populations in recent decades. The most recent UN-Habitat Report places the urban populations of Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea at 131,000 and 993,000 respectively in 2015, up from 53,000 and 664,000 respectively in 2005, and predicted to grow to 187,000 and 1,287,000 respectively by 2025 (2016: 200). These macro figures convey the extent of growth in urban settlement, though they must be read and interpreted with some caution given the difficulty of measuring rates of urbanization generally (see, for example, Tacoli et al. 2015). These difficulties extend to accurate figures for the populations of the two capital cities themselves. Census figures from 2009 state that the population of Honiara is 64,602, while census figures from 2011 place the population of Port Moresby at 364,125 (City Population 2016a, b); unfortunately, there are no figures for both cities for the same time period nor any known gender or sex disaggregated population statistics.
Both Honiara and Port Moresby are coastal cities. Honiara is located between and along the base of a number of mountainous ridgesâthe Skyline, Tavioa, Vavaea, Kolaa, Galloping Horse and Sea Horse Ridgesâand Honiara Bay, a relatively sheltered bay midway along the northern coast of Guadalcanal, the largest of the approximately 900 islands and islets that constitute the Solomon Islands (Lacey 2012). Port Moresby has developed on the coast of the Gulf of Papua on the main island of Papua New Guinea, âalong the slopes and valleys of a coastal hill range and the adjacent portions of an inland plainâ (Vasey 1985: 37). Neither city was formally planned as a large-scale residential centre, instead developing around villages and as central trading cites both in pre- and colonial times; each played a key role in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War and prominence of the centres grew after the conclusion of the war (Connell and Lea 2002). Jones argues that âthe genesis of Pacific towns and cities is anchored to the imperatives imposed by the colonial administratorsâthey are not creations of the islanders themselvesâ (Jones in Jones 2012a: 328). The relationship between settlement and colonial administration in Pacific Island countries, including in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, and importantly its aftermath, is deterministic:
Colonial administrators, including Britain, Australia and Germany, oversaw service towns based on well laid out physical plans and the provision of basic infrastructure comprising roads, water, power and sanitation. In terms of addressing urban drift, the administrations were strict in dealing with rural-urban migrants who did not have authorisation to travel. Those without formal permission to work and live in towns were sent back to their rural or outer island village. After independence, the regulatory colonial approach to restricted movement was downgraded, and the tide of uncontrolled movement commenced (Jones 2012b: 146).
Both Honiara and Port Moresby, as with the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea themselves, have been physically shaped by the experience of colonial rule and subsequent formal independence. I make use of postcolonial biopolitical governmentality to recognize the continuum of (post)colonial political rationalities and technologies of rule in development and urbanization interventions (see Scott 1995). Postcolonial biopolitical governmentality allows for engagement with colonialismâs specificities of rule, acknowledging that colonial rule and effect is not uniform, as well as recognizing its generalizable technologies (Jazeel 2009). An explicitly postcolonial framework also allows for recognition of the particularities of womenâs lives and that development is often devoid of specifically gendered considerations and of race and its operations (Mohanty 1984; White 2011).
Daniel Vasey cites Norwoodâs description of Port Moresby as having been âdesigned by and for car-owning foreignersâ (1985: 37), and the city is certainly sprawling and difficult to navigate by foot, particularly in times of heavy rain, which is frequent in the rainy season. The vast majority of the population does not have immediate access to personal cars and this contributes to informal settlements acting as micro-cities in themselves, with fresh and store food markets, for example, existing in most. Honiara is similar, though on a smaller scale. Like in Port Moresby, people can do much essential trade in their own informal settlements and in both cities these are located within close proximity to the city centres and extend beyond the city limits. People do, importantly, travel in and around the cities and between informal settlements by foot, by minibus, by local taxi and in private cars. Such commuting includes that by women, in spite of warnings of high danger for women. This is particularly true of the warnings issued to (white) expat women by travel advisory services, which would have one believe that the streets of both Honiara and Port Moresby are devoid of all women and girls, a dangerous and misleading misconception and one that will be examined as tied to dominant representations of gender in the cities.
The city centres of Honiara and Port Moresby continue to operate, as they did in the eras of colonial administration, as government and commercial centres. Port Moresbyâs skyline features a number of multistorey buildings, including hotels belonging to international chains, and the national and regional centres of international governmental organizations, including the UN, the World Bank and the national and regional National Capital District (NCD) government. A great deal of development in and around Port Moresby (and elsewhere in the country, particularly in the Highlands and the NCD) has been centred around the anticipated and only marginally realised benefits of the ExxonMobil liquefied natural gas project, which began in 2010 and is now in production (see Gilberthorpe and Banks 2012; Dixon et al. 2010); and a new motorway flyover, the Kumul Flyover, which was installed by the Papua New Guinea government in 2015 to link Port Moresby airport to Waigani City centre in the heart of the cityâs governance district.
The majority of city centre buildings in Honiara are single storey and single fronted, though there are some multistorey buildings that house government, commercial and international intergovernmental organizations (see Lacey 2012). New commercial and development project...