Walters, Peter and Kristen Lyons. 2016. "Community Teak Forestry in Solomon Islands as Donor Development: When Science Meets Culture." Land Use Policy 57:730-38. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.06.029. Community Teak Forestry in Solomon Islands as Donor Development: When Science Meets Culture

….development dictated from the outside rather than anchored in the knowledge base of the target population is in principle modernization disguised: it will not be fully concerned with local needs (Gegeo 1998).

Abstract

This paper uses a case study of smallholder teak forestry in the Pacific Islands nation of Solomon Islands to evaluate difficulties that can arise when foreign expertise fails to take sufficient account of local epistemology and practices when implementing market based community level development. The planting of community level smallholder teak is widespread in the Solomon Islands and has the potential to address some of the environmental and livelihood damage done by years of indiscriminate logging. Attempts by successive Australian Government aid programs to better manage plantations for maximum yield and marketability have largely failed as competing livelihood priorities; differing philosophies on long term compounding returns and deferred income; and the geographical challenges of accessing markets have all conspired to prevent this high value timber from being grown to its full potential. We use the theories of indigenous epistemology to highlight the ways in which failure to properly integrate economic activity according to the culture and values of communities can mean that initiatives such as this will struggle to succeed. Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of what can happen when technical knowledge and the efficiencies of scientific best practice related to plantation forestry fail to intersect with local social and cultural norms and needs. To do this we use a case study involving the introduction of smallholder forestry into the Solomon Islands, beginning in the late 1990s, by a succession of Australian donor agencies. This extended project (with a strong foundation in western scientific forestry management) was introduced for the dual purposes of providing villagers with a sustainable long term income stream, and as a way to assist with re-forestation. Our findings demonstrate that this community based plantation forestry project often fails to connect with local communities, despite articulating a commitment to locally sensitive development.

Solomon Islands has been ravaged by indiscriminate primary forest logging throughout much of the 20th and early 21st centuries causing biodiversity loss, soil erosion and water pollution (Scheyvens, 1998; Pauku, 2009). In this context, re-forestation is one of a number of significant environmental management related development interventions occurring across the country. Although re-forestation will not duplicate the primary forest lost to logging, it does have positive effects for soil rehabilitation, the prevention of erosion, some positive biodiversity and carbon effects as well as potential for local income (Feyera, Beck and Lüttge 2002, Wassmann and Vlek 2004). We begin the paper by describing the economic, social and environmental context of this initiative, the project and our methods. We then use our fieldwork findings and existing literature to examine why this project may not have been as successful as anticipated. We review some of the challenges faced by development enterprises generally, and more specifically in Solomon Islands, when there is insufficient attention paid to the importance of local epistemologies and value systems. We conclude by arguing that effective local level development related to smallholder forestry is constrained in Solomon Islands by donor and the state driven top-down promotion of village level economic initiatives. Logging and The Rise of Scientifically Managed Community Forestry in Solomon Islands

British colonial interests were responsible for much of the early logging that took place in the Solomon Islands. Since independence from Great Britain in 1978 the industry has come to be dominated by large international, mostly Malaysian, logging companies and their myriad subsidiaries, and often backed by the support of Solomon Islands government and some traditional landowners. This alliance between international and some local actors has been the cause of much conflict within and between communities, a theme to which we return below. Solomon Islands GDP has historically relied very heavily for export revenue on royalties from the logging of native rainforest hardwood timber across the archipelago. The amount of timber extracted from Solomon Islands over the course of the last century, and similar to other Pacific nations, is massive and environmentally destructive (Katovai et al., 2015). In Solomon Islands, logging has occurred at as much as five times the sustainable rate (Pauku, 2009) yet there has been little to show for it in terms of development, particularly at the village level, for the people who hold customary land title over those areas that have been logged (Foale, 2001; Pauku, 2009). There are a number of reasons for this.

The first is corruption and mismanagement at the national government level, with royalties diverted and misspent by politicians and senior officials in Honiara (Allen, 2011). The second is the related problem of mismanagement of logging permissions and the inability of forestry officials to effectively govern and police the activities of logging companies across remote island locations1.The third reason is the complex and sometimes internecine webs of trust and

1 A report into neighbouring PNG (Oakland Institute, 2016), for example, exposed the misuse of legal mechanisms (including Special Agricultural and Business Leases) that enables logging companies to

mistrust across tribal groups and village communities. While the consent of traditional owners is required for logging of natural forests, the local trustees appointed for logging projects often do not share these royalties with their tribes (Allen, 2011; Kabutaulaka, 2001). As a result, most village communities in Solomon Islands remain materially impoverished, showing almost no benefit from the years of destructive logging.

Environmentally, logging has been devastating (Katovai et al., 2015). The largely unregulated logging of tropical forests and related infrastructure in Solomon Islands has caused a range of problems such as loss of forest diversity, loss of animal and bird habitat, landslides, erosion, pollution of watersheds and subsequent damage to coral and fish populations (Dauvergne, 2001). In social and economic terms, logging is also directly connected to adverse impacts on livelihoods, nutrition and cultural relationships as well as women’s declining access and control over forest resources (Hviding, 2008; McDougall, 2008; Stege et al., 2008). Those most adversely affected by the destructive logging industries also remain largely excluded from industry decision-making (Dauvergne, 1997; Foale, 2001; Pauku, 2009). According to most estimates, accessible high value tropical hardwood will be exhausted by 2015, after which the nation will lose its principal source of foreign exchange (Katovai et al., 2015). In acknowledgement of this ominous deadline, the Solomon Islands government has attempted to introduce a moratorium on primary forest logging in 2015, although logging remains widespread. For villagers, the opportunity for fair compensation for logging has passed, leaving communities with few options for sustainable cash income and economic development (Katovai et al. 2015). One attempt to address this problem has been the introduction of plantation timber species at the village level in Solomon Islands. Teak (tectona grandis), the focus of this paper, is an exotic, reasonably fast growing tropical hardwood in demand throughout the world for high value added uses such as furniture and architectural applications (Krishnapillay, 2000). Teak is suitable for cultivation in Solomon Islands’ tropical climate and soils and has been cultivated there since the mid 1990s (Montgomery, 2006). Historically, global plantation forestry has been dominated by industrial scale monoculture plantations. This practice often interrupts local and indigenous connections between land and people, and locks communities into new forms of dependence on external ‘experts’ for knowledge related to forestry management systems (Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2002; German et al., 2014). In contrast, the majority of teak in Solomon Islands is grown in small plots (one to two hectares) at the village level and only a small number of these large commercial teak plantations have been established. This pattern of village level and community managed teak

access new forest resources without free and prior informed consent from local landholders. In response to a 2011 Commission of Inquiry Report into these land deals, the Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill stated it “revealed a shocking trend of corruption and mismanagement in all stages in the process” (Oakland Institute, 2016, p. 4).

in the Solomon Islands is part of a global shift towards village or community level forestry management that has occurred over the last three decades. Hajjar et al. (2013) reports community forestry now comprises 22 percent of forests in tropical countries. In contrast to the large-scale industrial model, community forestry often emphasises locally managed plantations of high-value trees, including teak (the focus of this paper) and mahogany. The growth in community plantation forestry (and other collaborative natural resource management projects – see for example Lowenhaupt et al., 2005) is demonstrative of the potential for ‘bottom up’ and participatory approaches that have gained salience in contemporary development and environmental management approaches (Gills and Gray, 2012). However, the bottom up model is not always implemented effectively as a model for development. Projects often face criticism for imposing large scale forestry practices at the community level; including practices such as tree inventories, annual operations plans and scientific management systems, but without providing local communities with the knowledge or resources to implement them (Hajjer et al., 2013). These practices can conflict with views, aspirations and beliefs at the village level. Community forestry has also often been found to be driven by the needs and interests of external actors (Pokorny and Johnson, 2008; Medina et al., 2009), including donor agencies and state institutions, disregarding local knowledge and epistemologies (Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2002; Hoch et al., 2009; Lyons et al., 2015). In the remainder of the paper we use a case study of the introduction of village level and community managed teak in the Western Province of Solomon Islands to make a contribution to this literature. We focus on village level teak growing in the Western Province using data gained from visits and extensive qualitative fieldwork in conjunction with an Australia donor project over the course of eight years. The purpose of this paper is to provide a social and cultural (rather a than a silvicultural) evaluation of the potential for the cultivation of teak for socio-economic development at the village level in the Solomon Islands. The paper appraises the aid program that initiated village level teak cultivation and then critically addresses some of the obstacles to teak cultivation at the village level. It provides a commentary on development projects such as growing teak and the role that local and indigenous knowledge and epistemologies might play to ensure greater and more enduring success at the village level in contexts like Solomon Islands. Method

The research for this paper was carried out in the Western Province of Solomon Islands from 2008-2015 by the authors, assisted by a number of postgraduate students and local translators2. The research was carried out under the auspices of two Australian government sponsored agricultural aid projects: ACIAR (Enhancing economic opportunities offered by 2 The authors thank [xxxxxx] for their invaluable assistance in the field.

community and smallholder forestry in Solomon Islands) and PARDI (Development of a market mechanism for Teak and other high value timber in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands)3. The broad aims of these projects were to further develop the economic opportunities the emerging timber plantation industry can make to the Solomon Islands economy, including economic opportunities offered by community and smallholder forestry.

Figure 1: Solomon Islands showing Western Province study area (Google Maps, 2016) The authors led the social research component of the project. The purpose of the social research component was to work in support of forestry researchers, assisting them to understand some of the complex social and cultural factors that influence the success of growing teak and other species at the village level in Solomon Islands. The social research team also analysed the socio-economic effects associated with the adoption of the new forestry system advocated by the ACIAR forestry team. Research was carried out in the villages of Baraulu, Saika, Mandali, Taboka, Dunde, Kindu and Mauru, as well as field visits to Guadalcanal Plains where the ACIAR project team had earlier sought to introduce the forestry management system. Field visits were conducted annually, for around two weeks each year, a total of at least 16 weeks in the field. Qualitative data were gathered using a combination of group meetings, gendered focus groups, transect walks, individual interviews and observation. Our questions to stakeholders focussed

3 Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (Grant FST/2012/043) and Pacific Agribusiness Research for Development (PRA 2011.06). ACIAR is the Australian Government’s principal institution for the delivery of foreign agricultural aid.

cumulatively and incrementally on building a picture of livelihood practises, cultural practises implementing work and income, village power relations, gender roles and norms, economic constraints, spatial and temporal constraints and local politics. As we will demonstrate below, this data and our many informal interactions with villagers allowed us, over the course of eight years, to evaluate the social and cultural obstacles and enablers to the successful cultivation and marketing of small holder commercial timber plantations. Teak as development

In the Western Province, interest in the cultivation of teak was the result of two related events. The first of these events is anecdotal, involving the story of villagers on Guadalcanal Island who, in 2003, sold 27 cubic metres of teak for USD190 per cubic metre to an Indian buyer in Honiara. News of this sale spread rapidly, causing what came to be known as ‘teak fever’ throughout the archipelago, referring to the widespread belief that teak was somehow a ‘millionaires’ tree, and resulted in widespread planting by smallholders throughout the archipelago (Hughes et al. 2010). The second event was a program sponsored by the Australian Government via its principle foreign aid organisation, Ausaid4, which commenced in 1999 as the ‘Solomon Islands Forestry Management Project’. The Ausaid project took place over two phases, from 1998 – 2009 against the backdrop of unsustainable logging in the Solomon Islands as detailed above. The environmental, social and cultural effects of logging were exacerbated by chronic and widespread corruption and mismanagement of forestry resources by the Solomon Islands Government, and aided and abetted by logging companies (Hughes et al., 2010). The purpose of the Ausaid project was summarised in an official evaluation:

Much of the overall forestry picture was bleak. Natural forests were being depleted, soils and freshwater reserves damaged and lagoon reefs silted over. Tribes and families in formerly forest-rich areas were bitterly divided over the destruction of the forest and the sharing of logging’s short-lived financial income, and dismayed at the lack of enduring benefits. Export duty revenues, though always well below the levels legally due, had become an unhealthily large proportion of SIG income, while key officials, politicians, ‘commercial chiefs’ and local Mr Fixits were on the payroll of logging companies (Hughes et al., 2010).

The Ausaid project commenced largely as a Honiara-based institution building activity, aimed at managing the Solomon Island harvest of natural timber to a more sustainable level, and to increase the resource rents that the Solomon Islands government received from logging companies for harvesting logs (Ausaid, 1998). However, following ethnic tensions and conflict in 2000 and the subsequent national economic collapse, forestry resource rents 4 Ausaid has since been disbanded as an autonomous government agency. As of 2013 aid delivery is managed by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

increased from a 40 percent share of Solomon Islands government revenues to close to 90 percent as most sources of revenue literally disappeared (Ausaid, 1998). The Ausaid project was modified to reflect these realities and protect this sole remaining significant revenue stream. From 2002 the program included the support of ‘family based reforestation’ as a strategy to increase the total forest estate while protecting essential revenues earned from logging operations (Montgomery, 2006). This shift also reflected broader changes occurring in the forestry sector globally, particularly the move from large scale plantation to community based forestry. This new focus was implemented largely by continuing the project’s original charter of institution building, but at a lower level. The project provided support for the training of provincial Forestry Department officers in small scale timber cultivation and maintenance. Additionally, extensive agroforestry training was carried out at the village level and large quantities of high quality tree seed were made available to Forestry Department officers for the development of nurseries. In one twelve-month period, the project reported that 1500 hectares of ‘readily saleable’ teak had been planted on plots of one hectare or less through the archipelago. Manuals on teak growing and marketing were made available to growers, and small scale domestic furniture makers were identified to provide a domestic value added capability (Montgomery, 2006). The final evaluation of the project in 2006 was optimistic, claiming:

The FMP [Forestry Management Project] has demonstrated to Solomon Islanders themselves, that independent of government, at the village level they can take action to ensure a sustainable flow of forest products (and income from forests) by the planting and careful tending of plantations of mahogany, teak and other species which already have an established export market (Montgomery, 2006).

The project forecast that the small holder (family-based) sector would be a ‘significant revenue source’ for Solomon Islands by 2015, and would be exporting SBD400 million (USD50 million) of timber by 2028. Based on our own research, we can confirm that small holder forestry exports were almost nil in 2014, and likely to be the same in 2015. Without fundamental changes to infrastructure and governance the figure of SBD400 million in exports by 2028 is highly unlikely. In the remainder of this paper we will explore the social, cultural and economic reasons for why this particular initiative has not progressed as hoped, and use these findings to make some more general conclusions about the role of donors and the state in the top down promotion of village level economic development initiatives. The scientific management of teak

For the reasons detailed above, villagers in the Western Province began to plant teak in the late 1990s and early 2000s on plots between 0.5 and 2 hectares (sometimes larger), using seedlings provided to them by the Department of Forestry in Munda, a market town on New Georgia (Figure 1). On the advice of the Department of Forestry, teak was planted at the scientifically recommended density of 800 trees per hectare (Blumfield, 2011). As of early

2015, teak varied in age between one and 15 years across the research area. Although it is difficult to assess accurately, the provincial head of the Department of Forestry estimates that by early 2015 there were approximately 2,000 hectares of teak under small holder cultivation in the Western Province5. The ACIAR project began work in the Western Province around 2008, by which time the planting of smallholder teak was established and widespread. As part of the ACIAR project and consolidating earlier work of the Department of Forestry, foresters, soil scientists and others developed a forestry management regime as part of the management of existing community level plantation forestry and any new planting. The original ACIAR project was established to find an alternative system to the western model of plantation management that more closely aligned to the needs of the Solomon Island growers. Following the earlier management approach, this related to selection and trial of various species in addition to teak including a mix of exotic and native species, as well as food trees. The regime included techniques for planting and plant spacing, thinning and pruning, as well as other aspects of forestry management (Blumfield, 2011). Reflecting the broader trends in community forestry globally, this regime was primarily devised and introduced by external experts in collaboration with with local Forestry officers. According to scientific best practise, for teak to grow to its full potential plots need to be weeded and trees need to be regularly pruned to ensure extraneous branches do not compromise a long, straight tree trunk (Krishnapillay, 2000). Deviations or imperfections in the trunk can render a tree almost worthless to the market. Scientific best practice also prescribes that trees need to be thinned over their life, so that an initial density of 800 trees per hectare is reduced at intervals, depending on growth rate, to around 500 trees per hectare, and finally to 200-300 trees per hectare (Krishnapillay, 2000). The initial high density of trees forces them to compete with each other for light and creates long straight trunks. The thinning regime allows the best remaining trees to grow to their full potential with less competition and ensures that the final yield of timber is far greater and of far higher quality than had the plantation been left with the original 800 trees per hectare. If followed, this regime should show its best, or most profitable, results once trees are 20 – 30 years old (Pandey and Brown 2000). The ACIAR team devised an extension program to consolidate this management regime, including workshops, training manuals and collaboration with Rural Training Centres for delivery of curriculum. It also funded travel for a small number of Forestry staff to visit Australia to undertake additional training. Given the significant resourcing invested to develop and implement community forestry in the Western Province, as well as significant resourcing in monitoring, including drones and GIS to measure tree cover, as social

5 In addition to the mostly smallholder teak plantations in the Western Province, the Christian Fellowship Church has also established a 1000-hectare plantation in Duvaha on North New Georgia Island (Lyons et al., 2015).

researchers we were interested in what we observed to be the wide scale rejection of this management program by growers. These low levels of uptake of particular management practices are counter to the projects significant resourcing and investment, and despite its institutional support in country, including from the Department of Forestry and Rural Training Centres. We now provide an extended discussion of some of the factors that prevented uptake of the ACIAR plantation forestry management regime, with a specific focus on thinning, and examine some of the causes. The limits of scientific management

Of the management practices the ACIAR project team sought to introduce the issue of thinning (described above) was one of the most contested and difficult to implement. It should be noted that many trees were well overdue for thinning when the ACIAR team began their work in the Western Province and this is a problem which pre-dates that project. However, given the significance of thinning to commercially successful outcomes, and the strong historical resistance to it as a practice, an exploration of community understandings and responses to this practise is important. The need for thinning, while straightforward and self-evident in a Western scientific context, has created a number of problems for teak growers in the Western Province of Solomon Islands and highlights some assumptions about the scientific method that should be carried into this cultural context with great care. During the course of our research, involving multiple visits to different villages sites and conversations with forestry workers and many growers, we heard of only two growers who had followed the recommended thinning regime; both of whom were significantly better economically resourced than other villagers. The remainder of growers had not thinned their trees, nor had they maintained them. While the majority of growers were aware of thinning practices, having heard about this technique from Forestry workers, the ACIAR team or by word of mouth, they gave several reasons for not thinning. The need for short term economic gains The first reason for rejecting the advice of the ACIAR team, and backed by the Department of Forestry, was that despite advice from experts, growers did not consider it wise practice to cut down what they considered to be healthy growing trees, despite advice that it would be potentially more profitable in the long run to do so. This refusal points to a number of economic and cultural constraints on growers. The reluctance to thin smaller trees appeared to be related to a belief by smallholders that the timber from their thinnings, if they waited, might be worth some money in the future. The aim of the PARDI project, as detailed above, was to investigate the possibility of market access for small holder teak growers in the Western Province. This market access ideally would include timber from thinning as well as more mature sawn logs. Part of the motivation for growing teak, in the villagers’ view, was

that the Department of Forestry, supported by the ACIAR/PARDI project, would provide both market intelligence and market access to growers. While this had not yet eventuated, there was still a general (albeit declining) faith that this might happen. So for villagers, it was considered unwise to cut down any trees until buyers had been identified and a price obtained, regardless of any future negative effects for the remaining trees. The fact that a market had not developed made it harder for villagers to take a longer term view of their trees. There was a very strong view that if a market for teak did eventuate, it might happen all of a sudden and growers did not want to cut down existing trees in case this did happen. When asked about this, a common response amongst growers was that they could just not bring themselves to chop down something that was potentially worth some money. Many growers lamented that it ‘made me sad’ to think about cutting down a tree and not using it; explaining they would much rather wait for a market to develop before engaging in thinning activities. Some growers understood that they had missed the natural ‘deadline’ for thinning and were left with trees that were far from maturity, but which they believed might fetch at least a small amount of money if sold. The majority of teak in the Western Province was only just becoming big enough to sell and that very little of the teak had been properly maintained or thinned, at the time of writing almost no villagers had teak that would be considered marketable according to international standards (Midgley et al., 2015). Despite these significant limitations and exhortations by ACIAR/PARDI projected members, the Department of Forestry and the social research team, many villagers told us that if any buyer offered them any price at all for the timber that they would harvest all of their teak and sell it. When we asked them the reason for this, given the obvious benefits of waiting and maintaining their teak to maturity, the answer was simple enough: that they needed money straight away, any return now was better than a larger, but still uncertain return in the future and based on the uncertainty of markets and the higher than anticipated maintenance requirements for teak, they would rather not be growing teak any longer. Most villagers were cash poor to the point that even a few dollars could mean the difference between being able to pay for necessities like school fees or sliding backwards into subsistence survival. The prospects of selling their trees in the short term, even at a poor price, was an attractive option. For many growers, there was the added benefit of opening up this land again for food growing; for subsistence and for crops to sell on the local market. While villagers described having a traditional ability to sustain themselves outside of the cash economy they are also increasingly in need of cash to satisfy growing aspirations for their children’s education as well as meeting changing dietary preferences including rice, noodles and tinned fish. Also there was an increasing demand to be connected to the outside world as mobile phone coverage reaches the provinces. The possibility of short term cash was too important to sacrifice for a longer term goal. It is instructive to note that the only two growers we encountered who had followed the recommended thinning regime were those who had significantly more economic resources than other growers. In this regard, the

project may be seen as entrenching privilege, given it was only those who could afford to take a long term view who would receive the benefits from adoption of this forestry management program (see also Mosse, 2005). Many villagers also expressed frustration that they lacked equipment required to maintain teak plantations as specified by ACIAR and Department of Forestry. While the ACIAR project had provided a small number of pruning tools, for example, both women and men explained they simply didn't have access to the tools they would require to undertake pruning or thinning, and most didn't know about the donation of equipment from ACIAR. In addition, local community members explained there were very few chain saws available to villagers to undertake thinning, and that gaining access to such high value equipment was complex; including the need to negotiate with local leaders from other tribal groups. Many described their plantations as being a long distance from their homes (land in close proximity to houses was prioritised for food crops), circumstances that made it time consuming to undertake any sustained plantation management. In addition to the economic and market factors outlined above, these local structural factors, in combination, appear to constrain local villagers from properly engaging in what was considered by ACIAR to be best practise forestry management, and instead influenced them to direct much of their labour towards the cultivation of crops to eat and for immediate sale in local markets. It was clear then that the decision not to thin or, if possible, to clear all trees was connected to a range of economic, socio-cultural and food security issues. Questions of good plantation management did not appear to feature in local villagers thinking about their approach to the trees planted on their land. The second, and closely related reason for villagers’ limited interest in thinning, and in plantation management more broadly, related to temporality and villagers’ relationship with a market economy. According to scientific best practice, returns on a teak plantation are optimised after 15-20 years of growing with proper plantation maintenance. For Solomon Islanders only recently emerging from pre-capitalism, the particular Western construct of a long term compounding return on investment is outside their experience. In traditional cultural practice, benefit is derived from nature, which provides a constant source of fish, other food and timber. These resources take time to mature, but there is no need to ‘wait’ for them to do this, it happens in the background while other resources are harvested. Planted food gardens are given time to mature, but the longest any crop takes to mature is a matter of months when it is harvested and either eaten, bartered or sold. Trees are used for fruit and continue to produce fruit on a regular basis for the life of the tree. Timber is obtained from natural forest, where suitable trees are hundreds of years old and have been (until recently) plentiful, and replaced themselves in the background over many generations. The idea that an asset is planted and then maintained for a possible return in twenty years was beyond the experience of most villagers who had no experience of ‘investment’ as it is understood in the western economic sense of compounding returns and deferred income.

Selling the Teak We introduced the topic of markets for teak from the perspective of village growers above. The next topic relates to the marketing of the timber from a broader perspective. Although the formal origins of the teak program can be traced back to the AUSAID project, for smallholders the most visible of the actors involved in the campaign to plant trees have been the representatives of the Department of Forestry. The Forestry representatives in the Western Province are based in the market town of Munda and drawn predominantly from this province. They are well known to villagers, have strong kinship and fictive kinship links and are for the most part trusted. The Department of Forestry was the source for teak seedlings and information on how to grow teak successfully. Visits by ACIAR and PARDI researchers are almost always accompanied by forestry representatives who underwrite the credibility of the researchers and anchor them within the local context. Although this trust does not prevent some criticism of Forestry, primarily for a lack of equipment and other material support provided to growers (as detailed above), villagers still believe that Forestry has their best interests at heart and when, or if, a market for their teak is found, Forestry will be responsible for finding this market and their protection against exploitation by buyers. For its part, Forestry would seem to be bereft of resources on this front. There is a close collaboration with the ACIAR/PARDI team, and combined with a strong local sensibility forestry workers are aware that a lack of teak maintenance, the remoteness of islands and teak plots and the cultural problems preventing any seller collaboration (see below) make the prospects for the successful marketing of teak very remote. Forestry workers in Munda are aware of the pressure they are under and on the occasions they joined us in village meetings were very careful not raise any false expectations amongst growers. While the ACIAR project is expected to provide timber analysis equipment that will be housed in the Munda Forestry office – where core samples from trees can be assessed and valued – none of this comes closer to actually finding a market for the timber. Much of the teak planted around the year 2000 is nearing the lower size limit at which it could hypothetically be marketed. In visits to villages in 2013 and 2014 we engaged growers on the possibilities of marketing their timber6. We did this by presenting scenarios to villagers about how a potential buyer might approach them and then asking them how they would deal with this. At this time the Malaysian owned Price Worth sawmill was being established in the town of Noro on New Georgia. At this time there was little information on how the mill would operate, although there was conjecture that the mill would be processing local timber for milling and plywood. We asked villagers how they would respond if a representative of the sawmill visited them and asked to buy their teak.

6 This section addresses our dealings with non-Christian Fellowship Church (CFC) villages. Any sale of smallholder teak from these villages will be carried out the by the CFC, with almost no involvement by villagers in timing or price (see Lyons et al., 2015).

As far as price was concerned, villagers were ignorant of how much they might expect to be paid for their teak, still holding to the inflated rumours they heard when villagers were in the grip of ‘teak mania’. When we asked them how they might go about informing themselves of a reasonable price, they said that they put their faith in the Department of Forestry to do this for them. All timber would need to be freighted to market by barge and there is currently no regular barge service in these waters. When asked about freight villagers gave a similar response to other questions – that Forestry would take care of this for them. We asked villagers about how they might go about ensuring they received the best price for their teak in any negotiation with a buyer. Their first response was that as their teak was grown on individually owned plots of land, they would negotiate and sell their teak as individual growers or family units. We suggested to them that if they did this, it would be difficult for a buyer to offer them a good price for such a relatively small amount of timber, and that a shrewd buyer might be able to use the fragmented market to push prices down. We suggested that it could be useful in these circumstances to present a more ‘united front’ to a buyer who would then have a quantity of teak that would be more profitably transported and processed. In one village, Mandali, this created a long and animated conversation about how such an arrangement might work, and villagers worked through a complex web of trust scenarios, eventually finding it almost impossible to nominate one or more (male) individuals who might be satisfactory to all to act as spokesman, to sign a contract or to receive and bank funds. This was despite the fact that a clear hierarchy of leadership existed in the village for other matters. Although it is tempting to see villages in a context like the Solomon Islands as a unified whole, a type of bucolic cooperative, conversations such as this reveal the complex webs of trust and mistrust that exist. Indeed, decades of experience with logging companies have left most villagers very sensitive around questions of trust in this regard. The result of our hypothetical exercise in Mandali was agreement that the growers might be able to present a united front to buyers, but only by those who were willing to sell. There was no obvious solution to the problem of which villager/s would represent them in negotiations, whether any one individual could be trusted to negotiate on their behalf and, more importantly, whether even a small group of men could be trusted to receive and distribute payment to other growers. These fundamental and possibly intractable challenges about how to operate in any form of cooperative capitalism were reinforced in discussions with Forestry staff who explained to us how these issues might be magnified should any provincial or regional selling cooperative be attempted, forecasting that negotiations would be slow and complex, involving the resolution of myriad shifting historical alliances, individual and tribal enmities and reciprocal cultural arrangements and webs of trust. Further challenging questions about securing a market for timber arose in a subsequent visit to the newly established Malaysian owned Priceworth sawmill in the town of Noro in the west of New Georgia island. The sawmill management displayed little interest in buying smallholder teak. Although they were prepared to buy teak from the large commercial

plantation on nearby Kolombangara island, they were not equipped or interested in making small purchases of timber of varying quality, and appeared not to have considered it. While it was not specifically discussed during our meeting at Priceworth, a tour of the mill clearly indicated to us that the mill appeared to have been set up to fulfil a value-added requirement levied by Solomon Islands government as a condition of the further logging of primary forest timber. Discussion and Conclusion

This paper has described a history of smallholder forestry in the Solomon Islands, with a focus on teak growing in the Western Province, the site of our study. Objectively, the growing of teak makes sense - it is an in-demand high value tropical timber that is well suited to Solomon Islands conditions. It promises to provide growers with a steady stream of income into the future and can also contribute to the re-forestation of a landscape degraded by years of over-logging. There was early enthusiasm for teak growing by small holders based on anecdotal evidence of high returns and the concerted effort of successive Australian government sponsored aid projects aimed at both institutional capacity building and technical knowledge transfer. ACIAR has expended significant resources and built up a substantial goodwill in its efforts to implement scientific best practise to repair the damage done before they arrived in the field in the early adoption of smallholder teak plantations in the Western Province. This emphasis on institutional capacity building – including capacity building amongst Department of Forestry and Rural Training Centre staff is demonstrative of the broader participatory turn in development intervention approaches, where local institutions and actors are enrolled as active agents in the development process. Reflecting this, in the Western Province there is a good level of technical knowledge and community outreach on the part of the Department of Forestry workers supported by the technical expertise of ACIAR/PARDI team members who began work in the Western Province only after the majority of teak in the Western Province and elsewhere had been planted. This local capacity building has occurred at the same time as the project has adhered to a strictly scientific approach to the development of smallholder plantations. The discourses underpinning this project resonate with modernist development narratives, centralising economic development and market integration via the control of nature; in this case through a scientific plantation forestry management regime (Escobar, 1995; McMichael, 2009; Fairhead et al., 2012). The external expertise introduced for this program has not translated into benefits for local growers and communities. There remains a tension between, on the one hand, the knowledge, experience of local institutions and practises, and on the other, a reliance upon external experts – in this case ACIAR project staff – for knowledge generation. This has led to conditions that constrain the uptake of scientific best practice for plantation forestry management. Despite local level institutional engagement, and indeed significant

levels of trust and reliance upon Department of Forestry staff amongst local communities we visited, the technical intervention itself appears disconnected from social and cultural values and needs, with outcomes that directly constrain local level uptake. The failure to thin and maintain plantations – a practice that is described by ACIAR project staff as crucial to best practice – is demonstrative of this. We have documented some of the obvious practical constraints on growers which raise questions about the future of teak in the Western Province. These include an island geography and therefore no road infrastructure, large dispersal of holdings, small fragmented quantities of teak for potential sale and the absence of any existing market or transport infrastructure suited to these geographical and economic realities, as well as limited prospects among growers for cooperation and associated economies of scale. While the ACIAR project is making sustained efforts deal with some of these structural constraints – including for example the PARDI project, which has sought specifically to improve selling and buying arrangements for smallholder growers – the social and cultural landscape has so far proved resistant to some of the best practices of teak growing. We are not arguing that cultural constraints work in isolation from the more objective constraints described above. Indeed, the intersection of both objective and social-cultural factors informs various levels of trust/mistrust at work within the social realm of villages, tribes and regions in the Western Province. Further understandings of these social and cultural factors, and their intersection with objective constraints on the uptake of plantation forestry management best practice is required and should form the basis of any donor intervention such as this. Plantation forestry and its management is an imposed knowledge, or epistemology. In this context, the imposer of that knowledge has certain assumed responsibilities in the eyes of growers. In this case, from the perspective of growers, that responsibility lies at the feet of the Department of Forestry, with foreign expertise in a background role. We were repeatedly reminded by villagers (independently of what may have been a more objective historical account) that it was the Department of Forestry who provided villagers with seedlings and Forestry who would find and facilitate the marketing of teak. Apart from the initial successful sales of logs on Guadalcanal that led to ‘teak mania’, growers had no evidence of any sale of teak and until they did, undertook to leave their teak in a state of hibernation, prioritising other more pressing livelihood tasks while their teak plantations deteriorated. The fact that teak plantations were allowed to fall into disrepair, rendering much of it worthless, was secondary to the need for evidence of a market from those who had sponsored this enterprise. From the perspective of Western scientific and economic reasoning, these decisions by growers make little sense, either in the short or long term. However, when viewed from the perspective of scholars such as Gegeo (1998), Esteva and Prakash (1998) and Chambers (1995) it begins to make some sense. It is now axiomatic that for development to be successful it needs to be driven from the ground up, by communities themselves. What is

clear from the results presented in this paper, and our broader learnings from the villages we visited, is the limited extent to which the ACIAR project was able to connect with the needs and aspirations for local level development as articulated by community members themselves. Reflecting this, we frequently heard accounts of villagers’ frustrations with the on-going focus on teak amongst Forestry field officers, when they themselves were interested to talk about crops with a shorter life cycle that could deliver quicker returns in the market (including cocoa and coffee). While the implementation and knowledge transfer happened at the local level, and in collaboration with local institutions, the knowledge required to grow trees and the ways in which those trees might then be marketed and sold was an imposed form of knowledge, a foreign epistemology. This technology transfer approach is typical of much community and village forestry around the world (see Chambers, 1995). While the ACIAR project made significant efforts to engage locally about plantation management techniques, the knowledge itself was generated by expert outsiders. The modernist approach of the ACIAR project – with expert outsiders enrolled to ‘fix’ a problem – appears linked to the poor uptake of plantation management practices. The practice of thinning in particular demonstrates this; with the range of complex socio cultural specifics of the Western Province inconsistent with the thinning regime. As Tsey (2011, p. 138-139) observes, the “success or otherwise of initiatives designed to promote economic participation, depends on a deep understanding of the relevant local socio-cultural norms and expectations”. In this regard, it seems the ACIAR project fell short in terms of such understandings, and with the social and environmental relations in which communities exist abstracted from the scientific objectives of the development project (McMichael, 2009). Gegeo (1998), provides some insight into this phenomenon. Over the course of twenty years of anthropological research on Malaita in Solomon Islands he describes the way in which new practices are adopted in the Solomon Islands in terms of ‘indigenous epistemology’, which ‘refers to a cultural group's ways of thinking and of creating and reformulating knowledge using traditional discourses and modes of communication (eg, face-to-face interaction) and anchoring the truth of those discourse in culture. Indigenous epistemology is a term that has been used to describe the process where people such as the villagers in the Western Province take introduced knowledge, and then incorporate it into their own timelines and for their own purposes. Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo (1998; 2002) found that ‘rural development’ or anything focussed solely on ‘business’ without taking into consideration spiritual and psychological needs, leads to nothing meaningful (Gegeo, 1998). There is a tradition of rural development in Solomon Islands, dating back to colonial times, that is perceived as something that is done on the terms of foreigners for a more abstract general good rather than the good of any one village (Gegeo, 1998), with projects often abandoned if not successful, and leaving villagers with the consequences. This is not to say that new methods and projects are doomed to failure on this basis. According to Gegeo (1998), the crucial ingredient is a feeling that the enterprise has a direct benefit for the community. It is

important for the enterprise to become part of the ‘cycle of life’, so that benefit can be derived on a predictable and cyclical basis. One of the obstacles that forestry may face is that it a commodity that is grown and then destroyed in exchange for its market value rather than something that continues to sustain villagers on a continual basis. Unlike garden crops that are seasonal, teak is an end to end proposition over a very long period. It is here that Gegeo makes his distinction between what is considered to be ‘diflopmen’ (development) and just ‘bisnis’ (business). What is clear from our findings is that villagers are not thinking about plantation management regimes; they are thinking about short term economic returns, local food security, paying for school fees, and other aspects of social and cultural life. Given the failure of local people to take up the best practice as articulated by external project staff, there is a clear indication that this development intervention – and others like it – would do well to engage with communities on their own terms. While this project made attempts to do this, for example including the uptake of some local species, and the use of food trees as part of plantation species selection, it still relies on a model of imposition of an external management regime. In so doing, it failed to consider the complex social and cultural factors that shape local people’s epistemologies, thereby failing to deliver development, in Gegeo’s terms. There is little doubt there is an urgent need to address logging and deforestation in the Solomon Islands. Community teak plantation forestry has the capacity to make a contribution to reforestation, while at the same time enabling local level community and economic development. While the Australian government funded development interventions that form the focus of this paper demonstrated increasing commitment to local participation as they progressed, they still failed to understand the conditions under which development might be incorporated into local culture, with outcomes that have limited the effectiveness of these projects. The donor aid agenda, based as it is on strict performance criteria, has used the power of science and markets as a platform for achieving its development goals. The debate about the proper incorporation of indigenous knowledge is not new, or settled (Agrawal, 1995). There needs to be greater awareness of the important link between power and knowledge, or the politics of development, which in many cases purely scientific endeavours are ill equipped to deal with. The story of smallholder teak in Solomon Islands is a fragmented one, unfolding over a number of donor projects with different aims and challenged by poor local planning, local politics, rumour and the realities of archipelagic geography. While the ultimate solution to growing marketable trees is a scientific one, the journey to that solution, if it is to involve donor participation, requires a multi-disciplinary approach (Huntington, 2000). The involvement of social scientists can provide vital context to science, particularly an awareness of culture, politics and economics and the need to incorporate changing indigenous epistemologies. However, to do this requires a greater awareness from funders that this process takes time, and perhaps the surrender of a degree of control. In the current climate of outcomes focussed managerialism, that is the prioritisation

of efficiency (Gulrajani, 2014) in the foreign aid donor sector, this will require a degree of change in the expectations that are levied on aid delivery teams. However, science and the market are recently introduced constructs and require interpretation into local epistemologies if they are to be accepted, transformed and sustained. For community based plantation forestry development interventions to avoid these mistakes, much greater local level engagement is necessary to ensure plantation management approaches are compatible with these local epistemologies.

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