Frictions around rendering technical: Land disputes over climate change mitigation projects in Suau, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This paper focuses on how land and trees are ‘rendered technical’ in Suau, Papua New Guinea through the Central Suau Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Pilot Project and Save the Forest conservation projects. These climate change mitigation interventions apply tools—such as Incorporated Land Groups, maps, and satellite imagery—to make environments measurable and valuable, thereby generating ‘frictions’ between different ways of being and knowing. Through ethnographic accounts of land disputes, we highlight how these tools conflict with the ways that people in Suau relate to and look after their environments. As processes of rendering technical work to recognise and exclude certain forest uses and users, this produces frictions that impact on local livelihoods and matrilineal land tenure systems. Employing the concepts of rendering technical and friction together provides a situated framework for extending attention from distributional and procedural elements of land disputes to consider ethical and ontological layers.